This movie drops you right into the middle of the action. There is no exposition at all in the opening of this film. The zombie apocalypse is underway and our "heroes" have found a way to an area that they think will be safer. As they leave town the lights in a skyscraper start going out one floor at a time. I thought that was a great visual and metaphor. The crew end up at a mall on the outskirts of town. The crew consists of a black male lead (similar to the ground breaking first film in that it used a black man in a leading role years before Hollywood would), a female, a white cop buddy of the black man, and a nerdy other male.
If there is one thing that zombie movies are almost never about, it's zombies. People have been using zombies and zombie movies as social commentary for as long as the dead have been rising. I am new to the sub genre of zombies, but I am quickly realizing that these films are metaphorically wonderful, and very close to pure cinema. I was thinking at first that this was going to be a movie about race relations, or the feminist movement. But once they got to the mall I was sure it was going to be a film about consumerism and boy was I right.
Once in the mall they come up with a plan to turn a bland stock room that they believe to be safe into their new residence. They plan on ridding the mall of all the zombies and living out the rest of their days surrounded by all kinds of consumer crap from the stores in the mall. The movie is saying that the threat is not so much the zombies, but the lust for material things. And it turns out that this lust will be the downfall of the group, or at least some of it's members.
Speaking of threats, I didn't find these zombies much of a obstacle or very intimidating. They are traditional zombies, in that they are slow moving. They have no brains to speak of so out smarting them should be easy. And for the most part they are not in large herds. Picking off the occasional lethargic idiot zombie didn't seem like that much of a problem. There is one kill I have to talk about and that is when a very Frankenstein looking zombie gets too close to the helicopter and chops off the top of his own head. I laughed out loud at that moment. One moment where I didn't laugh out loud is when the looters are in the mall and they break out cream pies and seltzer bottle and hit the zombies with them. If this is an ode to the Marx Brother films or films like theirs, it was totally over my head. I thought that was really one of the only stupid things in the film.
This movie was a first in many different fields for zombie movies (or at least main stream zombie movies). It introduced kid zombies. And kid zombies are not off limits in this movie. It was the goriest of the zombie movies at that time. There is a lot of zombies getting shot and a lot of fake blood being squirted around. There is a scene where the zombies tear into a newly dead body and we get the graphic moments of a human body being shredded like yesterdays newspaper. I think this is the first time I actually heard the word "zombie" in a zombie movie. That is the movies commenting on the movies. I love crap like that.
The soundtrack was done by the same band that did Suspiria's music, Goblin. Argento was credited during the opening of the film several times. I hated the music in Suspiria. But here it is quieter and I think it fits in better here. Overall I liked this movie a lot. Not quite as much as the first one, but it definitely stands on its own. I am curious now to see the remake. I give Dawn of the Dead ★★★★.
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