aka Zombie

• Written and directed by George A. Romero
• Starring
  • David Emge
  • Ken Foree
  • Scott H. Reiniger
  • Gaylen Ross
• Produced by Dario Argento and Richard P. Rubinstein

I gotta tell you: This is a movie everyone should rent.

You may think you know what I just said, but go back and read it: This is a movie that everyone should rent. Somehow, it just doesn’t seem right to me to own this one in the Limited Edition Boxed DVD, complete with the theatrical cut and the festival “director’s” cut and the Italian Argento cut, plus alternate soundtracks, commentaries from Romero and Savini and the main actors and a making-of featurette. That’s just not grimy enough. To truly be savored, the video itself, the physical tape, should be aged like fine wine. The movie should be seen on a rental tape, gussied up with gummy stickers like a well-traveled Samsonite suitcase; if you’re really lucky, you’ll even rent it from some mom’n'pop place that even lets you take it home in its own faded cover, sheathed in a cracked plastic case.

It’s the end of the world, folks; it shouldn’t be pretty.

Our movie here starts presumably a couple of weeks after the events of Night of the Living Dead (although through some cruel twist of fate, fashions have gotten ten years worse), and society is not reacting well to an onslaught of flesh-eating zombies. How can we tell? Because even the media are not able to present a well-edited, slick version of reality. Two of our protagonists, Fran (Gaylen Ross) and Steven (David Emge) work for a TV station, where their only programming has degenerated into arguing pundits on screen, while outdated disaster relief information scrolls along the bottom. Wait, that’s what TV has degenerated into in our day, except the disaster relief scroll has been replaced by “If you’ve had sex with your lover’s husband and given birth to conjoined twins, Sally would love to have you on the show!” (Look for Romero’s cameo as a harried techie.) Like so many people around them, Fran and Steven decide to desert the sinking ship, though with little idea as to where to go; but Steven does have access to a helicopter.

Meanwhile, we meet our other two protagonists, SWAT team members Peter (Ken Foree, the tall black one) and Roger (Scott Reiniger, the short white one). After a disastrous raid on a tenement — just when you think it can’t get worse than a racist SWAT team member going apeshit and blowing away everyone he sees, add an entire basement of zombies gnawing on the living — they, too, decide to head for the hills. And since Roger is a friend of Steven’s, he invited Peter along on their flyaway.

Now, I want you to notice a little scene. No one mentions it in their reviews, but it’s the single scene that defines the entire movie. As they’re getting into the chopper to take off, a young police officer, who’s discussing his own plans to get out of Pittsburgh, asks if any of them have a cigarette. They all shake their heads apologetically. And as soon as he’s out of sight, they all start puffing, without so much as a guilty shrug.

Remember that scene.

Their chopper flight takes them across the dead-infested countryside, and they have the requisite adventures and near-misses until they find their own little bit of paradise: A shopping mall. After landing on the roof, they find that the upper office level is practically inaccessable from below, which is fortunate because the mall levels are filled with the dead. It’s a pathetic scene, watching the clumsy corpses wander around, staring in at the locked shops; and it’s made more ridiculous and yet poignant when the explanation is advanced: “This was an important place in their lives.” They’ve come back because they remember it, but they don’t know why.

Welcome to the ’70s, when the Consumer Culture finally got into full swing, and more than ever the level and disposition of disposable income was tied to self-worth and self-image. As Romero never lets us forget, in any of the Dead movies, the dead are us. I’ve heard religious leaders quip before, “You can tell what a man worships by where he goes on Sunday” (a dig against sporting events); paraphrased for the circumstances, you can tell what a person worships by where he goes when he’s dead. We don’t get to see a church anywhere in the Dead trilogy, but if we did, I somehow doubt it would be nearly as full as this shopping center.

At first, our heroes make tentative forays into the mall to get supplies, but then they realize how easy it would be to block the entrances and mow down the zombies currently inside. Sure, easy and all — until, in an inattentive moment, Roger gets bitten on the leg. It’s all downhill for him from there; as the infection spreads, his normally peppy, manic energy grows into psychosis. Finally, it takes its toll, and in his last moments, Roger, swears to Peter: “I’m going to try not to come back.” Peter waits, gun in hand, over his shrouded corpse — until finally, the blanket slowly pulls back, and Roger’s corpse slowly tries to sit up, a look of incomprehension and misery on his face.

