Nitro Video Rating:
PURCHASE THE DVD: All Souls Day (2005)

When fate traps two travelers (Travis Wester, Marisa Ramirez) in a tiny Mexican town, they uncover the 100-year-old legend of Vargas Diaz, who looted a nearby Aztec tomb and murdered hundreds of innocent villagers. Stalking the living to collect human sacrifices, these tortured souls now long to rest … but the spirit of Diaz won't let them. A bonus featurette includes a behind-the-scenes look at the flick's makeup effects.

All Soul’s Day is a better than average zombie movie. It features some colorful Danny Trejo scenery chewing, a brief but rather effective sequence featuring Jeffrey Combs, and rather nice bits with David Keith and Laura Harring. The young unknowns who star in the movie don’t embarrass themselves much, in spite of having some pretty terribly clunky dialogue to chew their way through. And the day of the dead atmosphere is nice, though the movie could have and should have done a lot more with it. There’s plenty of bad, too, including a cheerleader who uses some kind of Bring It On gymkata on the zombies and some choices made by the leads that were just stunningly dumb, plus, again, dialogue that it sometimes hurt to listen to. All Soul’s Day has sort of an 80s zombie-lite feel to it, and quality-wise it sits somewhere in that great soggy zombie middle, with movies like Ghost Galleon or Manchester Morgue. If you’re a fan of zombie movies you could do a lot worse. If you’re not, you’ll probably think it’s one of the worst movies you’ve ever seen.