Dawn Of The Dead --- The Director's Cut
dir: George A. Romero

So I says to you, I says, "What could be better than a beautiful girl and a pissed off guy trapped inside an isolated farmhouse surrounded by flesh-craving zombies who escape using shotguns?"

"Dawn of the Dead" could be better than that, my friend.

The story takes place during the same time as "Night of the Living Dead". Cities under siege by the undead, chaos and panic and all that fun stuff. A traffic reporter, his girlfriend, and two SWAT team members decide to escape their city using a television station's traffic copter. In the twenty minutes that precede this decision, the audience is presented with a startlingly well-done portrait of a city in terror. One of the opening sequences is a SWAT team assault on a project who's residents have refused to go to one of the designated shelters. During the raid to get them out of the zombie-infested projects, the characters are forced to deal with the very real predjudices of their fellow officers. And (spoiler forthcoming), instead of being like any other movie with a racist character where the protagonist sits the bigot down and has a heart-to-heart, explaining hate is wrong and ignorant, Our Hero simply shoots the guy. Yes, that should give you a sense of the movie right there.

But I digress.

The four main characters seek refuge in a mall deserted by humans. Trouble is, there's a few hundred zombies walking around. So the SWAT team members take it upon themselves to clear the whole damned mall out and seal it up good and proper so no more zombies can get in. I don't want to get into too much detail about this part, since I think their methods are some of the best parts of the movie. They even think enough to actually close off the doors, since zombies are still flocking to the mall.

But clearing out the zombies was the easy part. The climax involves a gang of Raiders who want to get into the mall, and thereby let the hundreds of zombies in at the same time.

It's a keeper.

This movie was made in 1979, which blows my mind. It's without a doubt one of the best horror movies I've ever seen. One can't help but watch this movie in awe of it's grand scale, from it's rather-lengthy running time of two and a half hours to the fact that they shot this movie in a giant mall to the well done characterization and, of course, the over-the-top action sequences. I would love to know how much "Dawn of the Dead" would cost to make today.

You've got to see this film. You'll be amazed at how good it is. I was.

This is the Director's Cut, and it includes one tape of international and domestic trailers. The movies tag line is great --- "When Hell Is Fill, The Dead Will Walk The Earth". The German trailer, with fully-armed SWAT team members evacuating an inner-city project while continuous shouting in badly dubbed German, is kinda disquieting, since it IS angry Germans with guns shouting at people.

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Michael Keegan
8.5.1999