I’ll just come out and say that as a self-appointed zombie expert it shames me to admit that I haven’t seen the original of the Dead trilogy. I know your faith in me is shaken. I aim to rectify this deficiency; rest assured that I have increased my anti-zombie training to 4 hours a day. I decided to watch the recent remake first as remakes are usually worse than the originals[ftn] and I prefer to go from bad to good. Unfortunately Resident Evil 4 has been delayed again and won’t be out until next year, and Resident Evil Outbreak is PS2 only but Shawn of the Dead and Resident Evil: Apocalypse are being released soon so I should be able to keep my training on schedule.

This film opened my eyes to a couple of home truths. For one thing, I shouldn’t assume that zombies are slow moving. Apparently some of them can run really fast.

Another thing: God bless America. They truly are safe.[ftn] When the zombies attack, they just run to the gun store and stock up. What would we do in Australia? No semi-automatic weapons, no oversized military packed to the gills with high explosives. When the dragons awake to reclaim the earth, we’ll have half a dozen choppers to hold them back. America recently decided to let ordinary citizens wield automatic weapons. What progress! What forward thinking! Iraq will be safe too. I pity us poor schmucks here in Oz.[ftn]

This film turned out to be pretty good in the end. The special effects were good, definitely above B-grade standard and there was some decent characters. It’s a fairly standard zombie movie. For no real reason, some people wake up as zombies one morning. They want to feast on human flesh. There’s a group of people holed up somewhere. They decide to leave their safe haven and go on a wacky road trip. They have to kill their loved ones who have come back in zombie form. They make some stupid decisions and they fight amongst themselves. No one wears protective clothing. There’s self-sacrifice. Things go horribly horribly wrong. There’s hot pregnant zombie action.

It’s the little differences that make a zombie movie. The light hearted scenes in the middle were a nice touch. Once the group was established in the mall they were able to relax and enjoy things. These scenes break up the tension nicely. There was a funny scene standing in the elevator listening to the cheery music while running from the zombies.

It was a curious choice not use the word zombie in the film. Most horror films usually have a character early on call the creatures zombies or vampires and everyone says things like ‘zombies aren’t real, maybe he’s just let himself go’ until they actually see zombies climbing out of their graves. Here they do mention that people have come back from the dead but no one says zombie. I liked it at first but it seemed odd after a while.

There was some interesting stuff on how people react to a zombie epidemic. It was subtle and more believable than other movies. The suspicious mall security guards tried to keep people from looting the shops. Dr Pratt refuses to kill his zombie baby.[ftn] No one knows what to do with someone who has been bitten but only has a minor wound and isn’t going to die for a while.

I liked the style of the ending. I thought the film was going to end without the final fate of the characters known but it continued on into the credits showing what one of the characters was filming with a video camera. That way it felt like the rest of the adventure was shown while being cleverly compressed to fit into a decent length film.

Dawn of the Dead is a good film, especially for a remake. It’s a lot more consistent than 28 Days Later which started out good but finished badly. There’s a couple of plot holes in the movie: I don’t know why the guy was waving a chainsaw around in a moving vehicle and they should seriously wear some protection against zombie bites.

I have to go build myself a bomb shelter now. I’ll need about 6 months supply of food and water. That should be along enough time for the zombies to decay.

DVD Review

The DVD some clever extras. Instead of the usual deleted scenes, there’s background footage about the zombie plague. There’s a recording of what happened to the guy over the road from the mall and the news reports from the day of the zombie attacks. There’s also the usual commentary and behind the scenes stuff, most of which focus on how to make zombies’ heads explode convincingly. A worthy goal in my opinion.

Footnotes

1. e.g. Planet of the Apes, Psycho and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
2. Except in the case of natural disasters. They seem to be targeted unfairly. Australia was untouched in The Day After Tomorrow.
3. Now that I think about it, Australia has no zombie attacks. I’d rather be in a country that has no guns and no zombie attacks. Yay for quarantine.[ftn]
4. I knew he was up to no good.
5. John Howard is a hero for keeping out those refugees. Any one of them could have been carrying a zombie plague.

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This entry was posted by the illustrious Andy Cocker on Tuesday, October 19th, 2004. It concerns such pressing issues as . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.