Zombie movies. Lots of “serious” types peek down on them. That’s a shame, because some of them are really excellent films. Dawn of the Insensible, the middle film of George Romero’s “humdrum” trilogy, is a case in point. You want zombies, we got your zombies Correct HERE! You want blood? Guts? Flesh eating? Oh boy, does Dawn of the Listless ever deny!
And then it does something really original - it also delivers drama, spicy characters with realistic delimmas, a smartly crafted fable, and a heavy dose of dead-on social satire. And did I mention that it’s impartial flat-out scary as hell, too?
There is one scene in particular, toward the beginning, that unexcited haunts me - twenty some-odd years after I first saw it. The National Guard has been called in to determined a tenament building. In the basement, they salvage a cage where the listless have been locked away. The simple, unsettling music of Goblin rises on the soundtrack, underscored by a heartbeat-like bass drum. There are the zombies, many in death shrouds, feasting on body parts. Guardsman Peter Washington (Ken Foree) steps into the nightmare with a pistol to dispatch the zombies with bullets to their heads. The whole thing takes on a surreal, hellish texture, like a Bosch painting. Foree’s performance is striking - he is truly IN THE MOMENT, as they say, without a hint of the winking self-awareness we discover in other genre flicks. If the unimaginative really started coming wait on to feed on the living, this is exactly what it be like. This is the toll it would genuine on people trying to grapple with the space.
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Yet, in a design, Dawn of the Lifeless IS self-aware. It knows when to step abet, too, and admit that it’s playing with you. Another scene, of this sort, occurs when we recognize a group of rednecks hunting the shambling corpses as though they were deer. They sip coffee from thermoses, pass sandwiches around, and banter about their accuracy with their rifles. It’s a very droll bit, in allotment because it’s so deadpan.
Those are unbiased two current examples. There is great, mighty more to this film, and almost all of it works beautifully. Even the sometimes obviously grievous budget and gleeful consume of library stock music doesn’t afflict. Romero turns these limitations to his advantage, by making them abet as searing comments on mass media, consumerism, and pop culture.
Performances by David Emge, Scott Reiniger, and Gaylen Ross are salubrious of mention, too. They play exact people in an incredible dwelling, rather than two-dimensional horror-movie characters.
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Dawn of the Stupid schlock as high art - complex, amusing, scary, and sharp. And thank goodness it’s coming aid to DVD, because it’s one worth watching over and over again.
“Shop ’til you descend” takes on literal build in “Dawn of the Insensible”, Splattermeister George Romero’s 1978 magnum opus of the flesh-eating Living Plain. “Dawn” rightly deserves its title as the ‘Mount Everest of Zombie Movies’.
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The Zombie Apocalypse is all George Romero’s fault! And if Grandmaster Romero let the Walking Tiring, out of their tombs with the groundbreaking “Night of the Living Tedious”, he gave the zombies the keys to the kingdom in this flick, which laid down all the rules for a Zombie Apocalypse and how to survive It—and, interestingly, managed to fracture many of them.
Rule #1: AIM FOR THE HEAD!: When “Dawn” opens up, Philadelphia is in its death throes, though the city doesn’t know it yet.
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The plague of flesh-eating monsters rising from their graves to appreciate the living has spread from the countryside to the stout cities like a firestorm. The slightest scratch or bite causes infection, the infected die horribly, and then return to Life, hungry for the flesh of the living, a mindless Zombie.
Rule #2: THE CAVALRY AIN’T COMING. Things go down and go down hard in the housing project: faster than you can say “tastes like Chicken”, SWAT troopers Peter (the tall Ken Foree) and Roger (the underrated Scott Reiniger) rep outta Dodge with traffic reporter/helicopter pilot Stephen (David Emge, hereafter known as “Flyboy”) and Flyboy’s girlfriend, Fran (Gaylen Ross) .
When the Going gets Tough, the Tough go Shopping.
