Continuing a series that celebrates the fifty-fifth anniversary of Night of the Living Dead with a look at the classic zombie film and its many follow-ups.
The millennial zombie glut may have brought with it the triumphant return of George A. Romero’s Living Dead series, but it also revived the strain of soulless cash-ins on his work. Taurus Entertainment Company tried a similar trick by obtaining the rights to the title of Day of the Dead, knocking out Day of the Dead 2: Contagium without the involvement of Romero or his collaborators, and releasing it direct-to-DVD 2005 to make some money off the current zombie boom. (The company tied the same trick with another Romero series, Creepshow, leading to the much-resented Creepshow 3).
Day of the Dead 2: Contagium is, despite its title, not a continuation of Day of the Dead but a prequel featuring an all-new set of characters. Taking its lead from The Return of the Living Dead, Contagium implies the zombie outbreak in Night of the Living Dead happened back in 1968 and was quickly suppressed, while samples of the chemical that caused the resurrections in the first place survived to cause more trouble. This time around, a flask of the substance is found by a group of mental patients, and once the lid is off the institution begins a long decline into zombie apocalypse.
The word “long” should be emphasised here, as Contagium is in no hurry to deploy its living dead. Aside from the prologue, which shows the military squashing an earlier zombie outbreak, we do not see a full-fledged ghoul until the film’s final third. The meat of the story focuses instead on the gradual deterioration of those exposed to the chemical.
A common complaint about prequels is that the most interesting material is already covered in the original. It might be fair to assume a zombie prequel which saves its zombies for the closing act is the sort of thing which bears this objection out. That said, a film about the earliest days of a zombie apocalypse – detailing the spread of a new, baffling illness gradually forming into the familiar Romero-zombie scenario, dramatic irony mounting as the audience knows full well where all is headed even if the characters do not – might work if pulled off by the right hands.
Day of the Dead 2: Contagium, alas, was not made by the right hands. Instead, it sits alongside Flesheater and Children of the Living Dead as a zombie film that somehow manages to get almost everything wrong.
To start with, we have the setting of the mental institution. This is a stock location in horror films, and all too easily descends into lurid freak show fare. Day of the Dead 2 averts this, to its credit; but it is unclear as to whether the film does so in a conscious effort to avoid becoming exploitative, or simply because its writing is so utterly flat that it fails to even rise to the level of grindhouse shlockfest. The main cast is given a few token traits related to their mental health backgrounds (one character has a history of supernatural delusions while another is established to have previously attempted suicide, for example) but these are treated as throwaway details with no bearing on the otherwise sparse characterisation. Why, then, is the film based in a mental institution when it never puts this setting to any real use?
The performances are largely listless, although to be fair to the cast, this can be chalked up to the script at least as much as the actors. The one exception is Andreas van Ray’s watchably overripe turn as the scheming Dr. Heller – a sort of cross between Michel Foucault and Dr. Evil. Even here, however, the film messes up by killing Dr. Heller off too early, wasting the revelation that he had orchestrated the zombie outbreak as part of an experiment. (Incidentally, van Ray has no other credits on IMDB; this seems a pity, as if nothing else he could have had a career playing villains in children’s films. Or perhaps he understandably decided to use a pseudonym for his Contagium appearance).
Perhaps the saddest of the film’s failures is its fumbled effort to emulate the more philosophical aspects of Romero’s zombie saga. In the original Day of the Dead, John – who believes the zombie apocalypse to be divine punishment – derided the bunker containing the records of American civilisation as “a great big fourteen-mile tombstone with an epitaph on it that nobody’s gonna bother to read.” This is a solid piece of dialogue that comes naturally from the character and themes. In Day of the Dead 2, meanwhile, we have to put up with mental patient Isaac reciting undigested paragraphs about genetics:
“What is immortality, but the need to be remembered? We throw around terms like family and love when it comes to procreation, when in fact all we’re doing is perpetuating the species and generating instant immortality through our genes. We’re so selfish as to expect the next generation to love us and fear us so that they feel in turn compelled to continue the line: the patriarchal ideal of uninterrupted progeny.”
This is a pale substitute for thematic depth, nothing more. Contagium is asking the viewer to do the legwork in connecting Isaac’s ramblings about immortality to the zombie nonsense happening onscreen, but who could possibly care enough to do so? Nobody, and the film acknowledges this by having another character on hand to undercut Isaac’s dialogue with some sarcastic aside or another. All this serves is to remind us that we are watching a film that has inherited Day of the Dead’s family name but none of its vital DNA.
Contagium is not the worst quasi-sequel to Romero’s series. Its production values are at least shiny enough to prevent it from plunging into the same abyss as Flesheater. Yet it nonetheless manages to be worse than Zombi 3, which at least had a few novel moments (the undead DJ, the zombie head levitating out of a fridge) to save it from being a total abomination.
It seems fair to say, then, that Zombi 3 is the absolute lowest bar for a zombie film to clear. Day of the Dead 2: Contagium fails to clear it, and so deserves to languish in obscurity. We can leave the last word about the film (and its sister desecration Creepshow 3) to George A. Romero himself:
I don’t know. I don’t know how they can do it. I’d rather be doing it myself. I don’t know how they’re doing Creepshow. Those guys . . . anyway . . . what are you going to do?
Next: Unhappy returns…
