Saturday, October 27, 2007

TV Says You Gotta Shoot 'Em in the Head.

Today's movie is:



2004's Dawn of the Dead (As seen in my blog header thingy.)

Starring: Sarah Polley, Ving Rhames, Jake Weber, Mekhi Phifer, Ty Burrell and Matt Frewer. Directed by Zack Snyder (300)

Plot: A nurse, a policeman, a street gang member, his wife, a salesman, and other survivors of a worldwide plague that is producing aggressive, flesh-eating zombies, take refuge in a mega Midwestern shopping mall.

Type of horror: Braaaaaains

Sucky or sweet?: I really, really liked it, which is strange because I'm usually the one bitching the loudest whenever I hear that someone is filming a remake of something. I might even go so far as to say that I liked it better than the first one, which was draggy in parts. Heresy? Maybe, but if you've seen the original you know I'm right (and just for the record, I loved the original.)

I don't wanna get eated: I mentioned in a conversation earlier that zombie movies don't scare me as a rule, because I know it can't happen. If you're dead, you're dead and you ain't coming back. But even I will admit that there were a couple of things in here that made me jump, specifically the part at the beginning when Ana (Sarah Polley) tries to make her escape from her zombified husband and the neighbor kid. Zombies may not bother me, but being chased does. Oh and if you aren't down with gore, you might want to stick with something like This instead. Then again that might be scary too-it's a big machine! And it freezes things! OH NOES!

Highlights: Um, well, I can think of a lot of things, but if I listed all of them, the highlights section would end up looking like a recap, and I got things to do. Alright, I'll narrow it down to 3:

1) Sarah Polley. She was totally believable and totally bad-ass, plus I think she's neat in just about anything, so it stands to reason that I would like her in this as well. Biased? Why yes, yes I am.

2) The music, namely Johnny Cash's "The Man Comes Around" during the opening credits, and the mall-living montage set to Richard Cheese's "Down With the Sickness"-they're the perfect compliment to their respective sequences. At least I thought so, and it's my blog, so there.

3) The celebrity shooting gallery. Ving Rhames' character hangs out on the roof of the mall quite a bit, and he develops a friendship with the guy from the gun shop across the way. They communicate by way of those dry erase boards like they have in diners, using them to chat, play chess, whatnot. Towards the middle of the film, when all of the characters are going a little stir crazy, they come up with a new game: they point out various zombies on the streets below who share a passing resemblance to various famous people, while Ving and Gun-Shop dude pick them off with rifles. It was hilarious and realistic in a warped way (I could see myself playing a game like that, you know, if there was a zombie invasion, which there won't be because it's zombies, doy.)



Where it's at: Braaaaains