Review #167: Dawn of the Dead (1978)

This review was originally written in 2022.

Gabe's 100 Bucket List Horror Films Review #22: Dawn of the Dead (1978)

This is another movie that I watched and reviewed last year, but surprisingly, I actually feel much more lukewarm about it than I did at the time. Some of my thoughts are the same, but not all.

The first thing that struck me this go-around is how scattered and disjointed the first thirty minutes of this film feel. Lots of zombie movies seem to start mid-outbreak (like the Dawn of the Dead remake, for example), but generally speaking, they tend to start at a point that helps acclimate the viewer into the setting and to set up their expectations (even if they do so by starting the movie with a sudden, frantic chase scene, like the remake does). This one starts off so... just so weird, I don't even know what to compare it to. It feels like it's picking up mid-story, like maybe it was meant to be an immediate follow-up to Night of the Living Dead? (Except considering how that movie ends with the zombie apocalypse basically averted, I don't think that's the case.) Very little time is spent introducing us to who will turn out to be the main characters, and just as much time- if not more- is spent introducing a dozen other characters, who are all summarily killed off in one way or another. It's not until the main four people (Peter, Francine, Stephen, and Roger) reach the shopping mall that the movie begins to actually settle into what the movie is going to be about, and as I said, that's a good half an hour into the film. I'm fine with movies being a slow burn, but this sits there as just a pile of dry kindling, not yet set alight.

Once things get going, it gets pretty engaging, though it feels less like a cohesive story and more like a series of small vignettes about what it would be like trying to survive from a zombie outbreak in a relatively safe location. I know that at this point they were still working out what a "zombie flick" was or could be, but I can't help but marvel at how... ineffective and toothless these zombies are. Numerous times a character will just push their way through a crowd of zombies, and then near the end of the film the biker gang spends a good ten minutes literally pulling pranks on these contagious, deadly creatures. Am I supposed to be scared of zombies? I watched two guys laugh as they twisted a zombie woman's necklace around a few times and she stood there in her gray-faced terror and did nothing to stop them.

The movie isn't bad, but it certainly looks and feels much more amateurish than it did the first time I watched it. It has a lot of the hallmarks you'll come to expect from the genre, but as with all innovations it needed a bit of refining before it truly became great.

Overall Rating: 6/10 Helicopter Decapitations

Most Ineffective Zombie Weapon Ever: A pie to the face

(Seriously though, why did they throw pies at the zombies? I know they were clowning on the zombies because they weren't threatened, but you gotta imagine food was in short supply, right?)