Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.

Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

Day of the Dead

04:06 / 25.07.07

Any luck on if this movie will be released or not? I had a brainstorm of a sequel I would like to see with starving humans attacking each other and cannibalizing and have the scientists get more in a dissective mode with the zombies and seeing how they tick with zombies being dissected while they are eating glistening flesh. I wonder if it would work in a religious light with the last supper and all? With underground churches and the resurrected dead and a zombie priest. I was going to write a screenplay but I found that they are working on Day of the Dead already. Any fans of the original Splatter fest of a movie?

14:21 / 25.07.07

I'm a big fan of all the Romero 'Deads' (well, not 'Land Of The Dead' so much) - of the originals, I think that 'Day' is the weakest but there's still much to love about it. Hadn't realised it was being re-made. Usually I'd be pessimistic but as I was quietly surprised by the remake of 'Dawn', I'm intrigued..

Tell us more..

ONLY NICE THINGS

14:51 / 25.07.07

"Don't die, Officer Parkman," cried the zombie child, "You're my hero!"

16:12 / 25.07.07

The original was my first midnight movie - and possibly my first real zombie movie. This was when VCRs were exotic and new, so you had to see horror pictures either on TV or in the theater. With a crowd of lunatics.

Part of Day of the Dead is set in South Florida, so it was strange being in that crowd with people pointing up and recognizing exteriors. (I later watched Dawn of the Dead with a really drunk guy from the town where that mall is located. He raved about the Brown Derby, and said, "That's bullshit!" when they find the weapons shop in the mall.)

I remember being astounded by the patchiness of the plot (not a whole lot happens, story-wise) and by one particular effects shot where the top 3/4s of a decapitated zombie head lies there on the ground, unable to move but blinking eagerly at people's ankles as they walk by. And I fell in love with the chopper pilot.

When there's no more room in Hell, the dead will walk the earth!

17:12 / 25.07.07

The original was my first midnight movie

Would a thread on midnight movies be a good idea, or would it end up being pseudo/cod nostalgia? Dawn of the Dead was technically my first midnight movie in the way the term expresses, but for literalness my first 'proper' midnight movies were Strange Days and Battle Royale...

04:02 / 26.07.07

Yeah I miss those old Splatter Movie days. Vietnam era and Tom Savini influence. Where the man gets knarled and pulled apart in two was one of the great sfx make jobs of all time. I heard they used old rotted cow guts for his entrails for that effects shot. It stunk to high heaven and the actors had to smell and eat their way to zombie glory.

In the remake it would be so cool if they had a moving disectted zombies and one opened up like a dissected frog for analysis. Trying to find a chemical that will reverse the Lazarus syndrome where they walk again to eat the living.......

Or where a couple in love barracaded in a church and one sacrfices himself for his love and him to eat piece by piece since they are staving so much.......

20:04 / 26.07.07

I heard they used old rotted cow guts for his entrails for that effects shot. It stunk to high heaven and the actors had to smell and eat their way to zombie glory.

Indeed. I saw a clip of the rushes of that scene from some docu thingy on Channel 4 a few years ago; the guy being pulled apart (Rhodes, played by Joe Pilato) looked fairly nauseous.

20:08 / 26.07.07

Is Day of the Dead the one with the mall or Tony Todd?

21:00 / 26.07.07

Romero's zombie critiques:

Night of the Living Dead: Family & Race

Dawn of the Dead: Consumerism

Day of the Dead: Military/Industrial (or really R&D) Complex.

I'm not sure what Land of the Dead critiqued... maybe our new Gilded Age-style capitalist class exploitation. It was less focused than the others, though. Maybe more the idea of the gated community -- I'm not sure there's a name for that.

Anyway, Day of the Dead was soldiers and scientists in an underground barracks. The Ecclestone chapter of 28 Days Later was the Day of the Dead chapter.

23:49 / 26.07.07

There's also the race/gender elements of all the zombie pics, whether or not the last to survive and how he doesn't in Night of the Living Dead was unintentional commentary. The cop stuff at the beginning of Dawn of the Dead (original/real one) was definitely intentional. There seems to be a cycling of positions for whose (ethnic, gender, whatever) representative gets to be weak and who gets to be strong, which the woman in Dawn coming out pretty impressive compared to most of the men in the film. Land was the first time a white guy gets to be the living hero. How rare is that in any American film series? Of course, Land pushed a big The Wall will keep out undesirables, put your faith int The Wall so much, the wall brought down by a latino looking for a better life no less (slimey, cheap fucker, aside) where not-Cheney is squatting, perched above people, essentially - apparently - because people are still willing to toady to pretend power and authority, practically delusional to the real threats to himself and everybody else. It was very Don't look at us growing fat off you... Look! Over there! Fireworks! And undesirables at the wall! Stop looking at this wall keeping you regulated and look at the other wall and excitement! I walked out of a showing with some choice Bill Hicks quotes running through my brain.

Day of the Dead is still my favorite, I think. It's mean and sharp and not one character isn't hopelessly brainfucked and mentally scarred before the movie's even started. The reminder that death always sits right next to you. Science not portrayed as bad, but evil deluded people, whether scientist or otherwise, as, well, the bad, evil, deluded risk factors we suspect them of being, but in general society pretend aren't that bad.

And if you watch all four back to back - do it in a group, for sanity and focus - when you get to the jump between Day and Land it's quite hilarious, and hammers home the 'We hope you enjoyed your fireworks show/It was so pretty and it took our mind off domestic affairs' thing pretty hard.

11:27 / 09.11.07

The brilliance of the horror of the original Night of the Living Dead, 1968, was the social relevance of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. 1968. Here is a great black hero killing off the living dead but the tragedy is he is shot at the end where a white man just thought he was just another zombie. A real stomach churner if you know what I mean.......It left me feeling sick to the stomach.

The Day of the Dead had Tom Savini as the make up artist and he is a Vietnam vet and saw a lot of dead people and it makes Day of the dead even more horrific. I wonder if there are some themes of the atrocities of the Vietnam era in Day of the Dead. Probably stretching it a bit but you can probably analyze it this way too.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

16:25 / 09.11.07

grant- I read Land of the Dead as being about class, certainly. But it was by far the weakest, and the message was a little less coherent than those in the first three had been. Though it possibly had some interesting things to say about revolution, thinking about it now- the ruling order come under threat both from the zombies and from the "lower orders" of survivors, and it's the combination of the two disparate elements that brings them down, even though they aren't consciously working toward the same goals.