Film Review: Night of the Living Dead 3D

There have been few films that I can say shouldn't have been made much less attempted to have been made moreso than this piece of uninspired commercial fluff from writer Robert Valding and director Jeff Broadstreet. With so much potential material to pull from in the original George A. Romero film why the filmmakers decided to go with a story as mundane as the one presented is beyond me.

The plot of Night of the Living Dead 3D follows closely with the original where Barb (Brianna Brown) and her brother Johnny (Ken Ward) are attached at a cemetery by the undead ghouls. Barb soon finds herself alone and makes her way to a house with the help of young stud Ben (Joshua DesRoaches) who takes her to the home of Henry Cooper (Greg Travis) who is a hippie drug smoker along with the rest of his family. Soon they are surrounded by the undead who all seem to be coming from the nearby cemetery. When the mortuary operator Gerald Tovar, Jr. arrives at the house the group soon learns that the undead are all bodies that Tovar was suppose to have cremated but didn't.

What follows afterward is a lot of bickering and stupid decision making on the part of all involved creating one of the most ludicrous films that's tedious to sit through. Not even the analogue 3D effects can save this film as the filmmakers use the most obvious of 3D imagery to achieve there goals. Instead of creating images in which the 3D technology can better be used for the story, Broadstreet stoops to blatant in-your-face images such as a blunt being pushed directly into the screen. If it was the '80s with Friday the 13th 3D or Jaws 3D then I could probably forgive the film but in a time with such advancements made by Robert Rodriguez and Spy Kids 3D or the 2003 Hong Kong release The Park there is no excuse for such bad filmmaking.

The film is a complete let down from beginning to end and even though it wants to be a Midnight Movie that will continue to be played for years to come like The Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Evil Dead, or Re-Animator, this film's shelf life was all of about one weekend in which it grossed less than $300,000 before being dumped to video & DVD. There is nothing to recommend this film unless you're curious about the 3D effects (and even then you should just go out and watch Beowulf in digital 3D or watch Spy Kids 3D again).