A horror Masterpiece that equals the original

Rating: 10/10 (20 June 2008)

This is the age of the Remake. I don't know exactly when it started but remaking a classic movie seems to be the hip trend in Hollywood these days. Tragically most of the remakes have sucked royally, some even stain the legacy of the originals. Dawn of the dead (2004) is a fine example of how to do a kick ass remake! Not only do we have a good remake of a classic horror film, but we have a horror classic in it's own right.
I saw an interview with the director Zach Snyder who said something I thought was brilliant about doing the Dawn of the dead remake; "The Original is a classic, so I didn't want to do anything to step on the toes of that, so we took the basic premise of a bunch of people holed up in a mall during a zombie apocalypse and wrote a story around that". I thought that was very smart & thoughtful cause what he ended up doing was taking the concepts from the original and making a movie that would stand on it's own feet, and not be seen as something that was trying to imitate the original.
I think this is arguably the best zombie movie ever made, because for once we finally see a zombie movie that shows the horror of a zombie apocalypse from the very beginning. The very first few minutes of the movie are great because it seems like just another day, but you can see the unsettling signs that something bad is about to happen. You really feel like this is the calm before the storm, then suddenly all F*****g hell breaks loose! The little girl walking into the bed room all messed up is so shocking. The action grabs you by the throat, the suspense doesn't let up, there is always a sense of terror around the corner. What also gets me is the humor, there are moments that are really funny. When the characters say something humorous you really do laugh cause it just comes across as so casual and like something that my friends would say. The characters came across as real people, They all gave pretty convincing & genuine performances.
What make this film so bad ass are the zombies. I know purists insist that slow moving zombies are better and more realistic, put that's so traditional & normal from every classic zombie film. This movie has Zombies that are fast! Snyder described it perfectly, when the zombies see food they go after it! their like wild carnivorous animals and that makes this film so scary. Face it, slow zombies are weak and you can get away from them, hell you could take on three of them with no problem. But you couldn't get away or take on the zombies in this film. They also looked very realistic, they looked dead, look at the Dawn of the dead special feature where they explain how they did the zombie make up. The make-up for the zombies was magnificent and intelligently thought out.
As amazing and as hard to believe as it sounds, Dawn of the Dead (2004) stands side by side with Dawn of the dead (1978) as classic horror films. As revolutionary & classic the original was to it's era, this remake does the same with our generation. I left the theater thinking "Now that's how you make a Zombie movie"