Dawn Of The Dead (1978)
In any long-term relationship you're going to encounter that moment where after years and years together you find yourself a bit bored by your partner. You know each other so well that there doesn't seem to be anything left to discover and even that hairy mole on her chin isn't endearing anymore so much as just flat out disgusting. When you hit this point and realize that you've been calculating how many of the CDs you would get post-breakup while she's been asking when your back won't be too screwed up to go back to work, you've got to decide whether you want to try and save things or not.
If you bite the bullet and decide that you don't want to have to move back to your parents' house and learn a new cable TV channel line up all over again, one of the ways of keeping that good loving fresh is to dress it up in a new package. As all guys know, this involves your old lady dressing up like a cheap whore, but what she loses in self respect, you gain in desire. A fair trade if you ask me.
What does this have to do with Dawn Of The Dead, the second of the George Romero zombie movies endlessly praised by every twelve year old with a laptop? Only that after having seen it about ten different times, the prospect of watching it yet again filled me with the kind of dread I usually reserve for when I'm watching those Paul Naschy movies where he turns into a werewolf and is thus forced to run around shirtless.
Dawn Of The Dead was actually the first zombie movie I ever saw when I was still mostly just dribble down my mama's leg. I remember that it was only one of two movies that actually caused me to lose sleep after watching it (the other was Halloween). I laid there in the dark afraid to fall asleep for fear that when I awoke the following morning the streets would be full of zombies. Of course now I pray for that very thing to happen every night, so that in the morning instead of going to my dead end job, I can just run through town whacking people in the face with a sledgehammer.
Not too long ago, one of my old ladies wanted to see a scary movie, so I suggested this one, and busted out the director's cut which runs about eight hours or so. After about twenty minutes she made me turn it off because she was bored! I was never so embarrassed in my life! Here was this movie I had promoted as being a big scary flick that kept me up at night and some girl was yawning during it!
Later on I watched it again by myself to try and see whether the old gal's attention deficit disorder flared up because the movie was a plodding mess or simply because it didn't star Colin Farrell. When I woke up three days later, I realized that she may have had something of a point. I'm not sure what it was when I was twelve that made me think this movie was mega awesome. Maybe it was because I saw it before I embraced the extreme lifestyle I now live, what with the cross country desert BMX races, the touring with Pantera, and thirty-six hour marathons on the X-Box playing Star Wars games.
Whatever it was, there was no denying the simple fact that at nine hours and thirty six minutes, this movie was simply too long. Heck, as long as this thing dragged on, I would have rather been trapped in a shopping mall with a pack of zombies and rowdy bikers than watching a movie about it. At least, I'd have some incentive to stay awake. Despite its length, there was still a movie in all that padding that I fell in love with and I wasn't ready to ditch it just because of a few love handles.
So how did I attempt to revive my flagging relationship with David Emge's most famous film? I did what I do whenever I'm faced with any crisis in my life - I turned to Dario Argento. Dario was one of the producers of this and retained the rights to distribute the film in Europe. He also retained the ability to chop up the movie to his liking. This resulted in him releasing a version in Europe that was shorter than Romero's version and substantially rescored. (Read: lots more Goblin music.)
Like the middle-aged broad trying to hold onto her man by strapping on a wig and "meeting" her husband at a hotel, this movie gets a new lease on life when you watch the Eurotrash version (unofficially called "the Argento Cut"). Basically, what Dario did with the movie was strip out most of the junk that served to slow things up.
The main thing I noticed was that the interminable scenes in the mall where our heroes go on a shopping spree are shortened up which helps things out since the middle of this movie was always a saggy mass in serious need of an Ab Roller. There's some other scenes that were missing, but nothing that really matters in the grand scheme of things. Dario seems intent on making this a movie where mayhem can transpire uninterrupted by anything but the most perfunctory of interludes. Some may see this as a dumbing down of Romero's alleged commentary on our mass market consumer culture, but I prefer to see it as a jacking up of Romero's somewhat sluggish zombie proto-Die Hard flick.
For those of you that have never made it to the back of your video store where all the oversized, scuzzy video cases reside, usually with scuzzy girls being menaced by meat cleavers on them, I'll do a quick rundown of the plot for you. Zombies that eat people have taken over the world and four people hole up in a shopping mall that George Romero rented out while it closed at night. The story is a continuation of things that first happened in Night Of The Living Dead. That one was about a group of people holed up in a farm house. The third movie, Day Of The Dead, was about a group of people holed in an underground military compound. Clearly, when George comes upon a concept he likes, he isn't afraid to rehash, I mean, revisit it.
