Day of the Dead Wastes No Time Wasting Zombies

Day of the Dead Movie Review

By Demon

As Day of the Dead arrives on video store shelves (no theatrical for this one), even most raving horror fans have lost count of how many Living Dead films are creeping around the streets at this point.

A quick rundown:

George Romero has personally written and directed five Living Dead movies, these being Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, Land of the Dead, and Diary of the Dead. And these have been supplemented with a plethora of remakes, including two Night of the Living Deads, one Dawn of the Dead, and then the newly made Day of the Dead.

That makes nine zombie movies under the Living Dead moniker, easy enough to remember (we’ll stay away from Fido, American Zombie, and the countless Italian zombie films that have all been inspired by the Living Dead series, but as far as I know don’t pay royalties to Mr. Romero).

Where things really get confusing is trying to make sense of these Living Dead movies in relation to one another. For some time now, Living Dead sequels and remakes have appeared with no story-based relation to one another (when you buy a ticket nowadays, it’s pretty much a coin toss on whether the zombies are going to walk or run after their victims). And now, as is the case with Day of the Dead, remakes aren’t really remakes at all.

Day of the Dead, in fact, recalls the old Sesame Street jingle, “one of these undead children is doing his own thing…” Or something like that. Day of the Dead has nothing in common with the brooding original, other than a character name or two and the fact that at least part of the movie takes place in an underground bunker.

Oh yeah – and a bunch of flesh eating maniacs too.

And although comparing a bloody zombie movie to a children’s program is certainly a bad analogy, it’s strangely appropriate. Day of the Dead is a very playful film — a liberal mix of what-the-hell-is-going-on investigation, splattery gore, fully automatic action, and black comedy straying into camp.

The heroes of the movie — a group of young soldiers and locals quarantined in a small Colorado town – spend the first third of so of the movie helping loved ones and coming to grips with the rapidly spreading zombie outbreak, then quickly get down to business destroying flesh eaters with spears, machetes, AK-47s and Uzis acquired from the local gun store (yep, that’s how it works in Colorado). “This is kind of fun,” one character tells another as he gets the hang of capping the creatures in the head.

It’s a bit of a toss up whether the movie ultimately benefits by embracing the silly stuff or whether the moviemakers might have made something more compelling by keeping the tone more consistently dark and serious throughout. But with Living Dead movies as prolific as the zombies in the films themselves, the filmmakers seem content to let other films in the franchise do the heavy lifting, leaving them to focus on the niceties of burning, shooting, and decapitating flesh eaters (familiar terrain to director Steve Miner of Friday the 13th fame).

It makes for a fun and wild ride. And I dare say, a much more enjoyable one than the brooding, unrelated original of the same name.