DAWN OF THE DEAD

Rating:

Year Released: 1978

Zombie Speed: Slow

Cause of Zombie Outbreak: Unknown

Best Zombie: The rifle zombie! This guy takes a rifle near the beginning of the movie and continues to hold it and look into the barrel puzzlingly in the background of almost the entire movie until he eventually trades up to a larger, fancier machine gun.

Most Creative Weapon: The medieval style flail.

Best Death: Blood Pressure Guy! For some reason one of the members of the biker gang just HAS to take his blood pressure in the middle of a zombie horde. It doesn’t end well.

Sub-Genre: Dystopian

Amanda Jean’s Review: Dawn of the Dead is a brilliant film that contains a few of my favorite things zombies, a shopping mall and motorcycle jackets. The idea of having a mall and all its goodies to yourself with only a few others makes the hordes of zombies outside a lot less threatening. This film has likable characters, wonderful gore and hopefully a Cinnabon. This really is a must see George Romero zombie film (well all of them are really).

Matt’s Review: Dawn is my all-time favorite (serious) zombie movie. George Romero created the modern zombie film with Night of the Living Dead and he perfected it here. It manages to convey the utter helplessness of life in the early stages of a zombie apocalypse without making it so dark that it’s hard to watch. The characters feel real and do the best they can to maintain a level of normalcy in a world that’s gone completely to hell. Dawn also marks the introduction to the god of zombie make-up, Tom Savini. If you haven’t seen this movie yet go out and see it before watching any other zombie film (since most every other zombie movie has borrowed elements from Dawn in one form or another).

Don’t worry folks, we’ll get to the more obscure and weird zombie films soon but we wanted to set the benchmark with this one. Up for review next week is the 2004 Dawn of the Dead “remake” so we can compare the two films.

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