A great debut from Snyder!

Rating: 7/10 (8 March 2008)

DotD is not nearly as scary as it is haunting. It masterfully paints a small world from the start, so it shrinks at an alarming rate once the excrement hits the oscillator. The zombies become an overwhelming antagonist, closing in on the survivors fast enough to make you realize they simply postponed their deaths.
The acting is what you would expect. Nothing horrendous, but nothing great. There are some lines here and there that will make you roll your eyes, but nothing that makes you grind your teeth. I like the absence of recognizable actors (with the exception of Ving Rhames and Mehki Phifer, of course) because it adds to the illusion that this kind of nightmare could come true.
My one real gripe with the film is that it is unabashedly violent. It takes any and every opportunity to splatter some gore, and it gets tiresome toward the end. I'm not complaining that it desensitizes the audience (even though it does), just that it looses its coolness after a while.
Dawn of the Dead isn't perfect. It suffers from a lot of nasty Hollywoodisms and abuses just about every horror movie tactic in the book. Spooky sound effects, inhuman screeches, close-ups of bullet casings hitting the floor... (And, of course, everybody become expert marksmen when it comes to head shots.) Still, it succeeds in what it sets out to do: scare the hell out of the audience.