jlthornb51 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.

suite92 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.

TheLittleSongbird Considering that this was The Asylum, I kind of knew what to expect. But seeing as the cast was a good one and that there have been some tolerable movies of theirs in the past, I was hoping that Rise of the Zombies would be one of them. While it is a long way from The Asylum's worst, there is very little to be seen that is good here. Danny Trejo gave a bad-ass performance and the title was great, but that was it. You don't expect particularly good production values from The Asylum, but Rise of the Zombies is one of the worst-looking films I've seen in a while. Almost all the scenes looked as though they were done in one take, there was an over-reliance on CGI backgrounds and there were too many mistakes to list. Everything just seemed too rushed. Rise of the Zombies was written terribly too. The dialogue was forced and cheesy and the sentimental scenes were more awkward than they were poignant, the latter of which is a bad thing because there was lots of it here to the point it was over-used. The story was very rushed and got ridiculous after a while. It also didn't help that the horror and suspense elements needed for a zombie movie just weren't there, there was just too much of the cheese factor(tolerable if done in spades, but all the time is too much). We have no time to care for or invest in any of the characters, they were introduced and then just went as quickly as they were introduced. Apart from Trejo, the acting is bad, Mariel Hemingway in particular is painful especially in the line delivery. Those behind Rise of the Zombies also didn't seem to know how to make the zombies- made up in a very over-theatrical fashion- behave, one moment they're lumbering, next they're running, next they're swimming(more consistency please!) Overall, great title and I enjoyed Danny Trejo, but with Rise of the Zombies that's all I can say that was good. 2/10 Bethany Cox

Gatto Nero I must say I was somewhat impressed by this little zombie movie. I was a bit hesitant about it being SyFy produced and all, but I'm glad i saw it. It's not a classic in any way but nice group of actors in it.The Butch-like manly Mariel Hemingway as Dr. Lynn Snyder was a disappointment. She seems not to be a good actor. At least in this film. her lines seemed forced and somewhat off delivered. She seems to have that 'Butch-like Lesbian thing going on so in a way she seemed natural as a scientist turned soldier thing.Big & funny intense Ethan Suplee as Marshall was somewhat miscast. he seems to large body-wise to be this religious/military guy who is 'falling' for Lynn. They have no chemistry whatsoever.The always great LeVar Burton as Dr. Dan Halpern was a treat. Made me think how he would have handle the Will Smith role in "I Am Legend". He did a good job here.Mr. Bad Ass himself, Danny Trejo as Captain Caspian did pretty good too. He even got to play a zombie! The beautiful Heather Hemmens as Ashley. Did an okay job. What I really liked was that for the 1st time I can remember a character in a zombie film just says "forget it it's not worth living anymore" and just commits suicide.The funny French Stewart as Dr. Arnold. His video feeds with the chimpanzee are the only humorous bits in the film!The serious Chad Lindberg as Kyle. He did okay also. i liked his scenes where he hated to kill his friend Trejo's Caspain but had to do it because Caspian was a zombie coming for him and when he gets to the so-called rescue Center in Petaluma by himself and discovers it's gone and taken over by the zombies.