Cam McDermott (Keenan Tracy) and Luke Bowman (Daniel Doeni) wake up in a car surrounded by zombies. When they began to overload, the hearse turned; It showed Luke’s mother, Mayor Paula Bowman (Miranda Frigon) and local funeral home teacher Lauren Howell (Natalie Malaika). Paula happily blows up some zombies with two of her many weapons.
As they move away, Kam notices that one of the zombies is his father.
Return to “Previous”. Kam and his father (Mike Dopud), a detective, do not get along, especially after Kam’s mother dies. Lauren, who prefers to work with the dead over the living, is nine months sober and ahead of schedule, two details her slimy boss mentions when she wants to take him out for a drink.
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He did every odd job he could get his hands on to save money to leave Mavinhaken and go to Hawaii College, including maintaining a grave outside the funeral home where Lauren worked. As he prepared the body for the first single burial, he saw that the man’s eyes had opened.
Det. McDermott is summoned to a fracking site where Sarah Blackwood (Morgan Holmstrom), the crew’s “new man,” finds a mummified body in a hole blocking the drill. But McDermott planned to sneak into this hole with Sarah to see what happened. His boss was upset that he quit his job by calling the police, and he managed to get McDermott out of the investigation.
Luke tries to steal a beer to talk to his friends, but Paula catches him pulling something out of his safe. He is a supporter of open carry laws and carries his sidearm to election events.
Then the zombies started attacking almost simultaneously.
The dead man at the funeral parlour attacked first, then his hands and head began to jump out of the grave, where Kam was mowing the grass. Kam’s father grabbed the body in the hole as the damn drill started to sink.
At face value, there’s nothing about this Jed Elinoff and Scott Thomas version of Day of the Dead that stands out from all the other zombie shows and movies that have rocked our screens over the last decade. We’ve had severe zombie shows, funny zombie shows, shows where zombies don’t rot and resist the urge to eat living human flesh, shows where zombies are slow, shows where zombies are fast.
Day of the Dead doesn’t give viewers anything new to grab their attention. There is a group of everyday heroes from prehistoric small towns. Right before, I barely explored the resurrection and attacks of the undead.
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In the first episode, we don’t even see the main character – Amy (Christy Dawn Dinsmore). The town doctor’s daughter – just a random scene with her nervous fiancé on their wedding day.
It’s annoying to watch because throughout the time invested in this randomly started new zombie invasion.
We get very little information about the people who will be trying to survive. We know, for example, that Kam and Luca are almost opposites and don’t like each other. So when you see them coming together in a flash scene in the cold, it means the story between them is quickly fading.
Cam accidentally smashes Luke’s back window, but nothing happens; it looks like just the scene where Luke’s friend is seen tripping over a finger that suddenly jumps out of the grave.
Even zombies are standard stuff we’ve seen at TWD and elsewhere. One of the things we love is that not everyone is lazy; some who just died only had blood on their faces. We don’t set “rules” that the living have to learn to fight and kill these lifeless people, and they’re always fun to find.
But for the most part, Elinov and Thomas pay homage to Romero’s zombie archetype. Which has been copied so many times over the decades that it now feels like Xerox to Xerox.
So if the zombie is generic and the character is generic:
It is the behaviour at least decent? Hiring good actors like Norman Reidus, Jenna Elfman, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Lenny James, Alia Royal. And others helped differentiate the TWD franchise from a simple cheese zombie show. Here we get a mixed bag.
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We loved the Malaika and Frigon show, but the rest of the show was flat or, worse, loud. Not that we’re looking for Emmy-worthy stuff here. But TWD and other zombie shows have raised the bar. Since Romero’s inception, and we were expecting a little more than we got.
Romero’s zombie films are about social grievances as much as they are about the dead. This new version of Day Of The Dead tries to emulate that formula. But doesn’t follow the storylines or characters that appealed to us well enough.