Main cast: Vivica A Fox (Eddie Cluwirth), Eva Ceja (Miranda Riley), DC Douglas (Daniel Hanley), Erica Duke (Beth Mackenzie), Anthony Jensen (Senator Bailey Blackburn), Madeleine Falk (Dr Karen James), Robert Contrado (Schuster), Jeffery Thomas Johnson (Smith), Brandon Lee W (Skylar), Anna Telfer (Christie), and Kim Nielsen (Dr Ellen Rogers)
Director: Glenn Miller
Aquarium of the Dead is The Asylum’s third entry into the Zoombies series, although I don’t know why they didn’t peg that Zoombies name onto this thing. After all, that was such a revolutionary franchise, snort, that sees zoo animals turning into zombies and gives the world gems like man-eating giraffes.
Dr Ellen Rogers, in fact, makes a brief appearance here, making it clear that this movie takes place after Zoombies. She tries warning the folks at Shiny Sea Aquarium to not use the batch of serum sent their way on the animals there, as the same serum turned Ellen’s zoo animals into zombies in that earlier movie. Oops, too late. No one takes her warning seriously, and the vet Dr Karen James already used it on a dying octopus. Before long, everything from dolphins to starfish are out to get the people in that place. Yes, a zombie starfish.
Okay, credit where it is due: the dialogues and pacing in this movie are slightly better than those in the previous one, Also, like the previous movies, the leading female characters are for the most part able to take care of themselves, so that is a pretty nice change of pace from the usual creature feature tropes. However, the horrid cliché of the cowardly, bungling black guy that keeps screaming at the top of his voice what is meant to be “funny” lines regardless of context is still here. While Skylar is nowhere as eardrum-shattering and brain-damaging as the guy in the previous movie, he remains a painfully obnoxious character that ruins every scene he is in.
Speaking of which, this movie is populated by basically the same characters as in the previous ones, just with a different set of actors, so there is hardly anything here that will surprise folks that had the misfortune to watch those two movies that came before this one.
The CGI is pretty bad here too, but what kills this movie quite a bit is how the budget of this movie is probably a few thousand dollars, perhaps, and nearly all of that went to Vivica A Fox’s salary and the poor intern charged to do the special effects. As a result, the movie takes pains to avoid showing the horribly fake zombie animals and actual kills as much as possible. Of course, this is in a way a good thing considering how terrible they are, but at the same time, I have to ask why even make this movie when they clearly can’t afford to put together anything that comes close to a decent creature feature.
What I get instead are mostly scenes of people wandering around a series of corridors. Because the budget doesn’t allow for the casting of too many actors, or else they have to cancel the catering, the aquarium is conveniently closed to the public to facilitate the visit of Senator Bailey Blackburn. Okay, that makes sense, but what makes less sense is how the place isn’t swarmed by the cops, animal control people, CDC, or whatever, because by this time, these people should have been aware of the zombie animal problem. I know, the real answer to this plot hole is that they can’t hire too many extras, but that doesn’t change how the aquarium ends up having bewilderingly terrible and mostly absent security as well as no halfway proper strategy to deal with emergencies.
That’s the damn shame about this movie, and the previous two movies as well. The concept is fun, but what could have been a great twist on zombie movies ends up killed by low budget badness and the bizarre need to include an annoying black guy that just can’t shut up.
Anyway, skip this. There are likely fan-made movies that look better than this and are more entertaining too, I suspect. The worst thing is that, despite what a budget-induced dud Aquarium of the Dead may be, it’s actually one of the better entries in this series. Really, we need to get someone in Hollywood with money to give this series the reboot it deserves!
