Review: Dead Rising: Watchtower

A zombie game originally inspired by a zombie film, in turn inspires its own spin off zombie movie, the shuffling corpse that is the undead genre never ends. Dead Rising is practically a game version of George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead but with a few differences, the classic zombie movie about a ragtag bunch of people trapped inside a shopping mall, changed into a reporter stuck inside a mall trying to get the inside scoop, but the game series has come into its own as one of the best zombie games out there as the setting spread outside the confines of a shopping centre, much like the zombie virus itself. Dead Rising: Watchtower expands on the video game franchise set around the same time as Dead Rising 2.

Let me just fill you in if you have never played Dead Rising before, the first game had you play as Frank West, a gutsy reporter who has “covered war y’know”. After getting a tip about an incident happening at the Willamette shopping mall, you grab a helicopter ride into town, get dropped off on the roof, and given a few days to find out what caused everything to go to hell. You run around trapped inside the mall, using all the items at your disposal to take out the hordes of undead roaming the strip, rescue other survivors, fight off some crazies and general find out what started everything.

Cut to Dead Rising 2 and a cure for people infected with the virus has been created, Zombrex is a special injection that bite victims must inject into their blood every 24 hours to stop them turning full zombie. This is where Watchtower picks up from, a quarantine zone for survivors has been set up so people can get the medication they need, but unfortunately for them, the Zombrex has stopped working and people begin to turn.

Chase Carter (Metcalfe) is a small time net reporter looking for his big break, and so he and his camera assistant Jordan (Tracy) enter the quarantine zone to get the inside scoop, sound familiar? As they look for people to interview, things go wrong in the medical tent as the Zombrex cure starts to fail on people who have already been given the life-saving shots, and the outbreak begins, the pair get separated leaving Chase stuck inside the quarantine zone. Chase teams up with fellow survivors Crystal (Ory) and Maggie (Madsen) as the military turn up to keep everything contained.

Chase takes his opportunity as the guy on the inside, by phoning into a news station and getting the exclusive. Luckily the studio just so happens to have Frank West (Riggle) on set to talk about his time at Willamette. The back and forth between the News Anchor (Genzel) and Frank are pretty funny at first, but the one note joke starts to wears a bit thin as the film goes on. Seeing as how a sequel has already been confirmed to being in the works, I would not mind seeing Riggle reprise the role of Frank, but maybe in a more fleshed out appearance.

It’s not just Frank that gets a cameo in the movie, there is a lot of subtly hidden objects, as well as some not so subtle ripped straight from the game, from Servbot heads to combo weapons such the Sledge Saw, which is a sledge hammer duct tapped to a circular saw obviously. At one point it gets a little too self-referential, as someone is actually playing Dead Rising 3, a little cliché for a video game movie.

As the military decide that they will fire bomb the city to keep the virus contained, Dead Rising’s famed Psychos turn up. Regular people who decide to cash in on the chaos and go a bit crazy in the process, causing even more problems for fellow survivors. A motorbike gang lead by Logan (Paunovic) arrives and causes some havoc, while Chase, Maggie and Crystal are hiding out from the zombies in a pawn shop, and to cut a long story short, things go pear shaped very quickly.

Going from the trailer, Dead Rising: Watchtower looked to be a horror comedy, but there is nothing particularly gory or scary in the film, unless you’re one of those people that hate clowns.

Dead Rising: Watchtower is an enjoyable film, even more so if you have played any of the Dead Rising games. While the film is similar to the games, in that they all serve as a standalone features, they do change the fact that Zombrex no longer works. I shall be looking forward to see if this gets incorporated into the next game or not. As films inspired by video games go, Dead Rising: Watchtower is on the higher end of the spectrum.

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