Here Come the Zombies
This retelling of a classic zombie horror movie is cheesy, gory and cool... just the way all zombie movies are supposed to be. It doesn't bill itself as the evolution of zombie horror, it doesn't claim to be the next big horror movie, because it knows that it isn't. It pokes fun at itself at numerous points, and the plot is never overly pretentious, like a certain zombie movie that I disliked last summer. 28 Days Later was shot in a very stylish manner, but Dawn of the Dead has a different, but still artsy, way of showing things. The result is one of the best horror movies I've seen in the last few years. It's got hordes of zombies, zombies heads getting blown off with shotguns and some truly cool main characters. As far as I'm concerned, that's all you need to have in a zombie movie.
The movie starts off innocently enough, with a nurse named Ana coming home and climbing into bed with her husband. The TV flashes something about "it spreading", but it's ignored. The next morning, she is rudely awakened when her husband is brutally attacked by a little girl. Moments after he dies, he arises again, and attacks Ana. She manages to escape to her car, where we see the full extent of the carnage. The camera pans away, and we see her entire neighborhood in chaos, hordes of the undead swarming to live flesh, helicopters circling in the air, and far off in the distance, a city with smoke pouring from it.
She manages to make it to the Crossroads Mall (the first time I read that, I nearly jumped out of my seat, thinking it said Crossgates, the mall where I was watching the movie), and here she meets several other survivors. These include the grizzled cop Kenneth (Ving Rhames), the over-protective husband of a pregnant woman (Mekhi Phifer) and several other outcasts that would normally never associate with one another in real life. Soon, the survivors realize that no help is coming for them, and all the zombies are flocking to the mall.
The rest of the movie is some truly cool action scenes with zombies, and some very tense moments between the survivors themselves. It seems that the new zombie runs fast now, but I guess that's only natural evolution of the monster. They're scarier that way, and more violent. The movie even manages to make a few of the characters sympathetic enough to care about. One that stands out is a man stranded across the street on the roof of a gun shop. Most of the humor comes from his scenes, but some powerful ones as well. This movie is violent, but thankfully, most of it is zombie related. There's a scene with a chainsaw that made me squirm a little though.
I liked this movie because it didn't pretend to be anything it wasn't. It was a zombie movie, plain and simple, and a good one at that. The jackass men get what they deserve, the dumb broads get what they deserve, and the heroes go out like heroes. I wouldn't have it any other way.