Zombies are worse than vampires or ghosts, by far. Vampires are charming and have that fetish element to them plus they sleep during the day. Ghosts are easily busted by Ghostbusters. Zombies, on the other hand they’re the army ants of the supernatural world weak by themselves, but unstoppable in great numbers.
The American fascination with zombies arguably started with George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, reviewed by Luke on Old Movies. Romero extended the zombie idea with his now famous Dead ‘trilogy’, with three subsequent movies.
Out of this trilogy, Dawn of the Dead is the one most applauded for its depiction of an apocalpytic world. It was loosely remade in 2004, but didn’t capture the same imagination of Romero’s original version, though it had much more terrifying zombies.
Personally, Dawn of the Dead is a fantastic movie, and when you consider that it was made with a small budget, well. It’s a brilliant movie, and one that shows that big budgets and big stars are not the keys to success.
The zombies in Dawn are pretty unrealistic. The acting is a little forces at times. It’s not very scary. Why is it considered one of the greatest zombie movies ever?
The story is pretty elementary faced with the growing zombie threat four survivors hole themselves up in a suburban mall, clearing out the zombies and barricading it.
At it’s heart, it’s not even about the zombies. Yes, the scenario is driven by the zombie plague, but Romero shows the stuggle of people trying to come to terms with a world gone insane. He mocks everything about modern life the sensationalism of the media, the rampant materialism that fuels us and most of all, the inability of people to work together. It’s laugh-out loud comedy as people scrabble to grab jewelry and money, or get excited by small, petty items. It’s black comedy at its best.
Dawn shows a constant stuggle between people, and it becomes painfully obvious that, if they worked together, they could easily overpower the zombies. Unfortunately, greed and egocentric behaviour bring disaster. In 1978, Romero was commenting on the nature of our materialistic, commercial society, but things haven’t changed at all thirty years later. If anything, we’ve become even larger consumers, with less regard for other people a present day zombie threat would have no trouble at all rolling through Sydney streets, eating the brains of road raged commuters, yelling on cell phones, listening to their iPods.
I say: See it. See them all! Ha ha, zombies! There’s blood and gore and more gore!
Watch it for: Man, the ‘heroes’ of the film are a black man and a white woman. The tough, white men get eaten Schwartzeneggar and Stallone wouldn’t last 10 minutes in a Romero flick.
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