The remaining three try to spend their time in the denial of a consumer’s paradise, where everything they ever thought they wanted is theirs. But this only lasts a couple of months, until the TV broadcasts finally cease entirely, and they realize how far their heads have been in the sand. In a renewed vigor, Steven finally starts teaching Fran how to pilot the chopper, as he promised long ago — and the chopper is promptly seen by a vicious gang of scavenging bikers, led by Tom Savini himself at his most diabolical.

Now remember that scene that I told you to remember, the one with the cigarettes? This is the ’70s we’re talking about here, the only decade that could ever be proud of the inherent selfishness of a label like “The ME Generation.” And it’s that same material selfishness that destroys this ersatz paradise. Peter realizes that they bikers are only after the loot, not the people; but when they break in (letting the still-lingering dead flood in in their wake), Steven can’t help but try to defend “their” property. And while our survivors might be able to take on the zombies, and they might even be able to take on the bikers, they can’t take them both on at once.

The ending holds out a bleak hope, in the form of a partial survival (telling you who lives and who dies is cheating), but it’s a world in which things simply cannot get any better — not so long as the plague of the dead is fed by the living.

Of all three of the Dead movies, this one is the most dated — or, more correctly, the most date-stamped. Obviously, one can look at Night of the Living Dead and see parallels both to the inter-generational conflict of the ’60s, and the echoes of Viet Nam as the characters watch the reports of the struggle on TV, as authoritative anchors try in vain to present a rational version of an irrational situation. (One might also want to see the interracial struggles of the era, although that’s a questionable interpretation; the script was written before casting, and didn’t specify the races of the characters.) You can then leap forward to 1985’s Day of the Dead, and see a subtext involving the militaristic buildups of the Reagan era, and a critique of the “military mindset” out of its element. But in Neither of these cases are the concerns and hallmarks of the decade so front-and-center as in Dawn. This is the era in which advertisers, armed with their new knowledge of demographics, were able to bend the almighty powers of capitalism into convincing every man, woman, and child that happiness was to be gotten at the purchase counter — and even after death, the hapless dead, driven only by habit and instinct, are still trying to make good on that promise.

(An aside: I’ve always mourned that Romero was not given the opportunity to make a Dead movie in the ’90s, as I wanted to see what parts of popular culture were reflected in the dead. If a new Dead movie does come along in this first decade of the 21st century, I’m willing to bet that the underlying theme will end up being the isolation of a world in which the network had been the norm.)

But, even having said that, I can’t deny that there is still a universal appeal beneath the era-specific levels of this movie. These movies are so successful, not because they are about the dead, but because they are about the living — the people who need to reconstruct how they deal with one another, now that the societal patterns are dissolving. These are people who are trying to deal with the world, and each individual’s method of dealing comes into conflict with the others. These are movies in which the conflict is not between good guys and bad guys (though it must be said that, in Day of the Dead, it’s pretty clear where Romero’s sympathies lie), but between several pretty-good guys. (And gals. Let’s not forget them.) Each of our four leads here is a quirky individual, well-acted, and it is their interactions that makes the movie interesting, not the gore effects.

Although I must point out that the gore effects are quite effective, both for their straightforwardness (Romero refused to make the cuts necessary for an R rating) and for their freshness. This was shot in 1976-77, remember, before you could buy factory-made splatter FX kits in the back of Fangoria, and everything we see was thought up from scratch by Romero and Savini. As a result, what we see are effects which gain impact from being rough around the edges, rather than the streamlined, mass-market effects to be seen in more recent low-budget films. Of special note are the shotgunned head in the tenement (always a favorite), as well as the poor zombie who sticks his cranium right into the path of the chopper’s whirring blades and the machete-to-the-head zombie. Plus scores of bullet wounds to the head and body,zombie bites to all sorts of body parts, and a handful of biker pullaparts.

