Dreadful Dawn

Rating: 3/10 (21 March 2004)

I'm not completely against remakes. They can be good, like The Thing or The Fly, or they can be OK, like last year's Texas Chainsaw. This one, Dawn of the Dead 2004, is one of the most unholy God-awful piece of s**t remakes I've ever seen. None of the humor, social commentary, sense of dread or awe or loneliness that made the original so great is present here. The characters are the kind of stupid idiots usually found in a Friday the 13th film, who go wandering off by themselves to investigate noises totally unarmed. It takes them way too long to realize how zomibifaction (?) is spread, and they fail to take simple obvious precautions that anyone would take. The mall fails to feel like a real place, partly because we never get a sense of its size like we did in the original. This is really just an inferior version of 28 Days Later set in a mall.
I'm giving this 3 out of 10. I'll give it higher than a 1 just for the scenes involving Andy (the rooftop neighbor) which are clever and give us some trace of the original's charm. Plus, the early scenes where everything starts to go to hell are done well. Otherwise, this stinking zombie pile smells even worse than Resident Evil, and that's pretty bad.