I had high hopes for 'The Amazing Adventures of the Living Corpse.' I enjoyed the comic from Dynamite Entertainment for what it was, however, its film adaptation could have been handled better. The story is a jumbled mess that jumps from one action scene to the next, and it doesn't seem to know what to do with itself in between. The entire film is a cheap form of animated CG, which reminded me of the style of 'Reboot', that old Saturday morning CG cartoon.
However, the entire image looks like you're watching a very long cut scene from a cheesy video game, except you don't get to play after it finishes. It's a little difficult to watch in that aspect as it looks cheap with none of the characters or objects moving in a natural or fluid motion. And even though the movie is only 88 minutes long, it felt like two hours from its redundant action sequences and dull plot devices.
'The Living Corpse' starts out with the undead coming up from the ground to wreak havoc on us humans. We focus particularly on the corpse of John Romero, which is a nod to the greatest zombie director of our time, George Romero. John, who is now a blood thirsty zombie heads to his former house where his wife and kids still reside with an army of deadites. As a few zombies are about to chow down on John's son's brains, his son Taylor pleads for his life, which causes John the zombie to speak, develop a conscience and a soul, and stop the other zombies from attacking his son. Meanwhile, his daughter and wife are killed in the attack.
Since John is still a zombie and needs blood and brains to survive, his son Taylor is taken to an orphanage where he is bullied by students and teachers, but learns what he can from the school. A mad scientist known as Dr. Brainchild takes an interest in Taylor and adopts him after John tries to get back to his only son with a bunch of demons from hell hot on his tail. The demons end up destroying the school into which Dr. Brainchild adopts Taylor. On the other hand, John is taken to the underworld by a demon to live, but John has other plans to get to his son and make sure he's safe.
In a weird time jump, we fast forward fifteen years, where Taylor is now a young man who has been helping Dr. Brainchild with a series of experiments in furthering his secret research. After a little bit of time, John and Taylor figure out Dr. Brainchild's ultimate goal, which is to create an unstoppable undead army by using DNA from Taylor and John. Luckily for Taylor, John is a zombie kung-fu master and can fight his way through almost anything. And thus, father and son must work together to stop the evil mad scientist.
This movie was a disappointment visually and story-wise. The voice acting has a thick layer of cheese and the story seems to jump all over the place for no real reason. The animation is very choppy. At one point, John the zombie looks like a skinny version of Kratos from the video game 'God of War', which made me laugh out loud.
I will say that this didn't end the way I though it would, which is a good thing, but that ultimately didn't save it. The score doesn't amp up the suspense or emotion at all, but rather provides a heavy metal soundtrack throughout. It just didn't seem to fit. Look elsewhere for a decent zombie story and animated horror film, this isn't worth a look. Instead, read the comic.
'The Amazing Adventures of the Living Corpse' comes with a decent 1080p HD transfer and is presented in 1.78:1 aspect ratio. While the image might look sharp from time to time, the detail is almost non-existent. This cheaply done CG work has no depth or fine detail at any level. Everything looks vague and heavily glossed over.
The colors look good, but seem to have a very simple and muted palette with a lot of grays and pale blues. For being an animated feature in full color, I expected a better looking image. The blacks seem to run deep and inky with no evidence of compression issues or banding. While the image on the whole may look clean, it never dazzles and comes across very ill-defined.
This release comes with Dolby TrueHD 5.1 audio mix which is loads better than the video. The dialogue is always easy to understand, even if some some of the demons and John's zombie voice are deeply digitized to sound lower and more frightening. It takes a little bit of getting used to, but this movie's dialogue is not its strong point.
The ambient noises of nature and the other zombies and monsters growling sound decent thought the surrounds and well as some decent gun fire. the sound effects of munching on brains, and blows to the body sound good too and provide some nice directionality. The heavy metal score is the loudest part of the audio track and provides a good dynamic range with decent bass. While this audio mix won't win any awards, it does the job.
There are no extras on this disc other than a few trailers for other films at disc startup.
'The Amazing Adventures of The Living Corpse' is neither amazing nor an adventure, but rather a tedious and dull series of events that don't make any sense. The animation and voice acting is some of the worst I've seen in a long time. With a sub par video presentation and no extras, I would say skip this zombie movie all together. And that's not something I say lightly. One to avoid.
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