It's always said that there's a fine line between horror and comedy - the pros can straddle it like a daring high-wire act and this is one of them. A hard mix to pull off and one that happens with success very rarely. It just works - it's funny, weird, creepy, gory, and always entertaining. It has iconic scenes and quotes though I'm sure a lot of people have no idea they're actually from this. What you have is dry as hell, with punk rockers (timely for the time - Repo Man meets zombies?), Nazi morticians smoking pipes and listening to their Walkman while embalming, and Quigley nudity for its own sake, but characters are in on it and equally celebrate and scold her. It's a zombie comedy that isn't a full-on splatterfest like most, doesn't offer some overly humorous social satire (there's subtle jabs at Agent Orange and Nazis), and doesn't have a high-concept premise (for a zombie movies that is). “Dawn of the Dead” is a must-see.This movie is like very little else out there. George Romero was a first-rate filmmaker and an important social philosopher. The last thing they want is for us to stop shopping. I’m pretty sure that the people who run our world don’t want us to see it. I couldn’t even find it for sale in the iTunes store. I couldn’t find it on Netflix or Amazon Prime Video. “It’s ours … we took it,” he mutters as he chooses to fight to the death over his beloved stuff. When a band of armed raiders busts into the mall, our four heroes could simply hide and let the ruffians take what they want. The helicopter pilot – Stephen – gushes to his girlfriend about all the wonderful free stuff in the mall, giddy with the drug-like euphoria of a shopping spree.īut in the ultra-violent final act, it is clear that consumer goods are all that he has left. “Dawn of the Dead” gets more interesting when it explores the shopping habits of the human characters.įaced with the total breakdown of society, our four human heroes cling to 20th Century consumerism in a futile effort to find meaning. The zombie-as-shopper metaphor isn’t very sophisticated obviously. We shop pointlessly and mindlessly, never questioning whether our lives will be any richer after we’ve consumed another mass-produced product. ![]() George Romero is horrified by American materialism. They know we’re still here.” “No, they’re after the place. They have everything they could ever want – for free! But it turns out that the zombies are just as attracted to the mall as they are. Living at the mall offers the survivors a jolt of excitement. The four lead characters in “Dawn of the Dead” steal a TV weather chopper and fly to … the mall. They all look to the same false idol: consumerism. In “Dawn of the Dead,” the last living people just do their best to find meaning in a world with no family, country, jobs, or religion. But real people would have no chance of accomplishing these things. In a bad modern zombie movie, the characters would work toward a solution to the problem or a cure to the plague. This was not a victory to be celebrated this is a terrible thing. After a human survives an attack by killing a zombie, there is a moment of empathy and sorrow. The zombies in writer/director George Romero’s films are actors in make-up without any super speed or super powers. They are little more than video game bad guys to be heartlessly shot down. The problem with modern high-tech flicks like “World War Z” is that the zombies are computer generated and move unnaturally quickly. ![]() I doubt there will ever be a 21st Century zombie movie that is as great as George Romero’s were. Just millions of zombies and pockets of heavily armed humans fighting to survive. There’s no more radio broadcasts and no more government. ![]() “Dawn” takes place after society has broken down. “Dawn of the Dead” is a messier movie: morally and in terms of how much blood is spilled. “Night” is a low-budget masterpiece: simple, inevitable, relentlessly grim. Seven people holed up inside a farmhouse to wait out the crisis. In George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead,” a small zombie plague hit the Pennsylvania countryside.
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