Unusually powerful horror film from director Nick Lyon and a fresh contribution to the Zombie genre. With incredible imagination and originality, Lyon and his screen writers have envisioned a sort of zombie apocalypse where the dead are threatening the living with a fate too terrible to contemplate. A group of survivors take shelter from the chaos in San Francisco by going to Alcatraz. When it's learned a scientist may have an answer to this rampaging plague, survivors leave the island to search for the laboratory. Lavar Burton gives his best performance in years and Mariel Hemingway is outstanding as the anchor of the group. French Stewart is superb in a role that allows him to stretch as an actor with wonderful results. The scenes on the Golden Gate bridge are especially haunting and the imagery of zombies climbing up the bridge to reach survivors will stay with you for months. The vast vistas of carnage and the devastated bridge roadway are incredibly realistic and breathtaking to see. The idea of a Zombie Apocalypse is an alien concept to most of us and something seldom attempted in other genre films. Director Lyon tackles the enormity of this vision with gusto and his film becomes on of the truly horrifying zombie films in decades.

Shocker of shockers, this is a piece of crap. I know this news will startle many of you. How could this possibly go wrong, you say? A cheaply produced zombie flick with bad special effects and a cast of has-beens and never-weres? It has classic written all over it. Yet somehow this master formula fails. It would be easy for me to blame the movie's failure completely on the Hollywood Squares cast led by Mariel Hemingway (who, no joke, I thought was deceased) and the now-elderly and overweight Danny Trejo. But the cast is only a symptom of a much larger disease: namely The Asylum, the absolute worst production company in the industry today. Possibly worst ever. They make all that terrible SyFy channel garbage we all watch and hate. It's become popular in recent years to bestow some "so bad it's good" badge upon these movies. That's unfortunate because it just encourages more subpar waste like this is produced. This movie sucks. Don't watch it.

The zombie apocalypse has already occurred at the beginning of the film. The zombie phenomenon is treated as if it were a disease. One of the major plot threads is the search for a vaccine.Supposedly one has been found by Barney Arnold. There's a refuge on Alcatraz, where Lynn and cohorts reside. Lynn makes contact with Barney, and hopes to get the vaccine. Alcatraz gets a major zombie invasion.Lynn leads a small group to get the vaccine. Caspian leads a second group looking for a new refuge in Petaluma. Dan stays on Alcatraz to learn more about the disease and hopefully heal his infected daughter.While stopping at an upscale house to get food and rest, Caspian's group gets taken out (except for Kyle) by one zombie. Dan makes some progress. Lynn's team has better luck staying alive, but are slow to get to the vaccine. Kyle perseveres.Dan makes some progress on his research, but his daughter infects him so he takes them both out with a grenade at zero paces. Lynn's group barely escapes another zombie attack; they reunite with Kyle.How could this turn out well? We've got four survivors in Lynn's group. The amount of (unproven) vaccine that Barney has is probably very small, and hence unlikely to turn the tide, even if there were enough people to disperse it.Ashley decides to commit suicide out of desperation. We celebrate with another bad couple of SFX. Down to three now. They are attacked again at a police station where they were stocking up on weapons.At last! The three survivors meet Barney. Is it too late?-----Scores------Cinematography: 7/10 Variable. The daylight work is crisp and good. The night scenes tend to be useless on visual to the point where sound is the only guide.Sound: 7/10 Just OK.Acting: 4/10 My history with Marial Hemingway, LeVar Burton, Danny Trejo, and French Stewart is through much better properties. Given the screenplay, I still like them. The rest of the cast might as well have been cardboard cutouts with speakers. On the other hand, the on screen presence of Ethan Suplee is worse than the zombies.Screenplay: 0/10 Logic problems aplenty. The vaccine pursued through the whole film is unproven, and how much is there? The answer is next to none, with no fabrication equipment. The whole enterprise is pointless. The zombies cannot climb much of anything early on, then later they can scale the Golden Gate Bridge? In several scenes, two or three zombies can break open locked prison doors, but later 20 of them have a hard time with a chain link fence door. What was the point of Dan's efforts? All of it seemed to have been lost. Those are hardly the only problems. Barney says he needs a proper lab so he can replicate the vaccine. Where might that be?SFX: 2/10 Cheap, bad-looking. The splatter shots were especially bad, the micro-organism shots were laughable, the delivery of the baby (by Lynn, who killed the mother) was just ridiculous. The grenade explosion was really bad. The electrocution FX near the end were cheesy.

From the very beginning of this movie I found myself wondering about the title of all things! "Rise Of The Zombies." It suggests that the movie is going to be about the beginnings of a zombie plague - how it happened, where it came from. But no. Actually, from the very opening scenes of the movie it seems pretty clear that the zombies have already risen! They're pretty much in control and there don't seem to be all that many survivors. Over the course of the hour and a half, we do find out that it probably started with an infected water system, and that it's pretty recent. One of the characters is pregnant, and she says she got pregnant at a party two months before. So, since people probably haven't been partying much since the zombie plague started, this whole thing must have happened in less than two months. But that's not the focus of the movie. Not at all. Those are just snippets of information that come out. So, yes, strange choice for a title.With this being set in San Francisco (although the plague seems to be worldwide, or one assumes that there would be rescue missions) what survivors there are have holed themselves up on Alcatraz Island. So that's a bit of a twist: a high security prison becoming a sanctuary. Unfortunately, it seems that even Alcatraz isn't a very secure sanctuary. Every now and then zombies come wading ashore and have to be killed. Now, I've never looked it up, but I assume that the water depth between San Francisco and Alcatraz is more than 6 feet (ie, more than the height of your average human being - or zombie - or it wouldn't have been much of a prison) which suggests that since the zombies don't appear to be the type to enjoy boating they must be able to walk a fair distance under water. OK. Why not. It makes it harder to find a real place of refuge, thus increasing the hopelessness that's always at the centre of a zombie movie.Aside from that little twist, though, there's not a lot of originality to this. The zombies are zombies. They're the undead, re-animated corpses controlled by a virus of some sort with a taste for the flesh and blood of living humans. Got it. Seen it many times.The cast features a collection of fairly well known faces, although mega-stars they're not. People like Mariel Hemingway, LeVar Burton, French Stewart. They're all in this. A couple of others. Faces and names you know, in other words. Unfortunately, though many of the faces are familiar, the performances weren't great. Hemingway was probably the most front and centre as a scientist who takes a group from Alcatraz back into the city to try to find the lab where an antidote to the virus was being worked on. She didn't really grab me. Burton was given the most opportunity for a character the viewer could sympathize with. He stays behind on Alcatraz while Hemingway's group goes into the city and others go off in search of rescue, and he keeps two living zombies (or is that a contradiction?) locked up to experiment on as he looks for a cure. The attempted heart-wrenching is that one of the zombies he has locked up is his own daughter. Still, I would have to say that my reaction to most of the cast is that they were less than convincing in their roles; unenthused about playing them perhaps? So, really, what you have here is a mediocre movie that adds nothing original to the zombie genre, and rather flat performances from the cast. Not a winner, in other words. (3/10)