Dawn of the Dead
Director: George A. Romero
Writer: George A. Romero
Cast: David Emge, Ken Foree, Scott H. Reiniger, Gaylen Ross
Part of: The Living Dead series

Plot:
The world is being overrun by zombies. So Stephen (David Emge) grabs his girlfriend Fran (Gaylen Ross) and joins forces with two SWAT members, Roger (Scott H. Reiniger) and Peter (Ken Foree), they board the traffic helicopter that Stephen works with and try to find safe ground. When they land on an abandoned shopping center, they believe to have found it, at least for a while.

Dawn of the Dead was kinda bizarre. It felt like huge portions of the movie were just about these people playing house. And the zombies were so little scary that there was never a real sense of danger to the situation.

I like zombie movies, though I mostly like the funny kind because I just don’t think zombies are that scary (so far the only thing that really worked in that regard was World War Z [the novel, let’s not talk about the movie]). They’re dumb and slow and mostly it looks just really weird when people get surprised and overpowered by them. So, yeah, scary zombies are hard to pull off. And Dawn of the Dead really didn’t work for me in that regard.

If the zombies don’t scare you, though, what you’re left with is pretty much this bunch of people moving into a new place in a rather bad neighborhood. It’s got a bit of a Robinson Crusoe-y vibe and honestly that’s not too interesting to me.

At least I did like the characters. Well, except Stephen maybe. He was a bit of an ass. Roger and Peter were fun and definitely the emotional center of the film. [And again a black man gets to be the most competent dude. Well done, Romero.] Fran was pretty interesting, too. She insists on being involved every time the men try to make decisions without her. And they acknowledge her insistence – to then make the decisions without her after all and treat her like a little flower. I could understand her frustration and I thought it was an interesting approach to her character, showing the effects of labelling: If you treat somebody like their helpless, they can be as competent as they want, you will leave them helpless. [But I do think I’m overinterpreting the hell out of this here.]

The soundtrack was partly really cool and I was rather flashed when I recognized one bit of it from the Gorillaz’ Demon Days album. But the other part was just very cheap and 70s and didn’t work that well for me.

The most entertaining thing about it were the various people they found to be zombies, though. It was fun to see some of the weirdness walking around there.

Summarizing: Okay, but leaves me a bit stumped as to its classicness.