Dawn of the Dead

Romero’s imaginative and thrilling zombie sequel

A decade after the excellent “Night of the Living Dead” (1968), writer/director George Romero offers up this exceptional sequel. The plague of reanimated corpses with a hunger for warm flesh is now global and society is increasingly breaking down. A television exec (Gaylen Ross), her helicopter-reporter beau (David Emge) and two SWAT officers (Ken Foree and Scott Reiniger) take refuge in a suburban mall. Unfortunately for them, a veritable army of biker-raiders wants the mall for their own.

One of the main reasons this film is so iconic is because Romero seriously considered what it would be like after a ‘zombie apocalypse’ and came up with an inspired story. While the bleakness of the situation is addressed there’s also a sense of adventurous freedom; for instance, the protagonists having an entire mall to themselves.

The movie’s disturbing, ghastly and gory, but also action-packed and sometimes humorous. The zombies make for good bullet fodder while, at the same time, satirizing consumer society. The creative score is varied and I’m sure it was cutting edge at the time, but it’s very dated today, although you’ll probably find yourself acclimating to it. The no-name cast is convincing with the towering Foree standing out while Emge comes across as a poor man’s Donald Sutherland.

The movie runs 2 hours, 7 minutes with the longer version running 2 hours, 19 minutes (the one I watched). It was shot in Monroeville, Pennsylvania, and nearby Pittsburgh.

GRADE: A-

**This must be some kind of joke, right?**

Firstly, allow me to clarify: I am not a fan of “zombie” films, although I understand very well the interest that, in recent years, there has been for this material. I totally respect those who enjoy it. But let's be honest: a film has to have some aesthetic quality and some good taste to become “digestible”. And, well, I just finished watching this film, and I honestly can't understand how it has survived without ending up in the vault of oblivion. There are incredibly better films that have been forgotten as the years pass, but a certain type of crap, purely and simply because it's bad, lives on.

The plot is essentially based on a moment of chaos in which the USA (the rest of the world does not exist) is taken over by zombies and no one knows what to do or where to go. Everyone thinks of themselves, saves their own skin and that's it. In the meantime, the usual opportunists take advantage of the situation as they see fit, and a small group of “surviving heroes” look for somewhere to take shelter. It's the plot of this film and a dozen other disaster films (zombies, volcanoes, wars, earthquakes, alien invasions, you name it). The level of originality is below zero, and the situations are all predictable and highly cliché. We know who is going to die and who is going to be saved by a whisker, and the fact that the film starts without any kind of introduction is just confusing and a little stupid.

Directed by George A. Romero, a man who must have suffered from some bizarre sexual fetish with dead people and zombies (look at his filmography!), the film is absolutely trash and could compete in poor quality and bad taste with all of Ed's films Wood and with the historical rigor of Ridley Scott's period films. I lost count of the script problems, continuity errors and gross editing errors. The cinematography is ugly, there is a blatant exaggeration of the sets and the zombies' makeup is so obviously fake that they look like what we did at fifteen in school plays. And we'd better not even talk about the cast: I have doubts whether those people were actors.