Pixel Reviews: Night of the Animated Dead

[Pixel]

I've wanted to do reviews of movies and games for a while, so I figured this was the best place for the spooky flicks I find myself engrossed in on any given evening. 

And what better place to start than with the biggest fucking head scratcher I've seen in a long while?

This is Night of the Animated Dead.

Or, Night Animated of the Dead, if you're nasty.

This was a purchase made on impulse when looking for something else. It was on an end cap, new and cheap and I own... Probably something like four other versions of the original Night of the Living Dead, considering you can find it on most of not every single horror bundle that plague the bargain bins in stores around the most spine-tingling time of year.

It's been sitting under a pile of other movies and board games ever since, until I came across it last night when cleaning up to entertain company that was not my own. I spotted it, forgot that I had it and set it aside for a later viewing. 

Tonight was the night of that viewing.

Now, if you've never seen it, the original Night of the Living Dead is a masterpiece and landmark title not only in the genre of horror, but also in cinema as a whole and a footnote in pop culture for years to come. 

I wasn't sure what I was expecting with this movie, but it was very obvious within moments - they just made an animated adaptation of a movie that they couldn't possibly do any better - they've tried before, it was an effort in earnest, but it was not the work of art that the original was.

This?

I don't rightly know exactly what this was. 

What you're looking at above is basically what the entire movie looks like - traditional animation that is so cheap that it would make the cartoons shown at 3am on Adult Swim where you can't tell if you're actually watching them or fever dreaming them say "That makes us look like Ghibli!". 

The animation was lazy, stiff, lifeless and in no way conveyed the feelings of the characters, nor did it match the actually not awful vocal performances. 

With animation as a medium, though, things are possible that weren't impossible with the shoe-string budget and effects technology available to the team that crafted the original. In some places studio used it to alright effect, such as showing the events that lead certain characters to where they were now, but even that was incredibly fucking boring to watch and made me wish they would have just told the story instead of cutting to a flashback scene. 

Most of the freedom they are afforded with the medium seemed to be put into making it a significant amount more violent than the original, showing pieces taken out of people and zombies, appendages being severed and split, skulls being pierced and a skull being bashed in that lead to fucking up a whole plot point that continued to play out like it wasn't already ruined somehow. 

Everyone likes a messy horror, but the animators must have missed the memo where making a movie gorier does not make it better, such is the case in this adaptation. The original had very little blood in it, even, yet is still to some what The Beatles are to others. That should say something, especially to people who want to redo the story.

Now, I understand that it's not always right to compare adaptations to the original, because in many ways they aren't entirely the same movie: this logic can not be applied to Night of the Animated Dead. I thought that maybe it would be a complete retelling of the original with different occurrences and outcomes - this is not the case.

It is the same movie as Night of the Living Dead, just done worse in every conceivable way and I can't for the life of me understand why they would bother making this in the first place, aside from the voice acting there was absolutely no heart and in too many places, seemingly no real effort put into paying tribute to a timeless horror film that birthed an entire subgenre that decades later would infect the whole world, not unlike the mysterious virus of the Romeroverse.

If I were to put this on a scoring scale of 1-5, I would give it a 1, the only saving grace being that the voice actors actually seemed like they gave a shit about what they were doing where no one else did, they even got a few decent names for it, such as Katherine Isabelle of Ginger Snaps fame as Barbara and Katee Sackhoff, Bo Katan herself as Judy.

Basically, fuck this movie. Save your time and money and find the original on YouTube. Romero is dead and the movie is public domain, I won't get pissed if you don't buy a copy of it to watch.

They are coming to get you, Barbara... But they sure as shit aren't coming to get this shit ass adaptation.