Army of the Dead (2008)

Very Cool!!!

It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

ARMY OF THE DEAD is a low budget little action horror film, released straight to video and shot in New Mexico. The story follows a bunch of archaeologists exploring some ancient caves in search of some long lost Spanish Conquistadors, only to discover an army of reanimated skeletons bent on their destruction. This is one of those films shot entirely in the dark, full of cheesy scripting and even cheesier special effects. JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS this isn't: these living skeletons are bad CGI creations while the screen occasionally splashes with CGI blood. As expected, the acting is very bad and the action oddly repetitive given the scope to tell an interesting story. And that comes from somebody who's a massive fan of reanimated skeletons!

A group of archaeological students travel to the Mexican desert for a weekend of dirt racing in honour of their friend John Barnes' birthday. But the professor has an ulterior motive – along with some mercenaries, he plans to locate & loot a massive treasure of gold that was left by the Anasazi, an ancient people who lived in the area. But once he finally finds the treasure, he accidentally releases the treasure's guardians – an army of undead skeletons led by a feared conquistador who wanted to steal the treasure but died in the process. As the skeletons attack the students' camp, Barnes & his friends must find a way to defeat the hundreds of killer skeletons that are assaulting them.The killer skeleton film is a rare subgenre in the horror field. The most notable ones to use them were in a supplementary fashion – the old 1950s stop-motion fantasy films like Jason & the Argonauts had some awesome stop-motion skeleton warriors & more recently the Sam Raimi Evil Dead sequel ARMY OF DARKNESS, which was technically not really a horror film but had some brilliantly funny moments & a great battle scene with knights up against an army of skeletons. Since then, the idea of killer skeletons has been mostly dismissed… until now.Army of the Dead is a 2007 attempt to give the idea a whole feature airing. Of course, stop-motion is so passé so the producers used cheap CGI to animate a whole army of skeletons, which looks pretty good until you realise that the skeletons are just one model being cut-&-pasted several times to resemble a whole army. The scenes where the skeletons directly interact with the humans are shoddy & the CGI blood & explosions used are even poorer CGI creations.The story is a riff on the recent Pirates of the Caribbean films, most notably the first one – an ancient but cursed treasure with an army of undead guardians protecting it for eternity – but with that source franchise making a lot of money to the point that at time of writing this, a fifth instalment is being produced, this film's novelty value will be eroded significantly. The characters are reasonably well drawn – an advantage over some of the other horror films coming out of the independent sector as of late – and the acting is also quite good, but the film fails to generate much in the way of suspense & the skeleton attacks are quite hokey.

The premise of reanimated skeletons on the rampage is as imaginative as "Army of the Dead" ever gets.The characters are telling ghost stories at the campfire. Naturally, one recounts the film's backstory. The next day a greedy man tries to steal the treasure along with some mercenaries.Naturally, to establish the mercs are terrible people, their boss pushes the greedy archaeologist to promise more riches, both from the treasure and otherwise, then tries to murder him after reaching the gold anyways, apparently his previous antics didn't qualify as obviously evil.One of the expedition is rescued by the central characters, of which some exist solely to provide more deaths - literally, some people are only on screen in group scenes.If you intend on watching a film almost interchangeable with many other horror movies, try viewing this.

Like with most American films, this one is corny, narrow and stupid. That might be OK for American audiences who think Saddam was behind 911, but not for educated people. The plot was bug infested and the acting mediocre at best. The script was about as bad as it gets with maybe the exception of Bette Midler in her blasphemous movie The Thorn. I felt sorry for the actors. Whoever wrote the script should have taken a vacation and hired some high school kids who would have done a better job. The effects were nonsense, as was the hero who said he used "Physics 101" to create a Tesla coil. The people who made this film obviously know next to nothing about electronics, or for that matter physics. I gave it two stars because there was one scene where you might get a bit of a fright and it only cost me $1.99 at the local supermarket. If you value what time you have left on earth, don't watch this movie.