This is how remakes SHOULD be made!

Rating: 10/10 (18 November 2007)

One of the few remakes of recent years that is actually worth watching, Zack Snyder's Dawn Of The Dead takes the basic plot from George Romero's 1978 original, in which survivors of a zombie outbreak barricade themselves in an abandoned mall, and strips away the social commentary whilst cranking up the action, delivering a white-knuckle ride of flesh-eating terror.
A nerve-shredding pre-titles sequence see Ana (Sarah Polly), a pretty nurse, narrowly escaping with her life after her neighbourhood is rapidly over-run by the living dead: nasty, snarling, nightmarish creatures that, unlike in Romero's movie, can run like the clappers. All around her, chaos is erupting as the zombies rapidly increase in numbers, and Sarah eventually loses control of her car and crashes into a tree. Cut to black. Cue titles...
I haven't seen such a great opening to a film since Raiders of the Lost Ark!
And what follows is just as intense. The remainder of the film sees Sarah team up with a tough cop (Ving Rhames), a TV salesman (Jake Weber), and a young couple expecting their first child (Mekhi Phifer and Inna Korobkina), who are travelling to the relative safety of a nearby mall. But once in the sprawling shopping centre, the group realises that zombies are not the only threat to their safety: the white trash security guards that patrol the building are not too keen on sharing their sanctuary with outsiders.
Very gory, and damn scary (a scene in a pitch black underground car-park being my favourite creepy moment), with characters that are developed enough for us to care about, Dawn Of The Dead is a triumph. Its narrative contains enough differences from the original to make it constantly surprising, the special effects are top notch, with truly unsettling zombies and some disgustingly realistic gore, and the cast are utterly convincing as the terrified survivors of a nightmarish apocalypse.
I first saw this film at a late-night screening in my local multiplex. Afterwards, nerves extremely jangled, I had to walk through a nearby shopping centre in order to get to my car, which was parked in a large and quite poorly lit car-park.
I'm not ashamed to say that I've never moved so fast in my life!