WHY GEORGE A ROMEROS
DAY
OF THE DEAD
IS THE BEST FILM EVER
MADE
by JS ADAMS
I saw this film back in the late 1980’s in my teens. Back then we lived in a archaic
society: devoid of mobile phones, internet and blue ray. Back then, all we had
was the one telephone in the hall and a lot of arguments about the phone bill. Back
then it was an England struggling with 80's music and fallout from Chernobyl,
the fall of the Berlin wall and Gorbachev. It was also the time of video home
systems and top loaders that chewed up cassette tapes.
As a young kid growing up
in my town, there wasn’t really much to do for fun but there was video stores
and I used to spend hours and hours looking round them for decent movies to
watch. It was a bit like Russian roulette hiring a decent film out of those places
but my older brother had turned me on to horror flicks and by chance I spotted
Day of the Dead lingering there on the red plastic moulded shelves. The cover
was literally a wall of zombie faces and I think I may have put it back and
chosen something else but I kept coming back to it and eventually gave it a
whirl, through my mothers VHS top loader. I’m glad I did because now I can share
with you all, why Day of the Dead is the best
film ever made.
Putting things in perspective, I had not
seen the previous Romero Zombie films. Like I said it was a time of video,
which meant censorship was pretty fucked up and you were lucky if you got to
see those other zombie flix, you only got to see them if were part of some underground
cult called movie Pirates, you may have heard them on Tv: they of course were
heard to have fire in their eyes and supported terrorist organisations and
prayed to Satan or something like that. So yeah, it was the time of the Video
Nasty. Tapes deemed too gruesome to watch in the UK and thus made illegal.
So I
guess with all that against you, it was pretty difficult to get a horror flick
made let alone shown anywhere and by that stigma it was surprising this film is
as good as it actually is. In fact it is a masterpiece. Of his zombie trilogy,
Romero is said to have favoured this film the most but unfortunately his fans
and critics disagreed. But fuck them. I guess they wanted more blood, more
action, more gore and compared to its former, more gorier action packed
instalment, Dawn of the Dead I can
see why. But as a director Romero had
evolved a hell of a lot since Dawn of the
Dead and he wanted his next instalment to step up a level, he wanted Day of the Dead to be his equivalent of
the epic, Gone with the Wind.
However, with
budget constraints (cut to half, a mere 3.5million) the end result is never the
less a great attribute to the forces working against it. Day of the Dead is not Dawn
of the Dead, no more than Dawn of the
Dead is Night of the Living Dead.
But perhaps Day has more in common
with Night than anything else: Both
movies are character driven pieces, with strong delivery and little reliance on
gore and more notably they share the same themes of tensions between groups, a
clash of ethos ensues, much like in left and Right wing Politics unwilling to
cooperate under duress.
So right off the bat, Day of the Dead dares to be different from the moulds it was
already created. Straight away you are pulled into the world of the three
characters you basically want to give a shit about: Sarah, Bill and John. Sarah, or (Dr Sarah Bowman) is the Sigourney
Weaver of the piece, is the head strong brave and frustrated scientist who at
heart is an idealist wanting to make a difference in this strange and dark
world marked by the walking dead.
She’s the first character we are introduced
to as the screen fades from black to the clinical dingy white walls of an empty
square room without doors or windows, where Sarah lies slumped against the far
wall. This could be Guantanamo Bay for all we know. She then awakens from here
slumber or meditative state and regards the calendar on the wall opposite. The
only item in the room. She approaches it and admires the picture attached to
it: fields of pumpkins growing in the sun, while barely visible in the
background are the silhouettes of three people, what looks like mother, father
and child or you could say this might be the main characters Sarah, Bill and
John. The calendar is marked with ‘X’s covering the days of her imprisonment.
The date is October the 31st. Halloween. Perhaps a nod to that other
auteur horror contemporary, John Carpenter.
But for all the blood lusting hoards of
fans out there, sitting there scratching their heads and wondering why any of this
has to do with the movie, the wall with the calendar suddenly bursts open with
a multitude of zombie rotten hands all grasping for Sarah who screams. But of
course this is all just a bad dream. Time to return to the real world, where
Sarah is living in a waking nightmare. The world of the walking dead. Brilliant
!
She awakens back on the chopper by her
companions Bill and John and her wanna be boyfriend Private Miguel Salazar,
searching 100 miles up and down the coastal regions for any signs of life
beyond the land of the dead. Already worn down to the knuckle, these characters
are strung out on empty, holding onto the last remnants of humanity and
clinging to hope. With that in mind, they set the chopper down in Fort Myers,
Florida, which for all intensive purposes could be Miami, or the Florida Keys
with its palm tree lined promenades and white plank buildings but now it is
home to rogue alligators and burnt out Datsons and Fords, while dollar bills
blow about in the breeze. Private Miguel Salazar joins Sarah on a reluctant recce for
survivors, while chopper pilot John and Radio Op Bill keep the blades turning. The
private gets on the bull horn: ‘Hellooo? Is
there anyone there ? Hellooo ?’ He
hollers, but there is nobody but the wind to answer his calls, that and the
rising tide of moans and groans emanating from this city of the dead. ‘Hellooo? Is there anyone there ? Helloooo ?’
Romero pans his cameras over the this dead
city, its empty cinemas and abandoned vehicles, overturned trash bins and an
awesome shot of a newspaper facedown that blows over and reveals the headlines
THE DEAD WALK ! ‘Hello? Is there anyone
there ? Hello ?’ Finally the camera rests on the sun beaten road, strewn
with rubbish, a partially covered a manhole, then ominous footsteps, as the shadow
of a figure shuffles into shot. Our first offering by make up artist Tom Savini
and his crew: an awesome animatronic zombie, missing most of his lower jaw by a
suspected shotgun blast, followed by the movies title. The Day of the Dead has now arrived.
Soon every corpse within breathing distance
is coming out of the woodwork and our protagonists realise that The Florida
Keys aint what it used to be and hi-tail it back to their not so hidden
underground fortress high up in the hills, an 14mile underground bunker, a
missile silo or storage and records facility. Here we have a microcosm of the
USA, where the military, science and civilian worlds collide head on. With a
complement barely covering 12 military and civilian personal, tensions between
grunt and intellectualism fight it out from numerous squabbles and bickering to
all out war. We are seeing the last
stand of humanity and yet the same old bullshit is preserved in every colourful
detail resulting in some of the films most memorable cinematic moments as
Captain Rhodes faces off with Sarah and threatens to shoot her if she walks out
on one of his dictatorial committee meetings. ‘I told you to get back in your
chair lady’
Tyrant villain
of the piece, Captain Rhodes – played by Joseph Pilatoa
was in reality the bi-polar opposite of his character – a conscientious
objector at heart, almost fled to Canada to avoid the call up for the Vietnam
war and like many teens of his time were caught up in the anti-war
demonstrations that besieged the American military.
All in all, you just gotta see this film. Its AWSUM.
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