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Date Posted: 16:42:21 05/17/01 Thu
Author: Griff
Subject: Getting your parcel really did cheer me up, Rich, that was top, that was! Shame about the movie...


DAY OF THE DEAD


They stumble lifelessly, hollow-eyed and braindead, their only thought is to find food... but enough about the poor audiences who’ve had to sit through this monumental bore! Ha ha ha ha!!* Dearie me... After Night of the Living Dead, a relatively low-key and creepy movie in which zombies attack a house, and Dawn of the Dead, a ham-fisted and overlong dullard in which they start to take over the world, surely something a bit more apocalyptic than this was in order?

Well, nope, apparently not. The opening, with its eerily deserted streets and slowly appearing undead crowd, is intriguing enough, but not too long after that (‘bout thirty seconds) it all descends into George Romero’s amateurish, over-baked dialogue, endless monotonous squabbling, occasionally laughable macho insults and clichéd military antagonism. After the shopping mall setting of the previous film, which at least offered a bit of visual interest and some half-assed satire, this one is set in a disused missile silo and pits a bunch of racist, sexist, trigger happy army guys against a few boffins experimenting on the zombies in order to find a cure or a way to stop them. The zombies themselves have virtually nothing to do through the middle hour, and it seems as though Romero couldn’t think of anywhere to take them.

This is a character-led movie then, and that would be fine if any of the characters were worthy of leading a movie, but they’re not. Dr. Logan, a scientist trying to tame the zombies, is the only one who seems to have a bit of life outside the eternal dirge of the screenplay, thanks to the lively, twitchy performance of Richard Liberty. Otherwise we’re treated to endless swearing, shouting and embarrassingly clunky dialogue like the endless lines about jerking off, which just gets tiring. (The lines, not jerking off.) Here’s my favourite line in the film: “You pus fuck! You fuck! You pus fuck!” This was script-doctored by David Mamet, surely. The actors, especially Joseph Pilato, talk through clenched teeth so often they should have just wired their jaws shut and had done with it.

Thanks to the masterstroke of making all the central characters nothing but droning ciphers who are less rounded than any one of the undead wobbling around outside the silo, Romero ensures that we don’t give a crap about any of them. Who wins the Most Hackneyed Character Contest? Is it the wise Jamaican with a homely platitude for every occasion? Maybe it’s the drunken Irishman with a twinkle in his eye? Could it be the narrow-minded, hard-ass army captain? Or the misogynist, racist foot soldiers? The idea of an abandoned installation where the zombies can be captured and experimented on is a good one, but it never makes for an interesting film because the characters are so bloody boring.

For a bit of added nonsense, Romero throws in that sign of a dodgy movie, the completely unnecessary dream sequence. Nothing more than an excuse for some added gore and irritating trickery, the dreams add nothing, have no purpose and are only there because the writing’s so desperate. Funny that Romero should want to add more gore, because this is an extremely violent and bloody film – and that is where it really hits the mark. This might be a dreary, boring load of shite that seems about an hour longer than it really is, but there is no faulting the quality of the make-up and puppet effects. Once again logic goes walkies when the zombies are shown to be powerful enough to tear heads from necks and pull bodies in two with little effort but too weak to knock down a chain link fence, but the yucky attack scenes are superb, no doubt about it.

The animated corpse with the front of his face missing is probably the highlight, although the zombie who sits up only for his guts to spill out all over the floor runs it a close second. People get torn in half, have chunks chewed out of their throats, get parts of their faces torn off, and so on. I suppose this is a gore masterpiece, really. It doesn’t look like an expensive film but the effects are great. Shame about the surrounding movie. There’s very little sense of the scale of the problem, no tension, nothing much interesting going on at all, really. It’s a load of windy hogwash.



* I know I totally recycled a gag from my Mummy review there... but I like that one.

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