Day of the Dead (1985) - film review

Human civilization is virtually at an end, obliterated by a mysterious plague that is animating the dead, turning them into flesh-eating zombies with disgusting table manners.  A small group of scientists and military men are holed up in a former missile silo, hoping to come up with a way to defeat the zombies and save the world.  Tensions between the scientists and the soldiers are running high as vital supplies begin to run low, whilst the experiments have so far failed to deliver any useful outcome.   Captain Rhodes, the increasingly neurotic leader of the military side of things, is growing impatient, despite the progress made by chief scientist Dr Logan to understand the zombification process.   When Rhodes discovers that Logan has been feeding the dead bodies of his men to one of the captured zombies in an attempt to tame him, he executes the scientist and orders an immediate evacuation of the base.  The remaining scientists will have to take their chances with the zombies who, by this stage, are very, very hungry...

The third viciously blood-soaked instalment in George A. Romero’s classic Dead Trilogy may lack the coherence, intensity and darkly astute political subtext of its predecessors but it manages to be an enjoyable spectacle of visceral gore-splattered nastiness which no aficionado of the horror genre can afford to miss.  Despite the very mixed reviews the film received on its initial release, Day of the Dead is highly regarded today and provides a respectable conclusion to Romero’s groundbreaking trilogy of zombie films.

Romero initially had ambitious plans for this film but these had to be massively scaled back when he only managed to secure half of the budget he had hoped for.  Despite this, Day of the Dead still has an epic feel and features some of the most convincing special effects of any horror film up until this time.  Definitely not for the faint-hearted are the scenes in which internal organs spew out of chest cavities, making a gruesome pile of offal on the floor,  and you definitely do not want to be eating your liver and onions when the zombies begin ripping the heads, arms and legs off their victims before chewing hungrily on their tasty blood-dripping viscera.  If all this doesn’t put you off eating sausages for the rest of your life nothing will.

Romero’s direction is as inspired and meticulous as in the previous two Dead films and the only real let down is the screenplay, which in unevenly paced and fails to make any of the characters remotely sympathetic.  The first third of the film is basically just a slanging match, with two groups of people hurling obscenities at each other for what seems like an eternity, almost as if they were training for a career in politics.  You can hardly wait for the zombies to turn up and rescue us from this ****ing tedious ****ing tirade of ****ing abuse.  Indeed, so antipathetic are the human characters that it is much easier to side with the zombies.  This may have been a deliberate ironic twist – the last surviving humans lose their last vestiges of humanity and end up looking like career politicians just as we begin to see a human side to the zombies – but it weakens the dramatic tension if the audience cannot identify with any of the main characters.  The main reason why Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead are so compelling is because we want the human characters to survive.  In Day of the Dead, we just don’t care.  In fact, we can hardly wait to see the back (or rather the torn out viscera) of them.

The relative poor performance of Day of the Dead at the American box office marked the beginning of a dramatic decline in Romero’s career.  Two decades later, the director made a remarkable come-back when he launched his second trilogy of zombie films.  This began with Land of the Dead, a film which was reviled by some critics and praised by others, but which proved to be a major box office success.   George A. Romero is not the only director to have made zombie films but somehow his zombie films are the only ones that really matter.  The rest are bloodless imitations.  Romero made the concept of the zombie a horrifyingly realistic prospect, ten times scarier than the previous Gothic horror icons, and rocket-fuel for your worst nightmares.  Lovely.

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

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