If Those Redheads from Seattle was boosted by the Bell fans, this movie was even more greatly supported by having the entire cast, crew, friends, relations, and hangers-on show up. There were more “special guests” than there were passholders, I’m pretty sure. I was about number four in the passholders line, and they let a pretty huge crowd in before us. It’s a wonder any straight ticket buyers could get a seat, but there was a huge line of them too.
This movie was shot on HD, so special equipment was brought in to project it in HD. Two DLP projectors were used. Someone referred to them as “D5″, which is really a tape format, I’m pretty sure, but that’d be 1080. The projectors were stacked in the booth and polarized. Guess I could’ve got a better look at them from the balcony where I was sitting, but I wasn’t that curious.
The result had pretty lousy contrast compared to all the film we’re watching. The night scenes were kind of gray and dim. Partially, this is in comparison to the fantastic film we’re seeing, but I’d say on an absolute scale, it didn’t look so hot. Very much like the DLP projectors they use for ads back home, though higher resolution. There was also significant ghosting in large areas of really high contrast (like a white pillar on a dark background), but it wasn’t too distracting. If the other films didn’t look so good, I might not have even mentioned it.
Ignoring the projection issues, the 3-D was astoundingly good. The guys over at D3 did the 3-D, which had handheld shots and steadicam and all sorts of other modern tricks we don’t see in these movies. It really looked great in HD and polarized.
But that’s a problem. They aren’t planning to show it that way in wide release. Probably not really ever again. For theatrical and video release, they’re doing it anaglyphic.
Now, D3 knows from anaglyphs, I hear, though the only one feature release of theirs I have on DVD, Comin’ at Ya! looks like crap, but other than the vertical registration, I don’t think that was really their fault. I’m sure it’ll be about as good as it can be, but I’ll wait to see what The Puppet Kite Kid or one of the other anaglyph freaks says. I’m not sure I’ll bother to go see it in a theater as an anaglyph.
As I mentioned at the top, they really stacked the audience deck with their people, so it’s hard to gauge audience reaction. People seemed to like it, but, honestly, I didn’t.
I watch a lot of horror movies. I’ve seen most every zombie movie you’ve heard of and many more that I wouldn’t want anyone to have to sit through. I can tell you this: good zombie movies aren’t about zombies- they’re about people.
The gap between this movie and the original NotLD is far larger than the distance from the screen to the end of the shovel sticking out of it. This movie is about killin’ zombies. It also spends a lot of time setting up how the zombie menace got started, and then undermines it with different explanation at the end. I really didn’t like it, but the 3-D’s so good I’ll give it a thumb up in general. Don’t bother in 2-D though.