Lions and Tigers and Emmitt Smiths-Oh My!!!

Rating: 6/10 (21 March 2005)

Unlike my reaction to most remakes, I was happy when I first heard that they were remaking "Dawn of the Dead", the story is so irresistible that it could be remade ten times and each would still be entertaining. And I was sure they could do a whole lot better than George Romaro's third installment, the awful "Day of the Dead". Seeing the remake did not change my opinion, I found it fun entertainment and better than "Day". But I am hoping for still another remake because while better than "Day", it was not even remotely in the class of "Night" or the first "Dawn". It was about on a par with "Return of the Living Dead". Hopefully Romaro's new "Land of the Living Dead" will be a worthy companion to "Night" and to the original "Dawn"..
The remake started out well and it worked fine as long as Sarah Polley was the central character, but once they got into the mall the wheels fell off and the whole thing became very ordinary. And I was stunned by how bad the editing was with jump cuts and puzzling gaps in the storyline. While these may have been due to production issues, the lazy hack job done on titles and credits makes the post-production folks the most likely suspects.
The biggest controversy is a shuffling zombie vs a running zombie. A single shuffling Romero zombie was not particularly dangerous and it was only a crowd of zombies that posed much of a threat. So having a running zombie helped to close the main plot hole in Romero's films-it never made sense that something that slow and stupid could have taken over. But a shuffler is a far more frightening image because zombies are about entropy, a symbol of individual humans and eventually the entire human order breaking down. Slow rot that eats away everything human in everyone else until it devours you alive. Barely ambulatory supports this fear far better than zombies that run like Emmitt Smith.
I did generally enjoy this movie. But the comments on IMDb are far too often of the "best ever" "worst ever" type; useless to the prospective viewer. So for the benefit of those viewers I will again say that while the remake doesn't suck, it is extremely flawed and is only a pale shadow of the original. It is silly for us to accept that something this imperfect is anywhere near the best that can be expected from modern horror-especially since the illogic of such a belief is exposed by many classic horror movies, which create better horror and more suspense in subtle ways that does not need to overwhelm us to throughly scare us. So if someone calls this effort a classic, you can safely assume that they have not seen much else that the genre has to offer, or that they are as brain-dead as a zombie (but maybe not as brain-dead as those, and there are some out there, who thought "Day of the Dead" was the best of Romaro's trilogy).