Dawn of the Dead Review
by Jerry Saravia (faust668 AT aol DOT com)March 29th, 2004
DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978)
Reviewed by Jerry Saravia
RATING: Three stars and a half
When I first saw "Dawn of the Dead," back in 1986, I found it to be a huge disappointment. I loved the original "Night of the Living Dead," and "Dawn" was like a gory second cousin in living color. Remember that I was a teenager at the time and was a big fan of Freddy Krueger (still am). But watching "Dawn of the Dead" recently for the first time in almost twenty years, I was amazed at how much I missed. "Dawn of the Dead" is a comic horror film, full of satirical touches and director George Romero's own fiery theme of man's inhumanity to man and dead men.
The film does begin rather unevenly. The setting is a TV station (the only one presumably on the air) where the host is arguing back and forth with his guest over the zombies - they are everywhere and are turning the nation into zombies. How can we stop them? Can we study them, perhaps to find what drives the urge to eat humans? The scene is a study in chaos and paranoia, as we also hear the rumblings from the TV crew watching the host and the guest argue vehemently. To make matters worse, the military is in the building (or so I thought - the editing is haphazard but maybe that is the point), and they are busily wiping out every zombie by shooting them in the head. Eventually, after witnessing ten minutes of quick shootings and the rumblings of a priest with a wooden leg, four survivors take off in a helicopter and land on the roof of a shopping mall. All is fine and dandy until they realize that the entire mall is flooded with zombies! So how do you manage to take whatever you want from a mall while fending off zombies who are fascinated by elevators and do a lot of window shopping?
"Dawn of the Dead" has several moments of gore delicately crossed with brazen black humor. The film is a satire of consumerism, and what better place to consume and shop than a shopping mall? The zombies are drawn to this place because they feel they have been there before (and they like to consume as well), and I only wish that director George Romero pursued this idea further. If a zombie can recollect a specific memory by being in a familiar setting, can they think? If so, what channels it? And if they can think, can they see that maybe human flesh is not something to consume? Well, I just posed some existential questions here which Romero may not have thought of, but they went through my mind while watching this film. Most fans of the film will say that this a graphic geek show, designed to entertain and scare the bejesus out of you. It is that, and Romero has successfully managed to do so. But the setting of the film brings other questions to mind, considering this is not a nonstop avalanche of gore. The human survivors of the film stay at the mall for a long period of time, enough time to convert the dressing rooms into bedrooms. They even have a living room and a kitchen - it all looks like an advertisement for "Good Housekeeping." The dawn of America, Romero seems to say, is that the survivors of the Apocalypse will focus on living the good life of rich foods, TV, clothes, and all in great quantities, of course. Oh, and it helps to be armed and ready. The zombies are merely interested in consuming human flesh.
"Dawn of the Dead" is often brilliantly unnerving, fitfully gory and offhandedly scary, using a perfectly bland setting where you would never expect zombies to scour the regions of something so sacred to the American consumer. The ending goes on a bit too long (particularly after seeing Tom Savini, the king of gory makeup, as a motorcycle rebel), and the characters never truly come alive beyond being caricatures with glints of humanity. I must add that you still care enough about them to hope they make it out of the mall alive. Still, "Dawn of the Dead" has a purpose and it fulfills it to a tee - to scare you and to gross you out. It does those things as well as any director could, but it is clear that George Romero has much more on his mind.
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