Toss up

Rating: Null/10 (20 March 2004)

Okay, to get it out of the way, the original "Dawn" was better, no argument, end of story. But to look at this as an entirely different movie (which was incredibly difficult, but I always try to give a fair chance whenever I see a movie, especially a remake), but again as its own movie, the new "Dawn" wasn't that bad. It was immensely better than most of the new era zombie movies we've been dealing with like Resident Evil and House of the Dead, which were both based on video games and would have been 100 times better if they had let the actual video game creators write the script instead of giving us awful dialogue such as, "So what you're telling us it that we have to shoot them in the head?" Please, it sounds like an eighth grader wrote that.
Sorry. Anyway, what every horror movie needs in order to work is to build strong characterization so that we can feel what they're feeling and truly hope that nothing awful happens to them. For the new "Dawn" I honestly didn't care, most of the time I was silently saying, "Okay, let's drop some of these characters and get moving." Most of the people had no identities at all, such as the slutty blonde and the old man who was trying on the women's shoes. Do you remember their names? Didn't think so.
The only character that I truly had bad feelings for was Matt Frewer's character, "Frank." Solely because I love Matt Frewer and would not be able to bare seeing the man stub his toe. You don't want him to die, especially when they approach him to tell him he's infected, but he was busy talking to his daughter with a smile on his face. "No. . ." Is what I was saying.
The movie wasn't awful, it had some of those obligatory "zombie jumping out of nowhere and making you hop out of your chair a little bit, then you look around to see if anybody saw you do that." Otherwise, the film wasn't scary. It was the same formula; zombies run amok, a group of people unite and isolate themselves, something goes wrong, gotta get out of there, the black character lives. That wasn't a racist remark, it's just something I've noticed with zombie flicks.