Dawn of the Dead

Sequel to "Night of the Living Dead". In this one it seems the dead are taking over the country. Four people (three men, one woman) escape to a shopping mall and try to fight off the living dead and figure out what to do.

It starts off great with a confusing and VERY gory sequence and then sort of slows down when they get to the mall. There are still the occasional bouts of gore but it quickly turns into a satire on consumerism! There's nothing wrong with that but it makes that point...and keeps rubbing it in the audiences face. It slowly starts to get dull...until a gory rampage kicks in to end the movie.

In 1978 this was considered a strong movie in terms of gore and satire. The gore still works (there's a lot and it's graphic) but the satire seems very dated now. Still this is a classic--in its way. It was released unrated but no one under 17 was allowed in the theatre. Despite that it was a big hit and a rare horror film that critics actually liked. I remember finding this great back in 1979--but it seems kind of weak and dated over 20 years later. However the gore still holds up and it does have a few moments guaranteed to make you jump. Great music score too. I do agree it's a classic but I can truthfully only give the movie a 7. The satire really weighs this down.

When you want brutal, look no further, but when you also want to see perhaps the greatest of all comic-book movies not based on a comic-book, it's in George Romero's original take on his continuing mythology. It's not just one of the towering horror films, or horror comedies (what will a poor dead fellow do when the escalator starts?!) but one of the great sequels, more ambitious and ass-kicking than its predecessor, with a filmmaker more confident and technically proficient with his abilities.

Romero didn't originally want to do *any* sequel to his original 'Night', but after a visit by some friends to a soon-to-open mall nearby his hometown of Pittsburgh, it struck a chord as to who would be coming here – and what so much consumerism in one place would mean. "Why do they come here?" one of the four survivors that happens upon this mall swarming with these flesh-eaters asks another. "This meant something to them. Instinct, maybe. This was an important part of their lives," he responds.

I don't think necessarily Romero meant to show the film as any sort of 'This is what will happen!" type of social horror thing. It's more about, this is where we are at NOW, and in that sense, though broader and a whole LOT bloodier, it holds a place right next to a film like Network as one of the magnificent satires of its time and place, and as much about what the public is like. Romero acts as both pessimist and optimist in this world though; past all the chopped limbs, exploding heads (oh yeah!), Tom Savini stunt and make-up and intestines ripped apart, what holds up the film for me is seeing these four characters come to grip with the horror they've made for themselves, holding up in this "paradise" of a mall.

Balls-to-the-wall horror, social horror, and some genuine paranoid horror stuff (note to self, never try and fire a gun at a single zombie when in a dark room full of electrical wiring and pipes), and plenty of rock and roll attitude, this is a personal favorite and the most entertaining horror film of its time. And the Goblin music soundtrack… yummy.

By turns horrific, hilarious, disgusting and absurd Dawn of the Dead is the work of a director truly on top of his game. Given almost total control (something which was to be denied Romero in later years) George Romero gives us his unique and vivid view of a world in absolute turmoil.

Not just a mockery of the hedonistic and empty America of the late 70's Dawn is also a parable or warning if you like of the brittle structure of society and how easily it can be disintegrated. Many have criticised the film for being too over the top and questioned the quality of the acting. This for me is one of the joys of the film, Romero uses gaudy sets and effects and combines this with comic book hero dialogue to lull us into a false sense of security. Then masterfully Romero pulls the rug out from under us and brings the reality of the situation crashing in on our heads.

Dawn stands alone well but really comes into its own as part of the trilogy to which it belongs. One theory of mine is that the Alien trilogy (forgetting the miserable fourth installment) takes a lot from the dead trilogy namely the pace and claustrophobia of the two which book-end the mass hysteria and over the top horror and violence of the middle film.

Undoubtedly one of the great Horror films of modern time. Or perhaps there is something about being the only people left alive and living in a shopping mall that appeals to the kid in all of us. 10/10

'Dawn of the dead' may lack the pulverising immediacy of 'Night of the Living Dead', but it gains in exhilirating, epic scope. It is one of the best films of the 1970s, a reckless, hubristic, over-ambitious masterpiece whose excess is reined in by its Langian formal precision. The claustrophobia of the first film is replaced by a wider frame of reference, including the media, the military and suburbia; although, typically, the move is once again towards the indoors.

The film starts explosively, inside a panicking TV station trying to report on the inexplicable emergence from the earth of the undead. An assorted quartet - two media, two army; three white, one black; three men, one woman - escape in a helicopter used for rush-hour traffic reports. There is a sense of relief in this, a sense of breaking free from the circle of undead enclosing America's major cities.

But not for long - it seems that modern American man, unlike his pioneering ancestors, cannot stand open spaces, and holes up in a building, a shopping

mall, which is crawling with zombies, and recognised by the woman as a prison. Not content with this level of confinement, our heroes draw plans, erect barriers, shut down grids. Romero pinpoints this national insularity by framing his modern horror movie as a transposed Western, with the foursome as latterday frontiersmen wiping out the natives, and erecting a new civilisation.

Some might say that Romero's irony is a little heavy here - the mock-triumphal Western music on the soundtrack; the composition of the four at the height of the crisis standing in front of a sign with just the letters 'U' and 'S' visible; the glee in the gun culture, including an ersatz Western gun store in the mall the 'Red River' like beseiging of the mall by the 'Indian' Hells' Angels on their motorbike/horses complete with tomahawks. But such irony is never stable - Romero keeps pulling the ground from under the viewers' feet, both in terms of character identification, and the shifting meanings embodied by the zombies.

Romero's terrifying vision is of an America turned in on itself, eating itself through cannibalistic greed, the very system of capitalism based on a cycle of power and repression in which the repressed will never quite go away. 'Night' pulsated with a late 1960s urgency reflecting contemporary social and political upheaval, white capitalist America beseiged by the peoples it had oppressed for centuries. By 1978, that political anger is gone, and America has reverted to being a race of consumer zombies, congregating around massive shopping malls like they're the religious temples of the Incas, trapped there not by the freedom of choice of capitalist propaganda, but mindless instinct.

the zombies are supposed to be the enemy, the Other in conventional horror terms, but the first thing the so-called heroes do on landing at the mall is substitute urgent survival for gleeful consumerism (compare with the very similar silent fantasy, 'Paris Qui Dort'). There's no way to deal with any outside threat because we are numbed and bloated by products. Reality ceases to exist; there are some beautifully surreal scenes, as our heroes make homes in showrooms.

The mall sequence as a whole has a Bunuellian savagery about it, and the film builds up an aggression like the characters until all is chaos - tones, modes, genres all colliding, the 'reality' or 'integrity' or, even, 'seriousness' of the film as much in question as the modern world the protagonists live in, where even time seems to stand still, the weeks of the action compressed into the framework of a day, with the night of the living dead giving onto the dawn. It is probably allegorically significant which characters survive, but by the end we're not sure whether we're watching a horror, a comedy, a thriller, a Western, or a very bitter joke. Certainly scarier than 'The Stepford Wives'

This movie has always been a big favorite of mine. I went through a zombie phase in high school and this is, hands down, the best zombie film ever made. With all the crap coming out today, it still stands out.

Dawn is a great satire of materialistic modern society. All of the performances are spot on, George Romero's writing and direction is flawless as usual, and the gore is brilliant. What could be better than a bunch of zombies taking over a shopping mall? That's right, nothing.

If you call yourself a horror fan and you haven't seen the original Dawn of the Dead, you need to get with the program immediately! No one messes with Romero, no one!