By Tristan Bishop
Dead Rising: Watchtower, for those of you not in the know, is a video game adaptation. The game series (3 main entries and numerous spin-offs) is basically a spin on Dawn Of The Dead, and has you attempting various missions in shopping malls which are infested with slow-moving but incredibly numerous zombies. The joy of the games is a pretty simple one – you are able to free roam (although within occasionally tight time limits), pick up almost any object imaginable and use it as a weapon. Who can resist plopping a traffic cone on the head of a flesh-eater (and maybe then hitting it with a baseball bat)? Not me, that’s for sure. Truth be told I’ve never come near to completing one of the games (those harsh time limits) but I’ve had hours of fun wandering and wiping out waves of the undead. Truth be told, I wasn’t so sure that a film adaptation of Dead Rising would be half as much fun, however – I’m sure I don’t need to remind you how disappointing the majority of game adaptations are, with the exception of Christophe Gans’ 2006 Silent Hill film (and I also have a soft spot for the Resident Evil series, but let’s not go into that).
Dead Rising: Watchtower is set between the events of the second and third game. The town of East Mission, Oregon, has been fully taken over by the living dead, although a few survivors remain scattered around the city. The Federal Emergency Zombie Authority (FEZA for short) has been distributing the drug Zombrex, which halts the effect of infection from zombie bites, but supplies are running low. Reporter Chase Carter (Jesse Metcalf), who is trying to get a hard-hitting story in the quarantine zone set up around East Mission, instead becomes trapped in the city itself, and, teaming up with kick-ass lady Crystal O’Rourke (Meghan Ory) and Virginia Madsen as Maggie, a distraught mother who has lost her daughter, tries to escape. Unfortunately reanimated corpses are not the only thing standing in their way, as psychotic Mad Max-esque bikers and a military who are determined to wipe out the zombie plague at any cost are also looking to cause them some problems.
My first impressions of Dead Rising : Watchtower were pretty positive – Metcalf looks every inch the classic Dead Rising hero, Ory is suitable appealing as the femme-fatale-with-a-dark-past, and the level of detail from the games which has been shoe-horned in is impressive. However this soon began to dissipate. To start with, let’s be honest, zombie films have had a good run since 28 Days Later (2002) gave the genre a shot in the arm and bought zombies back from the realm of shot-on-video (in the days when that meant something) amateur gore-fests and onto the big screen. In the last few years however, boredom has naturally set in, and the flood of zombie films has slowed to a trickle, with only The Walking Dead TV series really still making much of an impact (due to the slow-burn character development it does so well). We’ve basically seen it all, and Dead Rising really doesn’t offer us anything new – part of that problem being that the games themselves are so indebted to George Romero anyway. The other issue is the pacing. For a film based on a game which features some heart-pounding time limits to negotiate, it really does take time going places, and the action sequences (some of which are admittedly pretty good) are just too spread out to involve you. This might be acceptable if the rest of the time was spent building character and tension, but it isn’t. Annoyingly there’s enough plotting in here to make a decent 87 minute film, but at two full hours it just gets boring, and those who don’t have added value of recognising elements from the game will find themselves getting bored a whole lot sooner.
On the plus side, the production values are pretty good – and despite that cursed dodgy CGI blood used on too many occasions, this is way above the level of most TV movies (which is what I was expecting it to be). It’s certainly a damn sight better than the last film I saw from director Zach Lipovsky, which was the execrable Leprechaun: Origins. Unfortunately there’s not enough here to recommend to anyone but fans of the games.
Dead Rising: Watchtower is available to buy now from Platform Entertainment.