Director – Zach Lipovsky, Screenplay/Producer – Tim Carter, Based on the Videogame by Capcom, Photography – Todd Williams, Music – Oleksa Lozowchuk, Visual Effects – The Sequence Group (Supervisors – Ian Kirby & Jack Owens), Special Effects Supervisor – Darren Marcoux, Makeup Effects – Ryan Nicholson, Production Design – Tony Devenyi. Production Company – di Bonaventura Pictures/Dead Rising/Contradiction Films.
Cast
Jesse Metcalfe (Chase Carter), Meghan Ory (Crystal O’Rourke), Virginia Madsen (Maggie), Keegan Connor Tracy (Jordan Blair), Aleks Paunovic (Logan), Dennis Haysbert (General Lyons), Gary Jones (Norton), Carrie Genzel (Susan), Rob Riggle (Frank West)
Plot
Zombie outbreaks have been occurring across the USA. There is currently one in East Mission, Oregon. Officials have quarantined the infected in a cordon of several city blocks while treating people with the preventative drug Zombrex. Chase Carter, a tv reporter for Hitpoint Digital, is seeking an article and sneaks inside the cordon. As zombies overrun the area, he, another survivor Crystal O’Rourke and Maggie, a mother whose daughter has become infected, seek refuge from the zombies and a marauding biker gang. Discovering that Zombrex is no longer effective at holding off the infection, Chase tries to get the story out.
Dead Rising (2006) was a videogame from Capcom, the creators of Resident Evil. The basics of Resident Evil drew heavily on the George Romero zombie film. With Dead Rising, Capcom took the game even further back to their source material – the first game had the player character fighting off zombies while trapped in a shopping mall, the location for Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978). (The first game’s player character Frank West appears in the film as an obnoxious tv commentator played by Rob Riggle, while making reference to the events in the Willamette mall). There have been three Dead Rising follow-up games, the last appearing in 2016, as well as two film spinoffs, of which this was the first.
The filmmakers have not opted to conduct a remake of the game, presumably as they didn’t want to make a near-clone of Dawn of the Dead. Instead they have created a work that sits in between continuity of the games but in essence is a standalone piece that can be watched without any knowledge of the game. Dead Rising: Watchtower is by no means a B movie; it is not particularly an A movie either but is made with a recognisable name cast. It was made by the digital arm of Legendary Pictures and released directly to the Crackle network.
The main problem that the film faces is that the Zombie Film has become so exhausted and overused a genre by endless imitators since its revival in the mid-2000s, even an ongoing tv series The Walking Dead (2010-22), that there is precious little that is original that can be done with the material. The genre has become so overworked by imitators that you look in any and every corner throughout for anything that is original or bucks the clichés.
Chase Carter (Jesse Metcalfe) faces the zombie threat
The action is passable but nothing that much gets the adrenalin going. There is a moderate level of gore but other works, including George Romero’s originals, have pushed things much further. The one aspect I did enjoy was seeing Virginia Madsen back on screen – and getting the film’s best developed role as a mom who had to kill her daughter before lapsing into a fugue state (although for all that is quickly bumped off in mid-film).
The sequel was Dead Rising: Endgame (2016), containing repeat performances from Jesse Metcalfe, Keegan Connor Tracy and Dennis Haysbert.
Zach Lipovsky had previously directed a handful of genre films with Tasmanian Devils (2013) and Leprechaun: Origins (2014). He frequently writes and co-directs with Adam Stein. Together the two worked on tv series’ Ingress Obsessed (2014) and Mech X4 (2016-8) and then made the extraordinary psychic powers film Freaks (2018) and the film version of Kim Possible (2019).
