To give you an overall idea of what the movie is like, I’ll put it this way: imagine a bunch of college kids with cameras  and an alcoholic professor with a British accent caught in the middle of a zombie apocalypse, making their way through the country roads, finding a safe spot to rest in.

I can honestly say this is one of my favorite zombie movies ever. I love the fact that the producer has ripped out a page from The Blair Witch Project scenario (figuratively speaking) and added to his own. By saying that I’m referring to the style in which the movie is shot – as if it was made with hand-held cameras.

Now, I don’t want to give you out any spoilers or anything, but here’s a hint: as the movie gets pass the 1 hour mark, it gets even better (or at least I think so)! They arrive to a huge mansion (or, as in the movie it was called, “fortress“) where really juicy parts start happening. Although, whats interesting is the fact that there’s barely any humor in the movie. Sure, it’s a zombie apocalypse and all of your loved ones are either dead or dying, but nearly all of the zombie/horror movies have a little bit of laughs in them (not referring to Zombieland or Shaun of the Dead). In a way it’s a serious movie and what Debra (the girl who sometimes speaks as the narrator) mentions during the movie makes you wonder (or at least got me). Lines such as:

“Are we worth saving? You tell me.”

“You see, in addition to trying to tell you the truth, I am hoping to scare you so that maybe you’ll wake up. Maybe you won’t make any of the same mistakes that we made.“,

“It’s funny. You spend so much time resenting your parents, separating yourself, building your own life. But as soon as the shit hits the fan, the only place you want to go is home.”

“What gets into our heads when we see something horrible? A horrible accident on the highway. Something keeps us from just driving on. Something holds us. But we don’t stop to help. We stop to look.”

Hey, a movie is just a movie, right? Either way, what Debra says in the movie… seems like the truth to me. Watch the movie, maybe you’ll see what I’m talking about.

Production & shooting

Romero announced the film in August 2006 after signing a deal to write and direct it. Filming began its four-week shoot in Toronto on October 19, 2006.

Despite the low production budget, somewhere around 2 million dollars, director George Romero made extensive use of computer-generated imagery, because it allowed him to shoot the film quickly and add the effects later. Also, the film’s style, as if shot with hand-held cameras, necessitated a shift from his usual method of working, which involves filming multiple camera angles and assembling scenes in the editing room.

The film had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), Midnight Madness on September 8, 2007. According to a poll taken by the Toronto Star, it was one of the most anticipated films at the Festival.

Cast

• Michelle Morgan as Debra Moynihan

• Joshua Close as Jason Creed

• Shawn Roberts as Tony Ravello

• Amy Ciupak Lalonde as Tracy Thurman

• Joe Dinicol as Eliot Stone

• Scott Wentworth as Andrew Maxwell

• Philip Riccio as Ridley Wilmott

• Chris Violette as Gordo Thorsen

• Tatiana Maslany as Mary Dexter

The film was principally shot in Bulgaria, with limited shooting in Los Angeles, California. Tyler Bates provided the soundtrack, and screenwriter Jeffrey Reddick has a cameo appearance as an ill-fated police officer.

Comparisons to the original

This film actually bears little resemblance to the original Day of the Dead from 1985. Similarities include the names of several characters, including Dr. Logan, Salazar, Cpt. Rhodes, and Sarah. None of these characters bears any similarity to those of Romero’s original characters other than their names. One character, Bud Crain, is potentially meant to identify with Bub, the trained zombie in Romero’s film. In this new version, Bud is a soldier who becomes a zombie who remains with survivors and aids them in surviving, including a scene where he shoots a gun at one of the main antagonists, just as the zombie Bub does at the conclusion of Romero’s Day.

Another similarity can be found in the new film’s conclusion as the survivors retreat into an underground bunker and missile silo, which is the setting for the original film. The contents of the underground bunker are, however, entirely different from the original.

The film does not follow Romero’s guidelines of what a zombie is at all; instead of a mysterious and unknown force bringing people back from the dead, the ‘zombies’ of this film are humans infected with a virus that makes them attack uninfected humans. When the infection takes control, the individual freezes completely, as the virus fully overwhelms their body. Once changed, the infected inexplicably gain numerous open sores on their faces. Once they are infected, the zombies gain super-human abilities, such as climbing walls, running along the ceiling, and jumping very high. This is very different than Romero’s “slow-moving” zombies and Zack Snyder’s 2004 Dawn of the Dead’s “fast” zombies which can run but at a normal speed for humans. For some reason, contact with fire causes the zombies to disintegrate instantly.

