Wednesday, October 13, 2010

The Three Ring Circus Mall

Zombies have been (some of) the rage lately, with zombified novels and of course movies.  None of this would be possible without the work of one George A. Romero.  Whereas Night of the Living Dead started it all, it was his second zombie film Dawn of the Dead that established the parameters for how to deal with a zombie invasion and how zombies should act in a movie, that is, if zombies can get it through their nonexistent brains.

As with any Romero film, there is social commentary in the film, with the zombies gravitating towards a shopping mall in this film.  The main characters are a helicopter pilot, his girlfriend, and two soldiers, who escape a zombie invasion and find refuge in a mall.  For a while, the four fight off the zombies while trying to make some kind of living in the mall before the rigors of fighting off the zombies gets to one of them and he becomes one of them.  A biker gang disrupts the living, which naturally causes chaos within the mall.  Most of the gang becomes zombie food, and eventually, the surviving main characters have to flee the mall in the helicopter.

It was in this movie that the best way to deal with them is to shoot them in the head or sever the head from the rest of the body.  Also in the movie is some of the worst zombie makeup ever, which to be fair, wasn't established, since Romero was still trying to figure it out.  I never said this was a perfect zombie movie.  Even with the social commentary, there are some light-hearted moments such as the zombies trying to use the escalator and sometimes falling, and the biker gang trying to use practical jokes such as spritzer water and pies in the face of zombies.  I don't know about you, but pies in the face are good for baseball players, but zombies won't take too kindly to that sort of thing.

Yes, there was a remake of this movie, which I absolutely refuse to watch, and yes, the rules established in the movie have since, been broken (by Romero, no less, in Day of the Dead, which by the way, offers more social commentary and a reason for breaking the rules here, so he gets a pass here).  However, there are few zombie movies that are essential viewing like Dawn of the Dead.

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