Shocker of shockers, this is a piece of crap. I know this news will startle many of you. How could this possibly go wrong, you say? A cheaply produced zombie flick with bad special effects and a cast of has-beens and never-weres? It has classic written all over it. Yet somehow this master formula fails. It would be easy for me to blame the movie's failure completely on the Hollywood Squares cast led by Mariel Hemingway (who, no joke, I thought was deceased) and the now-elderly and overweight Danny Trejo. But the cast is only a symptom of a much larger disease: namely The Asylum, the absolute worst production company in the industry today. Possibly worst ever. They make all that terrible SyFy channel garbage we all watch and hate. It's become popular in recent years to bestow some "so bad it's good" badge upon these movies. That's unfortunate because it just encourages more subpar waste like this is produced.

This movie sucks. Don't watch it.

Considering that this was The Asylum, I kind of knew what to expect. But seeing as the cast was a good one and that there have been some tolerable movies of theirs in the past, I was hoping that Rise of the Zombies would be one of them. While it is a long way from The Asylum's worst, there is very little to be seen that is good here. Danny Trejo gave a bad-ass performance and the title was great, but that was it. You don't expect particularly good production values from The Asylum, but Rise of the Zombies is one of the worst-looking films I've seen in a while. Almost all the scenes looked as though they were done in one take, there was an over-reliance on CGI backgrounds and there were too many mistakes to list. Everything just seemed too rushed. Rise of the Zombies was written terribly too. The dialogue was forced and cheesy and the sentimental scenes were more awkward than they were poignant, the latter of which is a bad thing because there was lots of it here to the point it was over-used. The story was very rushed and got ridiculous after a while. It also didn't help that the horror and suspense elements needed for a zombie movie just weren't there, there was just too much of the cheese factor(tolerable if done in spades, but all the time is too much). We have no time to care for or invest in any of the characters, they were introduced and then just went as quickly as they were introduced. Apart from Trejo, the acting is bad, Mariel Hemingway in particular is painful especially in the line delivery. Those behind Rise of the Zombies also didn't seem to know how to make the zombies- made up in a very over-theatrical fashion- behave, one moment they're lumbering, next they're running, next they're swimming(more consistency please!) Overall, great title and I enjoyed Danny Trejo, but with Rise of the Zombies that's all I can say that was good. 2/10 Bethany Cox

I didn't realize this was an Asylum production until after I purchased it. That said, I was not disappointed. The action takes place San Francisco. It is implied that due to government cutbacks (blame the Tea Party first crowd) the water supply got infected which lead to the zombie outbreak. There is a group doing research on Alcatraz headed by Dr. Lynn Snyder (Mariel Hemingway). There is another guy trying to develop a vaccine at Berkley who makes regular transmissions. When zombies start floating up at Alcatraz, that forces the two groups to come together.

I like the zombie effects. We had the split in half crawling zombie; the limb out of joint zombie; a suicide zombie; a new born baby zombie; and an amputation to prevent infection. Being California, long handled tasers and not AR-15s are the weapons of choice versus zombies. There is a an over abundance of zombie action. In one weird unconvincing scene Hemingway pulls a knife on Trejo who then looked scared. The dialouge needed some improvement, but considering it was Asylum, I can't complain. The really bad special effect was the new born baby, which was obviously a doll from behind, and a several months old live baby from the front. It gave me a chuckle. Trejo's appearance is slightly more than a cameo.

Also known as "Dead Walking" this appears to be the opening of a series like "Walking Dead."

Parental Guide: TV-14. No f-bombs, sex, or nudity. Plenty of zombie violence.