Dawn of the Dead (1978, George A. Romero) (Patreon)

77/100

Second viewing, last seen 2003. Only the mindless-consumer metaphor had really stuck with me, and I briefly wondered, as I sat down, just how Romero pulls this one off, since there's no way that shots of zombies staggering around the mall could sustain interest for two-plus hours, however hilariously incongruous their antics might be. Turns out the subtext is a lot messier than I'd remembered (or quite possibly than I'd recognized at the time—can't be sure, as I didn't write anything then). Night of the Living Dead's ghouls were unequivocally terrifying, sympathetic only insofar as some of them had previously been still-living characters' loved ones; that film is pure nightmare fuel, albeit with a pointed racial element (intended or not) courtesy of Duane Jones being cast in the lead role. Shifting the action from an isolated farmhouse to an enormous goods warehouse inevitably alters the symbolic relationship between the hungry masses and the barricaded few. There's considerable cognitive dissonance in the way that Dawn of the Dead treats its zombies, who simultaneously represent buffoons and the dispossessed; seems like Romero meant to emphasize the former, but it's hard to believe that he was entirely unaware of the latter, given how frequently his quartet engage in what seems like gratuitous...not cruelty, exactly, but just blithe disregard for the dignity of what were once human beings. (It's akin to treating non-mobile corpses callously.) Granted, knowing how much autonomy Romero will later provide his zombies in Land of the Dead—still two years off when last I saw Dawn—may also be influencing my perception here. Still, I'm fascinated by how these contradictory metaphors somehow work remarkably well in tandem.

Even if you completely ignore its sociopolitical message(s), however, Dawn of the Dead is just a superlative low-budget action movie, demonstrating once again Romero's skill at staging tension and coaxing low-key, credible performances from actors with decidedly limited experience and (in most cases) relatively little apparent raw talent. Reiniger occasionally pushes Roger's yahoo-isms too far into broad comedy for my taste, but that's a quibble—generally speaking, all four leads are light years stronger than one might reasonably expect from such a down-and-dirty production; one need only look at Ken Foree's performance in From Beyond to see how they might have fared without Romero's firm hand guiding them. (Okay, yes, Gordon's working in a very different register that encourages more, shall we say, flamboyance. Even calibrating for that, though, Foree just seems orders of magnitude more amateurish as Bubba.) I'm also impressed by how much attention the film pays to stray details like the notes posted all over the airport hangar, e.g. "Claus Plumer: Waited as long as I could—Big[?] and I are going to try for Akron. Love, Gerta." My main issue with Dawn is its comparatively weak ending, by which I mean both the invasion of Savini's motorcycle gang—suddenly we're watching Assault on J.C. Penney 13, which is about as welcome as zombies showing up for the last 15 minutes of Carpenter's film would be—and the cheesy, almost proto-'80s resolution of Peter's final decision (though the way that it pivots off of Night's epilogue vis-à-vis race in America does offer food for thought). As belated, arguably unnecessary sequels go, however, precious few can beat it.