Good Ride, Faithful Remake -- POSSIBLE SPOILERS

Rating: Null/10 (5 November 2004)

Zombie horror has been around for much longer than most moviegoers might imagine, beginning with the 1920's fiction of August Derleth and William Seabrook, whose ripping tales of voodoo gone awry populated the pulp magazines of their day. The pulp has long disappeared, but not the concept, which survived to a healthy film career, starting in the 1960's. Cultural psychologists might draw parallels between the proliferation of this theme and world events, social upheaval, and real human atrocity, but most horror film buffs would agree that there is a perennial attraction in the genre to the "scorched-earth" scenario of a world gone mad in which all things are turned upside down, inverted, and--ultimately--perverted. The structure of human society, interpersonal relations, and core values get a massive flaying when your neighbor, your husband, your children turn on you with the intent of consuming your living flesh. The best horror films play directly to the eternally taboo subjects, those which we keep under the tightest wraps, giving us the chance to explore them vicariously, without the risk of actual threat. There is a catharsis in throwing everything away for a time, in entering a world where the rules have been re-written, and all the things you worry about in your day-to-day life are gone, replaced by the immediacy of a feral and all-too-human need to survive.
"Dawn Of The Dead" is a fairly respectful re-telling of the plot from its eponymous 1978 predecessor, in which a group of survivors, stranded in a shopping mall, attempt to survive the onslaught of the carnivorous hordes outside as well as the menace within, represented by the tendency of those living wounded to convert upon death. The special effects have been updated, similar to Tom Savini's 1990's treatment of Dawn's predecessor, "Night Of The Living Dead", and the requisite gore is laid on equally thickly. I thought about counting how many zombie heads are splattered or perhaps calculating how many gallons of imitation blood were used in production, but such an effort would prove futile. Suffice it to say, the splatter lives up to the "Dead" legacy.
Mood is all-important in this genre, and director Zack Snyder makes some interesting and effective choices. The riskiest is in the title sequence, over which we've come to expect either the bombast of metal, the soulless trance of techno, or dark, Trent-Reznorish psycho-with-a-multi-tracker throb. Snyder, however, chooses to use, of all things, Johnny Cash's "The Man Comes Around" and the effect is both unsettling and ultimately satisfying. Cash's portentous, apocalyptic lyric over the flash-cut images of both the film's zombies along with random, bizarre news footage creates a mix which informs us that whatever we were expecting isn't necessarily what we're going to get. Aside from the standard incidental-music cues (Ana's digital bedroom clock flicks it's numbers with the requisite and impossible bass chunng) most of the other music choices bear this promise out.
"Dawn's" main protagonists are: Ana (Sarah Polley), a nurse whose young daughter makes a surprise morning visit, setting the story rolling; Kenneth (Ving Rhames), the cop who's trying to get to the next town to save his brother; and Michael (Jake Weber), the former Best Buy television salesman who seems almost amused to discover his until-now-dormant leadership ability in the course of trying to save the few living souls he's been thrown in with. For a zombie movie, there is surprisingly good acting throughout. Rhames, Polley, and especially Weber (who so efficiently played the womanizing co-worker on the HBO series "The Mind Of The Married Man") convey much more complexity than any of the actors in the original, and the believability factor created by their performances greatly enhances the creeping dread. It's as if someone finally noticed that if you actually care about flesh and blood characters, you might not giggle so comfortably when they get eviscerated.
Our little group takes refuge in a virtually empty shopping mall, where they encounter only a few members of the cleaning crew (Weber's shirt gets fairly bloody in this little exchange) and mall security, who immediately attempt to establish alpha-male dominance. The leader of this group of guards is played admirably by Kevin Zegers, who manages to embody petty authority in every gesture. His transformation as the film progresses is one of the most interesting and satisfying aspects of the overall ensemble piece, and he is--quite deservedly--given the best ending line of the film. A subplot involving a husband (Mekhi Phifer) with his oh-so-pregnant wife feels oddly flat, until its ultimate conclusion provides one of the ickier moments of the many gross-outs this movie has to offer. Yes, there are some plot holes, but they don't necessarily spoil the fun.
Snyder keeps the pace up, and his use of continued story through the closing credits is admirable, concluding his tale using the jumpy, hand-held reality-TV camera-work to which we've all now become accustomed.
It is a grim world "Dawn Of The Dead" paints for us, and like the best horror films, we leave unnerved, re-entering our daily lives perhaps a little the better for having walked our demons around the block and tucked them neatly back in their beds, knowing that--in the tagline for another early-70's low-budget horror flick, "The Last House On The Left"--it's only a movie, it's only a movie.