Was it me, or did that movie totally stink? Forty minutes of dull all-but-zombieless opening. Four dull, one-dimensional protagonists, at least two of whom are played by people who couldn’t emote their way out of a wet paper bag. Virtually no logic behind anyone’s actions (for chrissakes, the doctor and nurse and caretaker guy are caught by surprise by their dead patients coming back to life at the end–like they’d never seen it happen before!) or reality behind anyone’s emotions (when the wife of the dude who looked like Mike Love died, within five minutes they were acting like she was a pet hamster) at all. Nude scenes so completely gratuitous they weren’t even enjoyable as nude scenes. Voodoo rituals and an angry native community completely vital to the plot yet never ever shown even once. An ending that could almost literally have been phoned in. I didn’t even like the two most famous scenes: the shark fight just made me feel bad for the shark the filmmakers must have abused to get that footage, and the splinter-in-the-eye scene was so fake-looking I was actually embarrassed for them. I have no idea why either scene garnered the reputation it has.
To be fair, the zombie make-up was extraordinary and the gore powerful. And the scene of the zombies literally rising from the grave was beautifully done–vivid and wrong, and therefore horrifying. But that alone, my friends, does not a good movie make. Gee willikers, what a turkey.