A group of archaeological students travel to the Mexican desert for a weekend of dirt racing in honour of their friend John Barnes' birthday. But the professor has an ulterior motive – along with some mercenaries, he plans to locate & loot a massive treasure of gold that was left by the Anasazi, an ancient people who lived in the area. But once he finally finds the treasure, he accidentally releases the treasure's guardians – an army of undead skeletons led by a feared conquistador who wanted to steal the treasure but died in the process. As the skeletons attack the students' camp, Barnes & his friends must find a way to defeat the hundreds of killer skeletons that are assaulting them.The killer skeleton film is a rare subgenre in the horror field. The most notable ones to use them were in a supplementary fashion – the old 1950s stop-motion fantasy films like Jason & the Argonauts had some awesome stop-motion skeleton warriors & more recently the Sam Raimi Evil Dead sequel ARMY OF DARKNESS, which was technically not really a horror film but had some brilliantly funny moments & a great battle scene with knights up against an army of skeletons. Since then, the idea of killer skeletons has been mostly dismissed… until now.Army of the Dead is a 2007 attempt to give the idea a whole feature airing. Of course, stop-motion is so passé so the producers used cheap CGI to animate a whole army of skeletons, which looks pretty good until you realise that the skeletons are just one model being cut-&-pasted several times to resemble a whole army. The scenes where the skeletons directly interact with the humans are shoddy & the CGI blood & explosions used are even poorer CGI creations.The story is a riff on the recent Pirates of the Caribbean films, most notably the first one – an ancient but cursed treasure with an army of undead guardians protecting it for eternity – but with that source franchise making a lot of money to the point that at time of writing this, a fifth instalment is being produced, this film's novelty value will be eroded significantly. The characters are reasonably well drawn – an advantage over some of the other horror films coming out of the independent sector as of late – and the acting is also quite good, but the film fails to generate much in the way of suspense & the skeleton attacks are quite hokey.

Like with most American films, this one is corny, narrow and stupid. That might be OK for American audiences who think Saddam was behind 911, but not for educated people. The plot was bug infested and the acting mediocre at best. The script was about as bad as it gets with maybe the exception of Bette Midler in her blasphemous movie The Thorn. I felt sorry for the actors. Whoever wrote the script should have taken a vacation and hired some high school kids who would have done a better job. The effects were nonsense, as was the hero who said he used "Physics 101" to create a Tesla coil. The people who made this film obviously know next to nothing about electronics, or for that matter physics. I gave it two stars because there was one scene where you might get a bit of a fright and it only cost me $1.99 at the local supermarket. If you value what time you have left on earth, don't watch this movie.

This review should only be one line long. Unfortunately, the minimum length is ten. I'm pretty much wasting space here until I get to the actual review, which will pretty much describe everything that this movie is about in a single sentence. If you find this idea to be extremely hilarious and awesome, I highly recommend this movie. The cover art serves as a similar litmus test. There's a conquistador skeleton wielding a shotgun. The skeleton army has quite the array of weapons. Swords, halberds, shields, heavy artillery, shotguns... you name it, they've got it. Furthermore, they have ingenious tactics involving flaming arrows. Whereas conventional wisdom dictates that you light ONLY the tip of the arrow on fire (so as to avoid burning yourself, the fletching, the bowstring, etc.) the skeletons have a superior strategy. They light every part of the arrow on fire, except for the very tip. As such the fire is incapable of coming in contact with the intended target, and it is thoroughly impossible to fire. Brilliant. Well, that should cover my 10 lines, so here we go. I confess I will ruin the end of the movie, but you will see it coming for about 30 minutes. VASCO DE GAMA'S UNDEAD SKELETON ARMY WILL BE ELECTROCUTED BY AN IMPROVISED Mexican TESLA-COIL. If you are giddy with excitement, rent this movie.

It's really a terrible movie to me, I can't believe any score over than 1 point, maybe it's a different understanding. The storyline is awful, you might have seen over ten films like that, you could predict what will happen in the next minute very easily, and get a good preparation for every "scared moment"; the CGI was abysmal, the real people are definitely separated with animated characters, skeleton as well as the blood is so fake that is even worse than some computer games. I'm very surprised I could finish this movie with great patience because I'm wondering if it's true that the leading actor is Ross Kelly, and who is supposed not to show in any movie like this