"They're us, that's all. When there's no more room in hell..."
Summary:
The undead plague that swept through rural Pennsylvania in Night of the Living Dead has spread like wildfire in the close confines of Philadelphia. As the city tears itself apart, Stephen, the weather chopper pilot for a Philadelphia television station, plans to steal the helicopter and escape to Canada. His girlfriend Francine, who also works at the station, plans to go with him, as does his friend Roger, a SWAT officer. Just before the group plans to leave, Roger convinces Peter, another SWAT team member, to join them. The group eventually works its way to the material h[e]aven of a suburban shopping mall, but as the undead mass around the mall and the last remnants of society crumble on live TV, some in the group become enamored with their material surroundings while others begin to see their adopted home as an excess-ridden prison.
Starring:
David Emge as Stephen, Francine's boyfriend and the traffic helicopter pilot for Philadelphia's WGON station who masterminds the group's escape from Philly. Though a capable pilot, he proves unreliable as a soldier, a fact that he is reminded of (directly and indirectly) by Peter and Roger throughout the film. Stephen eventually becomes so attached to the trappings of wealth provided by the mall in which he has taken refuge that he begins an ill-advised gun battle with a biker gang in order to protect "his" belongings.
Ken Foree as Peter, a SWAT team member who befriends Roger after gunning down a man in Roger's unit who had gone berserk. Peter is invited to join Stephen's group, and provides a level-headed (though sometimes aggressive) professionalism and leadership that the group sorely needs. Though his feelings regarding Stephen range from amusement to annoyance to open hostility, Peter takes and instant liking to Roger, and the two former cops team up for most of the movie's early action.
Scott Reiniger as Roger, another SWAT team member who decides to accept his friend Stephen's offer to flee the city after his unit's raid on a tenement building shows him just how close to the brink the city really is. Roger is very capable but also very excitable, and teams up with Peter to clear and camouflage a suburban mall for use as the group's sanctuary.
Gaylen Ross as Francine, a producer at WGON and Stephen's girlfriend. Although strong and confident at times, Francine proves disturbingly helpless at times, particularly when confronted by the undead. But although she, like her boyfriend, is not a good soldier, her flight lessons with Stephen prove invaluable when the mall's defenses are eventually breached.
The sequel to Robert Romero's 1968 film Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead picks up where Night left off, but on a grander scale. The film is laced with social commentary, from the racial and cultural gulfs that combine with the undead to rip Philadelphia apart to the consumerism that leads the dead to drift back to a shopping mall and the living to still place value in the material wealth of a society that has crumbled. But it still retains the strong characters that made Night so successful as a film, while further exploring zombitude (for lack of a better word): the idea that the undead retain some of their memories, even if those memories are absorbed into instinct-ish behavior, is new to Dawn, and explored at length later in Day of the Dead.
The primary cast has been pared down in the second installment, as only four characters could truly be called "primary." Roger and Peter's SWAT units start the film off with a bang, and the two buddy up pretty quickly after the horrors they see together. Stephen and Francine remind me of basically every cinematic broken marriage I've ever seen, and both prove frustratingly useless at times even though both are extremely useful at other times. I want to like Francine, but most of the time I can't. I don't want to like Stephen, but sometimes I do. I respect the hell out of Peter. And I absolutely love Roger. But they're all great characters for the most part (I just can't get past some of Francine's ridiculously overblown helplessness), even when I'm occasionally rooting against some of them.
Joining the main characters are a host of secondary characters, most notably the masses of zombies that pursue the primary characters throughout the film and the biker gang that eventually breaks into the mall and spoils the group's capitalistic utopia once and for all. One of the strongest points of Dawn is that the conflicts between living and dead actually prove less damning for humanity than the many conflicts between living and living. The people of Dawn of the Dead, as a whole, are unable to let go of their lust for wealth or their racial prejudices, and as the regulating branches of modern society crumble, these flaws prevent humanity from rallying together against the undead and instead serve to incite violence between those who should be banding together in the face of annihilation. The criticism is nuanced and pointed despite being presented in a genre that, seemingly, has all the subtlety of a sledgehammer to the [hopefully undead] head.
Although Dawn, like Night, was cheaply produced, the sights and sounds of the second film leap far beyond those in the first. The soundtrack, at least in the American release, is absolutely full of generic muzak-style tunes that have, in some cases, become iconic within the zombie and horror genres. Though this approach leads to much of the music (intentionally) bleeding together, the effect is to replicate the monotony of a mall experience that has stretched into days, weeks, and maybe even months. The make-up work is heavily influenced by horror comics, resulting in a blue-gray hue to the faces of the undead and almost comically vibrant red splatter. Admittedly, I'm not a fan of the approach; I think the work that make-up artist Tom Savini (who, incidentally, was against the bright red blood) did on Day of the Dead was vastly superior to the work he did on Dawn. But the grays and reds certainly give Dawn of the Dead a unique feel, and many a character's demise (living or undead) in the film is rendered in gruesome detail that still holds up well today.
Put simply, Dawn of the Dead is the best of Romero's Dead series, and very likely the best zombie film to date. It is the most heavily referenced, revered, imitated, and parodied zombie film on the planet. Although it is significantly gorier than it's predecessor, the blood and guts never supplant the plot, and that plot is poignant on the micro level (love, loss, friendship, infighting─all that good stuff) and powerful on the macro level (society as too splintered and avaricious to save itself). Put even simpler, you owe it to yourself to watch Dawn of the Dead if you are a budding movie buff of any ilk; and if you're a budding zombie movie buff, you need to watch this film yesterday.
5.0/5.0
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