jason axinn – Horror Ghouls

Night of the Animated Dead (2021) is an adult animated horror film directed by Jason Axinn (who also made To Your Last Death). It follows the pretty familiar story of the original movie (Night of the Living Dead from 1968 by George A. Romero): Barbara and her brother John are going to visit their father’s grave in a cemetery in Pennsylvania. Simultaneously, a zombie outbreak causes the corpses to reanimate all over the country, and when John is attacked by one of the zombies, Barbara flees to a nearby farmhouse. There she encounters other survivors, including Ben who also seeks shelter in that house. Barbara gets in a catatonic shock, while Ben must fight of zombies with a torch as it seems fire is their weakness. Then they discover Harry and his wife Helen, who is hiding in the basement with their injured daughter. Several people have decided to seek shelter in the farmhouse, but will they be able to keep the zombies out?

The film was animated by Demente Animation Studio, and on their website it’s clearly listed that this movie was made on a limited budget. And it shows. The animation leaves a lot to be desired, and while it’s made in the traditional and quite time-consuming 2D animation style the movie suffers a bit from not having had a considerably bigger budget to flesh out the animation a lot more. There’s no doubt that the animators had to prioritize certain scenes over the overall product, pretty much like many of the old cartoons where the majority of an episode had very limited animation and movement while action and fight scenes looked nice (most of which were often used in the opening intros of the series, so you literally watched the best parts while listening to the theme songs). It’s obvious that the limited budget put a lot of restraints of how well this could be made, and the final product suffers from it. That being said, there are some decent scenes and particularly the gory ones are pretty good.

Overall, Night of the Animated Dead is more a movie you watch mostly for curiosity’s sake, as unfortunately it feels kind of redundant since it basically just retells the original story. Perhaps it would have been far more interesting if it was made in a completely different way to the original, maybe playing a lot more on the gore scenes because those were definitely the movie’s highlights. An interesting watch overall, but Jason Axinn’s previous film To Your Last Death is far superior compared to this one.

The movie is distributed by Warner Bros, and was released on DVD and Blu-ray in 2021. It is also widely available on several streaming sites.

Director: Jason Axinn
Writers: George A. Romero, John A. Russo (based on their original script)
Country & year: USA, 2021
Voice actors: Josh Duhamel, Dulé Hill, Katharine Isabelle, James Roday Rodriguez, Katee Sackhoff, Will Sasso, Jimmi Simpson, Nancy Travis, Stefan Marks, William Calvert, Chris Edgerly
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14961110/

Miriam is the only survivor of a twisted game her own father set in motion, which left her siblings killed in horrible ways. She is brought to the hospital, where a supernatural entity, the “Gamemaster”, offers her the opportunity to re-live that event from the beginning, and maybe change the outcome since she would then be armed with the knowledge of what is about to happen. She decides to do so, hoping to save her siblings from their own father’s cruel and twisted plans. And so, once again she’s together with them in their father’s high rise building because he asked them all to come. And he once again reveals that he’s got a brain tumor that is inoperable, and that he’s going to die soon…and then continues to tell them how awful disappointments they all are. Will Miriam be able to stop the murders from happening all over again, or will it be just as bloody as the first time?

To Your Last Death is an animated action horror film from 2019, directed by Jason Axinn and written by Jim Cirile and Tanya C. Klein. It was 114% funded on Indiegogo in 2016, with a total of $52.713 raised before the film went into production. At first, this movie felt a bit strange to watch with the pretty stiff puppet animation together with the realistic cartoon style, somewhat reminiscent to the show Archer, just a bit less polished. But I got pretty quickly used to it. It gives off a comic-book art style, and there’s even some scenes where there are comic book panels, so it was obviously made in order to replicate the graphic novel style. I also liked how they used Ray Wise’s character (the father Cyrus DeKalb) to look exactly like him. The voice casting is also excellent, with several well-known names such as Morena Baccarin and William Shatner. Bill Moseley (who plays Otis in the Rob Zombie movies House of 1000 corpses and The Devil’s Rejects) also has a voice acting role here, and he’s got the voice of one of the villains (no surprise there).

The story is a little bit like Groundhog Day meets Saw, and does it indeed get bloody and vicious at times! The evil businessman’s contraptions to have his own offspring killed is pure Jigsaw-esque in style and depravity, like how one of them needs to fill a bucked of blood by cutting themselves over and over again, or else they will get decapitated. Ooooh, messy! Aside from delivering on some very graphic kill scenes, it also offers enough tension to keep you invested throughout the movie.

To Your Last Death will definitely not be everyone’s cup of tea, and even though I liked the animation style I can understand that some people might be put off by it, at least for the 1 and a half hour duration. Still, it’s a pretty fun watch and quite fast-paced. There’s a lot of violence and gore, so gorehounds should start wagging their tails to this one.

Director: Jason Axinn
Writers: Jim Cirile, Tanya C. Klein
Country & year: US, 2019
Voice actors: Morena Baccarin, William Shatner, Damien C. Haas, Bill Moseley, Ray Wise, Mark Whitten, Benjamin Siemon, Bill Millsap, Florence Hartigan, Dani Lennon, Tom Lommel
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt3748918/

Tag: jason axinn

Night of the Animated Dead (2021)

To Your Last Death (2019)