Now, the answer to the question everyone’s been asking: “If the movie’s so great, howcome you didn’t give it a HOT rating?” Well, I’l tell you. A whole lot of this movie is excellent. However, it’s not uniformly excellent; perhaps the best word for it is “lumpy.” Some of the noted deficiencies:

Remember how it took maybe ten minutes to set up the premise of Night of the Living Dead (i.e., farmhouse, people inside, zombies outside)? It takes more than twice that long to get into the meat of Dawn’s story; before that, we’ve got scenes at the TV station, the whole SWAT thing (which is never really explained — is this in reaction to the fact that the TV station folks just mentioned a government edict that all corpses must be turned over to proper authorities for disposal?), the chopper takeoff, and some meandering around the countryside, watching the rednecks plugging zombies and getting attacked by various dead folks. It just takes us too long to get where we’re going.

The dead themselves. Occasionally there’s a corpse makeup that stands out, such as the bald goo-face guy that shows up on the majority of video covers, and of course any of our principal characters who get zombified are given more care, but the majority of the zombies simply have faces painted blue-grey. There’s very little in the way of texturing or shading, and very few show any signs of trauma, cause of death, or decomposition. I mean, they’re either corpses that predate the wholesale return of the dead, or result from it; so we should see more of them in burial suits, hospital gowns, etc., or in casual clothes with giant gaping wounds (assuming that their deaths were caused by other zombies). Instead, we see far too many people wandering around in casual clothes and unremarkable makeup. And while I do appreciate the inclusion of some more notable zombies in the mall (including a nun, a ballplayer, a shirtless fat guy, and the only murderous Hari Krishna you’ll probably ever see), very few of them are scary. Remember the hollow-eyed look that the dead had in Night of the Living Dead? That’s conspicuously absent here. Yes, I know that there were extreme budgetary contraints, but is a little bit of dark around the eyes (and maybe more than one color of flat greasepaint) that much of a drain on the pocketbook?

The music. I know that a lynch mob will be formed as soon as I start criticizing Dario Argento’s favorite band Goblin, but I can’t see how most of the score was anything but mediocre even when it was fresh, and it has certainly not aged well. The most effective musical cues are the Muzak playing during the “zombie roundup” scenes, lending an intentionally comic tone; but the super-heroish theme that accompanies Peter’s last-minute revelation that he does actually want to live is just as comical, unintentionally.

The clothes. Okay, I know this is petty of me, but if there’s anything less frightening than a zombie wearing casuals, it’s a zombie wearing vintage casuals. It’s still scary, but in a completely different way.

Having said all that, I can’t give a movie this uneven a HOT rating, but I can recommend it as one of the best zombie movies ever made. It pales in comparison to the original Night of the Living Dead, but most movies ever made do. (You’ll probably never see a review of that one on this site; it’s such an incredible piece of cinema that any review attempted would quickly degenerated into hagiographical fawning.) Dawn may not be top-notch cinema, but it is definitely worthwhile.

A final note: While looking around my personal library, I ran across a slim volume I had picked up some years back: The American Nightmare, a selection of essays on horror films edited by Robin Wood and Richard Lippe, published by Festival of Festivals in Toronto in 1979. The final essay, by Wood, is entitled “Apocalypse Now: Notes on the Living Dead,” and plays compare-n-contrast with Night and Dawn, most especially their respective psycho-social subtexts (gotta love them subtexts). While making some worthwhile observations (for instance, on the position of The Crazies midway between Night and Dawn on a continuum of social criticism), it does give us this priceless paragraph on Dead:

The closest link between Night and Dawn is the carry-over of the black protagonist — his colour used again to indicate his separateness from the norms of white-dominated society and his partial exemption from its constraints. Through the developing mutual attachment between him and Roger, the film takes up and comments on the ‘buddy’ relationship of countless recent Hollywood movies and its implicit sexual undercurrents and ambiguities. Neither man shows any sexual interest in the woman, yet both are blocked by their conditioning from admitting to any in each other. Hence the channelling of Roger’s energies into violence and aggression, his uncontrolled zest in slaughter presented in a display for his friend. The true nature of the relationship can be tacitly acknowledged only after Roger’s death, in the symbolic orgasm of the opening of a champagne bottle over his grave.

Bet you’ll never look at that scene the same way again.

Some Notable Totables:

(all counts being from the U.S. theatrical cut)

• body count (i.e., the living who get killed): 22
• breasts: 2
• explosions: 3
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0