The original Day of the Dead picked up well after the first zombie outbreak; a group of scientists and army personnel believe they might be the only living people left as they have not made contact with any other survivors in weeks. This film begins as the outbreak begins, making it more similar to Night of the Living Dead.

Cast

• Mena Suvari as Sarah Bowman
• Nick Cannon as Salazar
• Michael Welch as Trevor Bowman
• AnnaLynne McCord as Nina
• Stark Sands as Bud Crain
• Matt Rippy as Dr. Logan
• Ian McNeice as D.J. Paul
• Christa Campbell as Mrs. Leitner
• Ving Rhames as Capt. Rhodes

Plot

In 1968, in the Ravenside Military Hospital in a military facility in Pennsylvania, the army loses control of an experiment of a lethal biological weapon that changes the DNA and transforms human beings into zombies. A group of soldiers are sent to the hospital to eliminate the infected staff and interns but private DeLuca steals a test tube with the virus and hides it inside a vacuum flask. He is transformed into a zombie and killed but the vacuum flask falls into the grass.

In the present day, a group of patients in the mental institution Ravenside Memorial Hospital finds the vacuum flask and later when one of them opens the vessel, the culture tube drops on the floor of a bathroom contaminating the group.

Reception

The film has received dominantly negative reviews. One factor stems from the title, as the plot of the film and its depiction of zombies are at odds with those in both the original Day of the Dead and Romero’s Dead series as a whole. Heavy criticism have also been aimed at the film’s acting, special effects, and script.

Plot

An undead apocalypse has ravaged the Earth whilst America’s last surviving humans study them from within an underground military establishment. The survivors in the film are horrified at the prospect that they “are the only ones left”, creating a crisis within human civilization over whether or not the idea of human society should be continued or abandoned. The living characters in the film are made up of three distinctive groups, each of whom have been given a task by the government – but since the government is no longer providing oversight (and may no longer exist) each group is becoming increasingly subject to temptations that go beyond their instructions. The scientists have been ordered to find a resolution to the epidemic but are tempted to violate nature’s boundaries guarding life and death, soldiers who are assigned to protect the doctors appointed to study the zombies but are tempted to enforce fascistic martial law and destroy the specimens in an act of rebellion, and the civilians who are assigned to serve both groups with basic though necessary services like transportation and communication but are tempted to abandon the cause and, instead, live out their last days in reckless abandon.

Cast

• Lori Cardille as Dr. Sarah Bowman
• Terry Alexander as John
• Joe Pilato as Captain Rhodes
• Jarlath Conroy as William McDermott
• Anthony Dileo Jr. as Pvt. Miguel Salazar
• Richard Liberty as Dr. Matthew Logan / “Frankenstein”
• Sherman Howard as Bub, The Zombie
• Gary Howard Klar as Pvt. Steel
• Ralph Marrero as Pvt. Rickles
• John Amplas as Dr. Ted Fisher
• Phillip G. Kellams as Pvt. Miller
• Taso N. Stavrakis as Pvt. Torrez

Production

James Gunn is only partially responsible for the screenplay, despite receiving solo writing credit. After he left the project to concentrate on Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed, both Michael Tolkin and Scott Frank were brought in for rewrites. In a commentary track on the Ultimate Edition DVD for the original Dawn, producer Richard P. Rubenstein explained that Tolkin further developed the characters, while Frank provided some of the bigger and upbeat action sequences.

The mall scenes of the film as well as the rooftop scenes were shot in the Thornhill Square Shopping Centre in Thornhill, Ontario and the rest of the scenes were shot in the Aileen-Willowbrook Neighborhood of Thornhill, Ontario. The set for Ana and Louis’s bedroom was constructed in a backroom of the mall. The mall was defunct, which is the reason the production used it; the movie crew completely renovated the structure, and stocked it with fictitious stores after Starbucks Coffee and numerous other corporations refused to let their names be used  (two exceptions to this are Roots and Panasonic). Most of the mall was demolished shortly after the film was shot. The fictitious stores include a coffeeshop called Hallowed Grounds (a lyric from Johnny Cash’s song “The Man Comes Around,” which was used over the opening credits), and an upscale department store called Gaylen Ross (an in-joke reference to one of the stars of the original 1978 movie).

The first half of the film was shot almost entirely in chronological order, while the final sequences on the boat and island were shot much later and at a different location (Universal Studios Hollywood) than the rest of the movie, after preview audiences objected to the sudden ending of the original print.

