Dawn of the Dead (2004)
Directed by Zack Snyder
A group of survivors take refuge in a shopping mall after the world is taken over by aggressive, flesh-eating zombies.
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23 films that influenced Dawn of the Dead
What critics say influenced Dawn of the Dead
Sarah Polley and Ving Rhames lead survivors to safety in "Dawn of the Dead"…
I must confess that I walked into the screening of "Dawn of the Dead", the highly publicized remake of George Romeros 1978 horror masterpiece, with an attitude somewhat less than optimistic.
Of the recent spate of unnecessary remakes of horror classics (2003's 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre' being the nadir), the new "re-imagining" of George A. Romero's 1979 'Dawn of the Dead' is probably the least shabby.
But unlike the 1978 "Dawn of the Dead,'' this remake of the George A. Romero film keeps that metaphor implicit and its social satire under wraps.
George A. Romero’s brilliant Dawn of the Dead, released in 1978, was a sharp satire of consumerism disguised as a zombie thriller — and, oh wait, it was a terrific zombie thriller to boot.
While the movie passes on opportunities to touch on ripe-for-the-plucking social and political themes that linger around the edges of the plot (something last year's speed-zombie modernization "28 Days Later" did very well), it's smart enough and cinematic enough to have much more in common with great genre reinventions like John Carpenter's "The Thing" and Philip Kaufman 's "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" than it does with recent trashy cash-in remakes like "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and "Thirteen Ghosts."
If “Night of the Living Dead” is the granddaddy of all zombie movies, than surely George A. Romero’s 1978 sequel “Dawn of the Dead” is the granddaddy of all wacky shoot-em-up zombie movies, spawning countless others including the outrageous splatter-fest “Dead Alive” by Oscar-winner Peter Jackson.
While the concept may have looked good on paper, in execution it plays too much like something from Peter Jackson's splatter comedy Dead Alive, and is unintentionally funny.
Still, Dawn of the Dead leaves us feeling mildly ambivalent toward the genre, a knee-jerk result of having seen too many over-the-top zombie films in the ensuing quarter century since the release of the original -- including Lord of the Rings maestro Peter Jackson's gore-splendent zombiefest Dead Alive (which featured, among other things, a marauding intestinal tract), and Dan O'Bannon's deliriously entertaining satire Return of the Living Dead.
While the movie passes on opportunities to touch on ripe-for-the-plucking social and political themes that linger around the edges of the plot (something last year's speed-zombie modernization "28 Days Later" did very well), it's smart enough and cinematic enough to have much more in common with great genre reinventions like John Carpenter's "The Thing" and Philip Kaufman 's "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" than it does with recent trashy cash-in remakes like "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and "Thirteen Ghosts."
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But when some misguided souls tried to remake Night of the Living Dead in 1990, it fizzled and was quickly forgotten.
As she drives home, she switches the radio dial just as some anonymous anchor says "confirmed it is not an isolated..." We know what this means, especially if we've seen George Romero's 1978 original, itself a sequel to Romero's 1968's Night of the Living Dead and a precursor to 1985's Day of the Dead.
As the Romero film opens, the flesh-eating zombies have been rampaging for a good long while (it was, after all, a continuation of Romero's 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead); the lead characters have been dealing with the aftermath, on the front line of the action, so we understood why their instinct was to move to the relatively quiet confines of a shopping mall.
While George A. Romero's "Night of the Living Dead" (1968) still holds up today as a stark, frightening monster-movie masterpiece, his 1978 follow-up "Dawn of the Dead" doesn't earn much love from me.
Unlike the generic looking crap they passed off as zombies in Resident Evil , the zombies in the new Dawn are ugly as hell.
Instead, the torch is being carried by videogames in the vein of the very popular Resident Evil series and by new-Hollywood brats like Paul W.S. Anderson, who turned that videogame into a movie.
Resident Evil, (a film version of a computer game that owes a lot to the original Night of the Living Dead), used many of the scares and tricks that we see Romero using in Dawn of the Dead.
Sure, there have been a few good revisions of horror classics ("The Thing" "The Fly" and "Cat People" immediately leap to mind) over the years but those films at least had the good luck to have talented directors (John Carpenter, David Cronenberg and Paul Schrader, respectively) who were able to filter the material through their own unique visions and personalities; "Dawn of the Dead", on the other hand, was being spearheaded by a Nike commercial director and the author of the Scooby-Doo films and seemed to have come into existence because recent hits like "Resident Evil" and "28 Days Later" (both of which were heavily influenced by Romero and his "Dead" trilogy, which also included 1968s "Night of the Living Dead" and 1985s "Day of the Dead") demonstrated that zombie movies (or, in the case of the latter, pseudo-zombie movies) were good box-office.
Distinguishing Resident Evil from these films (putting aside the drastic drop-off in quality) is that its rampaging monsters are not extra-terrestrial but uniformed and business-suited bogeys "borrowed" from George Romero's Dawn of the Dead.
''Resident Evil'' is a blatant recycling of those queasy pulp classics, notably ''Dawn of the Dead'' (1979), with its claustrophobic setting, its comic-book sociology, and its SWAT-team-on-the-defense ballistics.
Like last fall's revamp of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, this Dawn eschews its source film's haunting simplicity in favor of a more bombastic modern-day sensibility.
While the movie passes on opportunities to touch on ripe-for-the-plucking social and political themes that linger around the edges of the plot (something last year's speed-zombie modernization "28 Days Later" did very well), it's smart enough and cinematic enough to have much more in common with great genre reinventions like John Carpenter's "The Thing" and Philip Kaufman 's "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" than it does with recent trashy cash-in remakes like "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and "Thirteen Ghosts."
My biggest fear was that it would turn out to be something like last years woeful "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre"-an unpleasant exercise in soulless sadism that relied solely on repellent imagery to frighten audiences instead of any demonstrable filmmaking skill.
Like the recent remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Dawn Of The Dead had hefty expectations to live up to.
The same goes for 1974's influential The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which suffered the indignities of a tepid remake last fall.
Tampering with a classic is rarely, if ever, a wise idea, and when it comes to genre films such as this, only John Carpenterâs 1982 remake of Christian Nybyâs beloved-yet-cheesy The Thing From Another World springs to mind as an example of things going right for once.
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Dawn of the Dead opens gangbusters, its prologue--which segues into a title montage scored just right to Johnny Cash tune--the most nihilistic-feeling bit of cinema I've seen since the first broadcast of The Day After, and right in line with our apocalyptic cinema environment.
While the variety of zombie is arguably better than in recent zombie films, there still isn't the multi-flavored lot of cannibals that Romero gave us in the original Dawn of the Dead or Day of the Dead.
George Romero's 1968 Night of the Living Dead has long been considered a classic, as has its 1978 sequel Dawn of the Dead.
The director raised the stakes with his first sequel, Dawn of the Dead, by mixing satire of consumerism into the zombie formula.