DVD Movie Review | Dead Rising: Endgame (Lights, Camera, Action!)

Dead Rising: Endgame (UK Rating: 18)

The film follows on directly from the previous entry in the series, with only a short time having passed since the end of Watchtower. Chase Carter (the poor man's Frank West) - again played by John Tucker himself, Jesse Metcalfe - returns from his incursion into the zombie infested Oregon and immediately gets back on the horse, taking his team and spying on dodgy military black ops. Chase has unearthed a plot that requires some prior knowledge of the series to understand. The series has a method of treating the zombie infection, known as Zombrex. In Dead Rising 3, Zombrex GPS chips were introduced - a sub-dermal implant that regularly dispenses enough Zombrex to fight off its host turning, not to mention being a handy GPS should the host actually turn. The military plans to make these chips malfunction and inject a lethal Zombrex dose into a sizeable chunk of the population… for some reason.

It all opens up a little girl wandering the streets of a war-torn area. She picks up a fallen teddy, looks at the camera and… half of her face is missing. Is she a zombie? It's hard to tell as she's acting very un-zombie like… Even the mediocre zombie make-up looks terrible. This is a common theme throughout as many of the zombies and effects look awful. The team here has produced some amazingly uninspired and lacklustre work, and could have learned a lot from Tom Savini's work in the '80s.

Considering the source material, it had to be expected that this would be filled with comedy elements. Sadly, that's not the case. Other than a handful of witty lines in the dialogue, the movie is played completely straight. Even when the zombie slayers are forced to resort to using the series signature weapons, they do so with designs that are as dull as this movie - tie a knife to a stick or put some nails through a baseball bat…

3/10

Bad

Why bother with the Dead Rising licence if you aren't going to embrace what makes the series so great? Yes, this has Zombrex (and Chuck… briefly), but that's about all that feels part of the franchise. Basically, Dead Rising: Endgame boils down to yet another low-budget zombie film - something there are already far too many of already - and not even a good one at that.