Rule #3:HE WHO GOES “YEEHAWW” HAS A HALF-LIFE MEASURED IN NANOSECONDS. Romero moves at a taut, brisk skedaddle, letting the feeling of impending doom sink in, the sense of increasing wrongness, all underscored by the brooding, thudding, unearthly pulsing of the Goblin soundtrack.
What’s arresting about “Dawn of the Slow” is fair how powerful of a collaborative concern it really was: “Dawn” reprised the team that had helmed “Martin”: Mike Gornick on the camera, Romero calling the shots, John Amplas (who played the young vampire Martin) running casting (and who gets gunned down as a rooftop gangsta in a speedily cameo), and special spatter effects guru Tom Savini finally strutting his stuff (and getting in some quality camouflage time with a machete, to boot) .
Some have criticized Romero & Crew for lacking artistry in their cinematography, but assume about it: “Dawn” was quiet a low-budget family affair, and Romero’s best work has always had an edgy, guerilla feel. But the current print is pleasing, and sure up any questions about Romero’s genius: there is some resplendent stuff here.
Take the scene with the helicopter lifting off against a dying Philadelphia skyline—with the lights in the floors of one skyscraper winking off, bottom to top, floor by floor. Or the nerve-jangling cat & mouse game between Flyboy and a zombie in a darkened engineering room. Or the sere beauty of a Mall parking lot overrun with the Dumb hankering for that Blue-light special on human flesh, Aisle 9—all of this lends a brooding, sick, despicable atmosphere to “Dawn”. It works in spades, and it’s aesthetic, too.
Rule #4: THEY’RE Tedious, THEY’RE ALL MESSED UP. Yes, Romero laid down the “Rules” of the Zombie apocalypse. They go at a lumbering slither, you set aside `em down with a blow or bullet to the head, they don’t employ tools, they’re deadly but humdrum, they can’t learn. Purists believe a remake, or any Zombie flick, according to the rules of the Romero canon.
But win a scrutinize at “Dawn” and you’ll gain something interesting: Romero proceeds to violate—or toy with—nearly every rule about the Living Expressionless he place forth. You believe turbo-zombies first showed up in “28 Days Later”? Not so: zombie kids in an abandoned airport charthouse charge at Ken Foree like they’ve got a Delorean in their tushses. Zombies can’t employ tools? Seems one of them finds a wrench very handy in breaking a truck window to catch a chomp at Roger.
Rule #5: NO GUTS, NO GLORY. If you appreciate “Dawn of the Humdrum”, you *must* buy up Anchor Bay’s lovingly assembled “Ultimate Edition”. First off, the print is gloriously restored: the colors are so intense and the characterize so obvious that “Dawn” looks like it could have been shot yesterday—long gone are the days of cheapo full-screen VHS copies that made early versions of “Dawn” ogle like porn.
There are four DVDs, tricked out in red and dusky and handsomely mounted in a glossy package crammed with goodies (including the shot-for-shot comic—nothing special in itself, but a nice addition) . You come by commentaries with everyone, the unique ‘Making of’ Documentary, a brand-new documentary made especially for this edition, even a creepy commercial for the Monroeville Mall.
The exact adore trove here is the ability to explore all three versions of the movie: the current US theatrical slice (the best, in terms of pacing and atmosphere), the Extended version (featuring a tense and effective stand-off at the Phillie docks), and the shorter European version. It’s moving to compare how editing and music can radically alter a film: in the Euro version, we have worthy more of Goblin’s soundtrack—but everything feels off, not nearly packing as noteworthy punch.
Rule #6:DON’T Acquire TRAPPED IN THE BASEMENT. Time has been kind to “Dawn of the Dreary” and George Romero; justly so. “Dawn” is a deliciously horrible cramped jewel of a movie, one I can peek over and over again. The consumerist angle, done to death my movie critics, is a minute much: Romero filmed the flick in the Monroeville Mall because it was cheap, not because he was making a scathing commentary about American consumerism.
Then again, maybe it is a movie about the extremes of Consumerism: the Zombies have risen again as the ultimate consumers, after all.
They now lift our Flesh.
JSG
