Not Rob Zombie, though. Go make another white-trash horror opera!
I don't care how nouveau-hipster that makes me sound, but I've liked them well before The Zombie Survival Guide (as good a read as it is) suddenly made them acceptable for the indie kids to have interest in. My mom showed me Night of the Living Dead on VHS when I was I think 13 years old, and I think that fostered the beginning of a deep appreciation in me.
I mention this because I watched Day of the Dead today, rounding out Romero's original zombie trilogy. Of the three, Dawn of the Dead is probably my favorite, as it is many others', but Day of the Dead is really underrated. It catches a lot of shit because there's very little zombie action in the first half an hour of a movie, to which I say - so what? Yeah, George Romero doesn't write particularly well; he knows where to put hot zombie action, and he knows how to disembowel a hapless human, but dialogue and coherence dance around him a little bit.
The basic premise of the movie is that there's a small military faction holed up in a bunker with some civilian scientists while zombies are apparently overrunning the earth. Romero's sociological allegory is obvious right off the bat: all of the soldiers are douches, especially their insane captain. The military/government is bad? Seriously?! It's cool to have a message in your movie and all, but I can understand why it frustrated people that it supersedes the zombies.
Obviously, the movie really hits its stride once he gets to the actual meat (no pun intended) of it all. It's the most gruesome of the trilogy, no questions asked, especially the final death scene. It's absolutely great in that repulsive sort of way. I think it's especially funny because all that moralizing that Romero did in the first act and a half of the movie just totally gets chewed through by ridiculous undead violence. It's as if he decided to say "you can have your politics if you like, but when the apocalypse comes, they're not gonna fucking matter."
Anyway, I decided to write about this partly because the movie is being remade. It has Nick Cannon in it. I assume he will be taking the place of the Jamaican helicopter pilot, simply because Hollywood thinks all black people are exactly the same so it's okay to have them talk like that. I hate Nick Cannon, but spare the man a little dignity! Anyway, the remake is going to suck. I can tell right off the bat because with the current political climate, the director's going to go really fucking overboard with the social messages, diluting the actual zombie part of the film in one way or another. What do you wanna bet they'll all link hands and sing "Imagine" while the legions of the undead bear down on them with tooth and nail? God save us all.
But yeah, zombies are great. I've been thinking about writing a zombie film of my own, and Day of the Dead has pretty much solidified the deal. Have any ideas? Post them here! I probably won't use them, because that's plagiarism and it is bad, but I know that I have some creative friends out there. Show me what you got!
(Image from Pangeacorp.
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