Review: Day of the Dead 2: Contagium (2005)

Stars: Justin Ipock

Budget: $1 Million


Directed By: Ana Clavell, James Dudelson

Contagium, contagium a word that makes you think germs, infection and just icky shit.
Despite being part 2 its supposedly an origin story for the first one, yet doesn't really have a massive amount to do with the original either.

Made for only one million the film does use some pretty good practical effects in it's oddly convoluted story. The acting is very B-movie quality by people I haven't seen in anything else other than this film.

This film does not take place anywhere near the locations of the original either, it feels like a way to cash in on a familiar name. Pretty much like the way asylum does when they release something similarly named to some big movie. Difference being asylum do on occasion make something at the least entertaining.

So here we go, in Russia in 1968 a group of soldiers break into a hospital where some kind of patient 0 is being cared for. They start killing people, one of the junior doctors grabs a phial then hides it in a thermos flask. He manages to escape the hospital but is gunned down dropping the thermos in the woods. The rest of the hospital is shot up then blown up with C4.
37 years later a group of patients at the rebuilt hospital happen to find the thermos buried in a tiny amount of soil. The puny people are unable to open a rusted shut flask so entrust it one of the other members. You may notice i'm not naming people, that because it's hardly worth it. The acting is blander than tap water with only the zombie acting being a slight highlight.

When one the others steals the flask after another has some kind of bad feeling about opening it, he manages to crack it open releasing the phial. This group of fucktards are now ground zero. By the night they each start feeling a little sick. One of them contacts a friend he thinks might know about the phial, somehow out of nowhere.
The next day some of them notice patches of dead weeping flesh appearing on their body, Emma, yes i had to name one of the idiots, is apparently pregnant. She gets angry and bites a guy on the arm unknowingly infecting him. Three of the other start to have advanced symptoms, dead flesh, coughing blood and thick varicose veins.
They and anyone else who they've been in contact with are quarantined to their dorm. The one who contacted their friend gets a message back not to open the phial its a virus that mutates human DNA. Later that night the man bitten by Emma dies.

Getting worse and worse Emma's friend manages to get hold of a gun which he uses to go see her, not before killing a guard. Marshal (the dead bitten guy) reanimates. This is the part where people start to die and reanimate a lot now, along with the main cast. It's a such a convoluted mess of mismatching circumstances it made my head hurt. Like some people are proper zombies yet others can come back fully coherent, albeit not for to long.
Anyway nearly everyone dies by either turning into a zombie and attacking someone, or being betrayed by someone else. Emma ends up with one of the others near the end and has her baby, that story ends there we then see a news crew attacked by a horde of zombies

Yeah THN where we rarely spoil the endings of films, unless of course they are total rubbish not worth watching at all. This film has NOTHING to do with Day of the dead, its a cash grab name just to dupe people out of their money.
THN awards Day of the Dead 2: Contagium 0 stars out of 5