Cast

• Sarah Polley - Ana Clark
• Ving Rhames - Kenneth Hall
• Jake Weber – Michael
• Michael Kelly - C.J.
• Kevin Zegers - Terry
• Lindy Booth - Nicole
• Mekhi Phifer -  Andre
• Inna Korobkina - Luda
• Ty Burrell - Steve Markus
• Michael Barry - Bart
• Jayne Eastwood - Norma

Dawn of the Dead was shot over approximately four months, from late 1977 to early 1978, in the Pennsylvania cities of Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Monroeville. Its primary location is set in the Monroeville Mall. The film was made on a relatively modest budget estimated at US$650,000, and was a significant box office success for its time, grossing an estimated $55 million worldwide. Since opening in theaters in 1978, reviews for the film have been nearly unanimously positive.

In addition to three official sequels, the film has spawned numerous parodies and pop culture references. A remake of the movie premiered in the United States on March 19, 2004. Labeled a “re-imagining” of the original film’s concept, several major themes, including the primary setting in a shopping mall, remain essentially the same. Cultural and film historians read significance into the film’s plot, linking it to critiques of large corporations and American consumerism and of the social decadence and excess going on in America during the late 1970s.

Cast

• David Emge as Stephen “Flyboy” Andrews
• Ken Foree as Peter Washington
• Scott H. Reiniger as Roger DeMarco
• Gaylen Ross as Francine Parker
• David Crawford as Dr. James Foster
• David Early as Sidney Berman
• Richard France as Dr. Millard Rausch
• Howard Smith as the TV Commentator
• James A. Baffico as Wooley, Insane SWAT Cop
• Tommy Lafitte as Miguel, The Zombie(uncredited)
• Sharon Ceccatti as Lead Zombie (Nurse)
• Pam Chattfield as Lead Zombie
• Mike Christopher as Lead Zombie (Hare Krishna)

George Romero completed the film on a $114,000 budget, and after a decade of cinematic re-releases, it grossed some $12 million domestically and $30 million internationally. On its release in 1968, Night of the Living Dead was strongly criticized for its explicit content. In 1999, the Library of Congress registered it to the National Film Registry as a film deemed “historically, culturally or aesthetically important”.

Night of the Living Dead had a great impact upon the culture of the Vietnam-era United States, because it is laden with critiques of late-1960s U.S. society; a historian described it as “subversive on many levels”. Although it is not the first zombie film, Night of the Living Dead is the progenitor of the contemporary “zombie apocalypse” sub-genre of horror film, and it influenced the modern pop-culture zombie archetype. Night of the Living Dead (1968), is the first of five Dead films directed by George Romero, and twice has been remade, as Night of the Living Dead (1990 film), directed by Tom Savini, and as Night of the Living Dead 3D (2006).

Influence

Director George Romero revolutionized the horror film genre with Night of the Living Dead; per Almar Haflidason, of the BBC, the film represented “a new dawn in horror film-making”. The film has also effectively redefined the use of the term Zombie. Early zombie films — Victor Halperin’s White Zombie (1932), Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked with a Zombie (1943) — concerned living people enslaved by a Voodoo witch doctor; many were set in the Caribbean.

The film and its successors spawned countless imitators that borrowed elements instituted by Romero: Tombs of the Blind Dead, Zombie, Hell of the Living Dead, The Evil Dead, Night of the Comet, Return of the Living Dead, Night of the Creeps, Braindead, Children of the Living Dead, and the video game series Resident Evil (later adapted as films in 2002, 2004, and 2007), Dead Rising, and House of the Dead. Night of the Living Dead is parodied in films such as Night of the Living Bread and Shaun of the Dead, and in episodes of The Simpsons (“Treehouse of Horror III”, 1992) and South Park (“Pink Eye“, 1997; “Night of the Living Homeless”, 2007). The word zombie is never used, but Romero’s film introduced the theme of zombies as reanimated, flesh-eating cannibals.

Night of the Living Dead ushered in the slasher and splatter film sub-genres. As one film historian points out, horror prior to Romero’s film had mostly involved rubber masks and costumes, cardboard sets, or mysterious figures lurking in the shadows. They were set in locations far removed from rural and suburban America. Romero revealed the power behind exploitation and setting horror in ordinary, unexceptional locations and offered a template for making an “effective and lucrative” film on a “minuscule budget”. Slasher films of the 1970s and 80s such as John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), Sean S. Cunningham’s Friday the 13th (1980), and Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), for example, “owe much to the original Night of the Living Dead“.