Though there aren't any characters back from Night Of The Living Dead, it would seem that this movie is taking place relatively soon after that one since the dead are mucking around all over the country and everyone is aware of their presence. Fran is working at a TV station and her boyfriend Stephen is a helicopter pilot and they decide to get while the getting is good. Showing us the same kind of planning that resulted in Stephen getting her knocked up even though they aren't married, their escape plan involves them getting in a helicopter and flying away. After that, it's a pretty much play it by ear kind of plan.
Along the way, they pick up two SWAT team guys who have just been in a firefight with a building full of zombies. There's the cool and collected Peter and the little spaz named Roger. Roger's spastic nature would eventually be his downfall as he gets all bit up by a zombie during a rather stupid scene involving he and Peter braving a bunch of zombies to go and retrieve his bag that he dropped outside the mall. If you have an entire mall at your disposal, what could be in that bag that you would be risking your life to get? And what was the usually smart Peter thinking when he let Roger go back and get the bag? Oh well, that scene involved some semis running over zombies, so I didn't really dwell on the pointlessness of that particular plot twist.
So, these four are flying around in their helicopter and end up at a mall. I've always found the most bizarre moment in the movie to be when they first spot the mall and some character asks what it is and Stephen says it's a shopping mall and then explains what a shopping mall was! You know, it's an enclosed shopping area. What? Where was that guy from? Ghana?
Once in the mall, the movie is basically a bunch of scenes where the characters run around avoiding zombies and collecting stuff to live off of. Eventually they clear the mall of all these things and dump their corpses in a giant freezer. They block access to the mall by moving semis in front of the doors (this is where Roger gets zombie rabies) and settle into a nice, peaceful existence (well, except for Roger who is working on turning into a flesheating monster). Fran learns to fly the helicopter, Fran and Stephen learn to shoot by using mannequins on the hockey rink for target practice, and everyone shops for new threads.
Though there was a scene where Peter made Fran and Stephen dinner, I was a bit disappointed that there wasn't more of a focus on the food court aspect of the mall. I was hoping for scenes where the characters put on funny paper hats and pretended to be working at the Taco John's or where one of the characters (probably Roger) would be knee deep in Happy Meal toys. I know that if I was trapped in a mall in a world gone mad, it would be big soft pretzels and Orange Juliuses until Judgment Day.
Into an idyllic existence of free video games at the mall's arcade (this movie proves conclusively that violence in society causes people to play violent video games) comes a marauding band of bikers! Special effects guru Tom Savini is featured as one of them (you'll be able to spot him because he's the guy with the mustache and machete and always seems to whacking someone in the head with it) and they bust into the mall and wreak havoc. This also causes all the zombies that have been milling around the outside of the mall to come in and turns into a battle between them and the bikers. For awhile the bikers have their way with the zombies, but are forced to retreat once Peter and Stephen start shooting the bikers and the zombies begin to get the upper hand in all the chaos. With the zombies having overrun the mall again, the survivors of our little foursome have no choice but to make their escape in the helicopter and that's how things end.
Other than being faster paced, the other thing you'll notice about Argento's version is the music. He's added a bunch of Goblin and heavy metal, guitar oriented stuff to a lot of the scenes and though I'll be the first one whining about all these Italian horror movies and their rotten music, this time it actually helps the movie. Right from the beginning, the pulsing music sets an atmosphere of not only dread, but also one of anxiousness. Whereas Romero had used a variety of music and I seem to recall some scenes that were without music altogether, Dario uses the music to the point where it practically threatens to take the entire movie over. A case could be made that he overused his music, but I think for the most part, the new music gives the movie a momentum and a sense of urgency that it lacked in its original version. That may also be attributable to the fifteen or so minutes less of crap that was in this version, but the music made you sit up and pay attention, even after having seen the same scenes several times before.
If you're were a fan of this movie and are looking for a slightly fresh take on it, you should try and find this version. If you haven't seen this one before, I'd also suggest this version since I don't think you'd be missing out on anything if you missed Romero's version. Well, you'd be missing out on some boring stuff as well as some attempts at humor and if you have a day and a half to spare to watch it all, more power to you. In the end though, Dario saves the day. This stripped down version of this old hag managed to light my fire for it again. At least for a one night stand.