Zombies are all the rage. With the rise of the Walking Dead, increase in popularity of haunted attractions, and all the various spin-off zombie TVs and movies, zombies have quite literally (in a media sense of course) consumed our brains. Among the countless number of homages to the undead is the film VALENTINE DAYZ. Some of these films and TV shows have risen to incredible recognition and become exemplary cinematic works, VALENTINE DAYZ is not one of those films.

The synopsis: Countries are mass executing birds because of a purported bird flu. It becomes clear that it is much more than the bird flu when it begins affecting humans; turning them into violent being’s hell-bent on wreaking havoc on those still living. The story follows some main characters during the course of the outbreak. Max (Dallas Valdez) a former assassin for the U.S. Government, realizes that the love of his life has been infected and is left to defend himself against the one zombie he cannot kill, his darling Sara (Carrie Keagan).

It took a full 8 minutes and 41 seconds for me to fully grasp what was happening and understand the “plot”. The scene changes were so often that I had no grasp of what was going on. In addition to the constant scene changes, there were several supporting and minor characters that contributed to the plot in some way but were afforded no introduction or explanation of their actual purpose. Someone would just pop up, and as soon as they appeared, they disappeared.

The makeup in this film was a tad cheesy and not consistent. If all the zombies are afflicted with the same virus, it’s highly likely that they would all look similar because they are experiencing the same symptoms. Not here, not with this virus.

The acting in this film (for lack of a better term) is incredibly “meh”. That being said, Valdez is likable in his role as Max. Initially, I didn’t think I would like the character but as the film went on I found myself rooting for him. Valdez took what very quickly could have been an annoying disagreeable character and made him someone in the film you didn’t want to see dismembered.

I had several questions regarding the plot of the film. In all honesty, most of the film was a giant question mark for me. For the sake of not ruining the ending, I will omit them from this review. But I will say that it wasn’t until the final 10 minutes of the film that these questions were answered. Perhaps this was intended to be a plot twist, and in some ways, it was. But it was more-so the lightbulb I was so desperately looking for the entire film. Certain concepts about zombies in this film are quite original and have a lot of potential. It just feels like the writing struggled to bring these original ideas to life.

Overall this movie was not my favorite. Not even close to being my favorite. A very watchable film is buried in there somewhere, it just needs some workshopping to be brought out. It is a very ambitious task to take on a zombie film. It is a genre so saturated that standing out becomes incredibly difficult. VALENTINE DAYZ fell short of that goal and remains one of the countless other zombie stories out there waiting for someone to notice them…like a single person on Valentine’s Day.