Yes! I’ve been waiting for this one, and you know you have too. Heralded by numerous promotional campaigns, including a fancy Website (www.dawnofthedeadmovie.net) and an amazing ‘first time ever’ preview of the entire first ten minutes of the film on the USA Network, Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead looked, to put it simply, just fucking beautiful. A number of critics bemoaned the lack of involvement by Romero and co., but as a big fan of Savini’s Night of the Living Dead and well aware of the fact that it has been a long, long time since we’ve had a good zombie movie to digest, I was more than willing to give this remake a chance. (Admit it, although 28 Days Later may have had its moments, on the whole it just wasn’t that great a film.)

Instead of beginning at a housing project infested with radicals and zombies, Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead opens up in a hospital where our heroine Sarah Polley is coming off of an exhausting overtime shift. (Needless to say, one of the patients admitted earlier was in critical condition after sustaining a curiously debilitating bite . . .) Scanning past a number of emergency bulletins on her car radio, she drives home to some of the most incongruous music imaginable and joins her husband for “date night.” In the morning their domestic bliss is savagely disturbed, and our heroine leaves the house to find not only her suburb but all of greater Milwaukee horribly changed. Violence literally explodes all around her as she flees in her car, and after having avoided half-a-dozen close calls she smashes her vehicle into a tree and blacks out into the opening credits.

            When she comes to some time later, miraculously uneaten as well as unharmed (thanks to the vehicle’s airbag), she meets up with shotgun-toting policeman Ving Rhames. Joined by several other struggling survivors, the group of them heads across the freeway to take refuge in the nearby Crossroads Mall . . .

And that’s all I’m really gonna say regarding plot detail. Things do slow down considerably at this point, the scares and bloodletting being parceled out at a moderate pace to prepare viewers for the wild end scenes (comprising a good quarter of the film), but tension (and bloodshed) is adeptly maintained by the actions and arrivals of new faces both live and undead. And while there are a greater number of living protagonists this time around (look for cameos by original Dawn of the Dead players), as can be expected they don’t all play well with others.

Our crew at Crossroads doesn’t face some of the same handicaps that Romero’s bunch did: not only are their numbers larger, but this mall is closed and locked down when they break in, necessitating the mopping-up of only one or two stragglers rather than a wholesale sweep-and-clear. And although as in the original the living do barricade themselves inside a shopping mall, this new version does not simply mimic the 1978 classic from here on out. Certain themes are reiterated, such as the pregnant survivor, the necessity of dealing with bitten comrades, and the decision to leave their temporary haven (no handy helicopters here; our gang is forced to take a hint from The Road Warrior regarding transportation issues), but all of these turns are handled in an adept and innovative fashion. And while there may be no biker gang invasion this time around, the refugees do manage to inflict plenty of damage upon their own in one way or another.

The scope of the full-scale zombie apocalypse is actually demonstrated much more effectively here than in the original, with some scenes composed of literally hundreds of rioting zombies. And unlike the shuffling undead cretins of the Dead trilogy these modern incarnations are a hasty, hungry lot, going after their prey with the quick determination of Return of the Living Dead’s carnivorous ghouls. You can’t just stroll past these fuckers on a shopping spree; they’re very fast, and there are an awful lot of them.

Following this line of thought, if you’re looking for blood and guts (and if you’re paying to see this picture you probably are) the film easily earns its MPAA rating for “pervasive strong horror violence and gore.” The effects aren’t exploited as much as they might be in a cheaper B-movie, but there are plenty of them and they’re plenty wet. (Wait until the chainsaw comes out; it may be a horror film cliché at this point, but picture if you will a combination of Scarface and Pieces.) As far as black and bloody humor goes however, although there are a few laughs this film doesn’t break out with anything nearly as hilariously awful as the original Dawn’s scene of zombies struggling across an ice-skating rink to the sound of abysmal mall muzak.

Stroboscopic camera work similar to that used in 28 Days Later adds a nervous, jittery edge to certain scenes, but far from aping that film or its cinematography the new Dawn of the Dead manages to sum up and best all of 28 Days within just a small portion of its running time. The variety of cameras utilized, from film to various digital recordings, also helps round out the total experience by providing multiple points of view on a horrifically multi-faceted situation.

Even the soundtrack is nicely handled; on top of the expected ‘make-a-really-loud-dramatic-noise-all-of-a-sudden-to-startle-the-hell-out-of-the-audience’ jolts, the zombies are given literally feral voices when they attack, adding a distinctly inhuman ferocity to their assaults. And the songs “When the Man Comes Around” by Johnny Cash playing to the opening credits (a fierce montage of news atrocity footage), and “People Who Died” by Jim Carroll coming in over the end credits, are very appreciable and appropriate selections.

And speaking of the credits, just as the pre-credit sequence consisted of an impressive amount of plot staging and violence, so too do the scenes interspersed between the end titles continue the drama, providing a bit of an homage to Fulci’s Zombie as they do so.

Just one more thing to add, and that is GO SEE IT. Myself, I’m heading out right now to go see it again.

- Crites

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