Dawn of the Dead=Mindless Zombie Fun!

Last summer’s 28 Days Later appears to have breathed fresh life (so to speak) into one of the most peculiar genres of movies ever invented—the zombie flick. There’s no escaping the enduring appeal of a movie featuring a randomly picked band of human survivors matching wits with a carnivorous horde of mindless yet relentless dead folks.

Unlike most movie villains and monsters, there’s really no need to explore the motives of the zombie. It is only a voracious appetite for human flesh that keeps them going to work every day and for moviemaking purposes, that’s enough.

The latest entry in the walking dead sweepstakes is the new remake of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. The new version is directed by Zack Snyder and is released on the 25th anniversary of the original.

Dawn of the Dead starts with a bang as nurse Ana Clark (Sarah Polley) comes home from her night shift at the hospital just in time to find that her entire neighborhood has been infected with a deadly virus that turns its victims into bloodthirsty zombies. She escapes from suburbia but wrecks her car in the woods. Fortunately she meets some other survivors including a cop named Kenneth (Ving Rhames) and the group decides to break into a nearby mall for safety.

Once the survivors get over their initial horror at being trapped inside a mall by thousands of roaming zombies, they settle into their new digs rather nicely. The mall’s bar serves as a meeting place for the group when they are not sunbathing on the roof watching Andy from Andy’s Gun Shop across the street blow the heads off of random zombies.

Eventually the group decides to make their escape from the mall to see if there is anyplace left where a human can relax without fear of being a zombie snack. It’s useless to quibble with zombie movie logic, but didn’t that mall have any radios or cell phones with which they could have tried to communicate with the outside world before leaving its safety?

For good old jump-out-of-your-seat frights, Dawn of the Dead is a scarier ride than 28 Days Later, although the plot and the acting are slightly inferior. There are also plenty of twists on the tried and true zombie theme that I will not go into detail about so as not to spoil the surprises (two words: zombie baby). The new movie could’ve done more to explain the zombie explosion (virus? chemical warfare?), but that’s a minor complaint. Like the original 1979 Dawn of the Dead, the remake gets good mileage from black humor and from the mall setting (a Muzak version of “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” is playing in the background of one scene).

Both 28 Days Later and the new Dawn of the Dead explore the notion that these are not your parents’ stiff-limbed, slow moving zombies. Their newly discovered quickness helps the action and removes the necessity of a sprained ankle for the zombies to catch up with their victim. While the new version of Dawn of the Dead retains many of the great qualities of the Romero original, it lacks one of my favorite components of the first movie: The zombies’ verbal desire for their favorite entrée, “Brains, brains!”

Dawn of the Dead is rated R for pervasive strong horror violence and gore, language and sexuality. It is currently playing at Regal Cinemas in Boone.