All Souls Day (2005)

All Souls Day (2005) Dir. by Jeremy Kasten

When Joss (Travis Wester) and Alicia (Marisa Ramirez) are traveling to meet her parents for the first time in Mexico, they crash their car in a creepy small town, where on the Day of The Dead the dead rise for real.

I knew about this movie when it came out, but it never seemed to make it to the top of my list. When I noticed it was available on my Starz On Demand, I decided to give it a try. I hadn't posted anything in a while, and I was up for a zombie movie. I must say I was a little let down. It's not really much of a zombie movie at all. It deals more with the Mexican traditions and all that stuff is great, but doesn't exactly make for a thrilling movie.



I knew going in to it, not really to expect much. Jeremy Kasten isn't exactly Mr. Horror when it comes to making good scary movies. His resume doesn't burst at the seams with quality horror films with The Thirst, Wizard of Gore, and the Attic Expeditions being his top horror films, and The Dead Ones coming out next year. This movie was worse than I thought it would be. It had such a slow start and horrible acting. I was a little intrigued by the DVD cover boasting that it starred David Keith, Danny Trejo, Marisa Ramirez, and Jeffrey Combs. The only problem with that is if you add the screen time of the three guys, you get a total of 15-20 minutes of screen time.

Even with the large names attached to the film, the acting is still horrendous. Not one person in this film offers up any sort of mediocre acting. This really doesn't help the story, which actual could have been pretty good if it had the proper filmmaker directing it. I'm perfectly fine with the independent film aspect of it, and it doesn't bother me that they didn't have a large budget. In fact, some of the gore in the movie was amazing, but the thing that bothered me the most was the zombies. There seemed to be multiple kinds of zombies. There were slow ones, fast ones, and ones that talked. It just wasn't very consistent, and that bugged me alot.



In the end, the final minutes of the film are probably the best, as it does come to a very interesting conclusion, wrapping up the story really well, and doing it with plenty of gore. Even with this, I can't honestly recommend this to anyone. It was ok, but I don't know that anyone will like it any more than I did. So in the end, it's a don't bother watching.

Entertainment Value: 3/10 severed tongues
Cinematic Value: 4/10 severed tongues