The original 1978 horror splatter-comedy Dawn of the Dead had an idea that played like cast-iron satire: zombies invading a mall. The one good exchange from that film is repeated in Zack Snyder's single-minded scare-tactic remake: when someone asks why the zombies congregate there, the response is: "Memory, maybe. Instinct.''
Otherwise, Snyder's blood feast is strictly by the numbers: this second-rater could be the world's most expensive Troma film. That makes sense: the screenwriter for the remake, James Gunn, also banged out Tromeo and Juliet (1996), that no-budget B-movie-studio's seminal film (that is, if the word seminal can be appended to Troma). Still, this is the first studio picture to exhibit the tacky Troma influence, which means -- -- something, like the end of shame in Western civilization, perhaps. However, since Dawn of the Dead doubtless thinks of itself as a re-imagining rather than a remake, the concept of shame was probably obliterated the moment the script got a green light from Universal.
The Dead -- with apologies to James Joyce -- notches its frights early, before the introduction of the, excuse the euphemism, characters. The first undead we see is a little girl with part of her face rotted away, who goes right for her dad's neck. The mother, Ana (Sarah Polley), barely escapes the house intact and drives away through an apocalyptic version of the dozy suburban tract neighborhood she had come home to the night before. The graphic point of zombielike conformity was made earlier with an overhead shot of the neighborhood.
PHOTO COURTESY OF UNIVERSAL
In such instances, Dead establishes its scariness with an efficiently tactless facelessness -- that is, if the use of the word faceless doesn't provoke a defamation of character suit from the zombie lobby, apparently based in Toronto. That's where this movie was obviously shot, despite shabby attempts to convince audiences that it is set in Milwaukee.
Milwaukee, the home of the bubbler, is transformed into the subdivision of the living dead. Ana runs into Kenneth (Ving Rhames), a uniformed cop, who makes her speak. It's one of the few ways to tell the zombies from the living -- though with dialogue like this, who's better off? They're joined by Michael (Jake Weber), Andre (Mekhi Phifer) and his very pregnant wife, Luda (Inna Korobkina). They make their way to the Crossroad Mall, where a handful of security guards led by the suspicious C. J. (Michael Kelly) have taken up residence.
C. J.'s intolerance is evident early, when he calls Andre "Shaq.'' His ragtag minimum-wage squad is determined to keep the zombies out, especially once Ana figures out that the life-free scourge is spread from a zombie bite. Isn't it always funny that people in zombie movies have never seen zombie movies, so they have no information whatsoever?
Dead does an adequate job of building up the tension early, but the traces of humor with which the original writer-director, George A. Romero, slathered the first version weren't nearly as ham-fisted as those found in the current one. The reimaginers of Dead have to cope with being compared with a classic, while Romero had to deal with a much more horrendous thought: making a sequel to a legitimate classic, 1968's spartan and terrifying Night of the Living Dead. (Romero's genius came from never explaining why the zombie infection plagued Pittsburgh, a plot device this new version keeps.)
The eventual video game is bound to be a lot more fun -- and less slowed down by bad dialogue -- than this Dead.
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