I saw Night of the Living Dead for the first time a number of years ago. It’s not perfect, but given the budget George Romero was working with, it’s fairly effective for what it’s trying to do. Romero claimed later the social message, where the last survivor of the overnight siege was a Black man killed by police the next day, was unintentional, but later movies in the series leaned into Romero’s left leaning social politics more prominently. Now, I had planned to see Romero’s Dawn of the Dead next, especially since it seems to be the one that gets the most acclaim from horror fans. I haven’t really been able to find it on any of my streaming services, and it doesn’t even seem to be rentable from Amazon last I checked. Sure, I can see Zack Snyder’s remake, but I would still rather see the original first. Day of the Dead, the third part of the original trilogy, was on HBO for me to see once I caught that second one.
But then HBO Max let it be known Day of the Dead was leaving at the end of the month, and here we are.
It would seem the zombie plague first seem in the previous two films has gotten much worse. For this movie, the story follows a handful of survivors in an underground military base. Those survivors are a small group of soldiers, a handful of scientists studying the zombies, and two guys who take care of a helicopter. Zombies seem to be everywhere above ground and even in a tunnel where the soldiers occasionally collect specimens for the scientists to work on. There aren’t as many of them as there used to be, and most of the military men, now led by the crazed Captain Rhodes (Joseph Pilato), are itching to get out of there and don’t much care for the scientists. Many of the scientists’ experiments are questionable, though Dr. Logan (Richard Liberty), nicknamed “Frankenstein” by Rhodes, seems to be having some success teaching a zombie he calls “Bub” (Sherman Howard) how to be friendly. Tensions are high, and as the group waits for…something to happen, it may be only a matter of time before the humans living underground find the real dangers are each other and not the cannibalistic hordes of the undead slowly roaming the surface.
There’s a lot to potentially work with here. Romero was clearly not working with a particularly large budget. The underground sets aren’t that impressive, and the cast is obviously not that big outside the hordes of undead extras. That’s fine. He did just fine in the first movie with a smaller budget than this one probably got. There’s some good work here to be explored on how much underground confinement can affect the minds of survivors…something that occurs to me is a little on-the-nose for pandemic times truthfully. That said, I didn’t particularly care for this movie. The Bub scenes work, and there’s a very memorable dream sequence to open the movie, but outside of Rhodes and to a lesser extent Frankenstein Logan, I didn’t find the characters all that memorable.
It doesn’t help that many of the performances are so over-the-top that it is difficult to take them seriously. Actors are either unsubtle or they’re bland. That goes for their performances and the script as-written. The soldiers are generally violent and itching to hurt, well, anything while looking for a place to go. The scientists, for the most part, are a bit dispassionate. The “good” guys here, the lone female scientist and the two guys running the helicopter, are just observers. Bub has the most personality in many ways. That’s almost certainly intentional. But we don’t spend a lot of time with the zombies as it is.
I will give credit to Tom Savini’s as-always excellent zombie make-up effects. Those effects look good even now, and when the zombies, of course, finally overrun the base and start munching on the movie’s real villains–the surviving soldiers–the movie has some life, no pun intended. Given the military presence, this was probably Romero’s attempts to comment on 80s era military build-up, but ultimately, this was a movie where characters were either screeching madmen or bland forgettable people living underground and trying not to go insane with various levels of success. I just didn’t care for it all that much.
Grade: C
0 Comments