Admittedly, I have a weird bias, watching this film for the first time in 2021, having spent the majority of my life ingesting so much of the zombie media that it undoubtedly inspired in the 43 years since it's release. It's quite difficult to separate it from more recent interpretations and try to imagine how it must have affected audiences at the time. The most startling contrast is the effects, with the blue face-paint looking downright laughable, but the clear use of actual meat for guts is grosser than any CGI effects. The tone ping pongs from the expected violence to some slow sequences and some funny sequences that would feel out of place in a similar movie today. It admirably contains poignant commentary on consumerism as well as critiques on government crisis mismanagement that is all the more chilling in a post pandemic world. The meat and potatoes though, is of course the zombie attacks, which can be a double edged sword. I do have an appreciation for the level of gratuitous violence the film achieves, which seems excessive even today, so must have been groundbreaking at the time. However, without much of a satirical or dramatic angle attached to the relentless deaths, the incessant action can grow a tad tedious, especially when you've seen this kind of thing done some many times before. Definitely a solid ride though, and I fully respect it's influence, even if I'll never know what it was like to watch this for the first time as a teenager in 1978.
