Motorized Instinct

When it comes to zombie movies, and man I love some zombie movies, you have to go with George A. Romero. The guy started it with his shot on the weekends in black and white Night of the Living Dead. It’s a simple story – the dead mysteriously begin to return to life to eat the flesh of the living. They cannot be killed unless the brain is destroyed.

The original is a great, tight little horror movie and all of the sequels have something to offer. They’re not progressing any story necessarily, just taking the viewer further along in the days of the zombie apocalypse. Dawn of the Dead takes off a couple of days, maybe weeks, after the initial night; humans are scattering to survive, fleeing cities for the country. Day of the Dead shows a world mostly overrun, hope for survival pinned on pockets of underground installations of stir crazy military and scientists hoping to train the zombies. Land of the Dead extracts it even further; the world has lost hope of this ending, humans are exiled to scattered, fortified cities and special units sent out to small towns to gather supplies. But the zombies are starting to learn and don’t like being used as target practice. Diary of the Dead takes us back to the first days with a first person camera approach.

For my money, you cannot beat Dawn of the Dead; funny, scary, tense and gory as all get out. Four survivors flee the city and accidentally end up taking root in a shopping mall. As with all of his Dead movies, Romero makes a point about the times they were shot in. Here it’s not as heavy handed as in some of the others because it doesn’t need to be. Shots of zombies strolling a mall, aside from the rotting flesh, don’t look much different from any other day in any other mall.

But more than that, and the point that most everyone seems to miss when watching Romero’s zombie epics, is the idea that we as humans will rebuild in our own image when things get hairy, but refuse to learn from the past. Invariably in his films, we as people build the same society only to fuck it up for ourselves do to greed, jealousy, ignorance…

Why Dawn though? It moves at a good frenetic pace, like a horror comic brought to life, and there’s this lack of gloss to it that makes you feel like anything can happen. Plus these guys hole up in a mall, it’s like an adolescent fantasy mixed in a missive from the end of times. Oh, and the soundtrack kicks fucking ass; great, liberal use of mall music to underscore the action.

While I did enjoy the remake on some levels, it just doesn’t compare. Why? There was no need to remake it, for one. As it was a studio release it had that safe, well produced shine to it. The original unrated Dawn of the Dead got away with horrifying zombie carnage as it didn’t have to worry about a studio or the sensors. Plus the remake had running zombies. Cool for a bit, but there is something absolutely overwhelmingly dreadful in the fact that these shambling, slow moving messes are inevitably going to get you – and eat you.

A mini, gory epic – with zombies. Eight kinds of awesome.

Rocktober Song of the Day: “Tundra/Desert” by Modest Mouse.