Mrrrrrr.... Brains.... Again....

And this time it was the 2004 remake of Dawn Of The Dead and it was brilliant. I mean, it didn't give me a gut-wrenching portayal of the human condition (although some guts were, in fact, wrenched). Neither did it offer a searing insight into important political issues. There were, however, a great many zombies and a fair number of humans for them to eat, and what more do you really want from a zombie movie?

So, a plot summary? The world is overrun with zombies and a group of people hide out in a mall. That's all you need to know. People. Zombies. A mall. People are barricaded in the mall. Zombies are outside the mall. Got it? Oh, and there's a pregnant chick, but more on that later. The producers of this film knew precisely what their viewers would want and we get it in spades. There's creepy child zombies biting out people's throats, amusing violence involving zombie death and general carnage and mayhem aplenty.

They also manage to slip in a few surprises here and there. Like making you care for a character who - for the first twenty minutes of our acquaintance with him - is kind of a dick. We're using fast-moving zombies, which still hasn't been done that much[1], and there are a few genuine scares and genuine laughs too.

Oh, and then there's the Moment. The Moment that led Sam and myself to invent a recurring character for horror and similar movies. But back to the Moment. It involves zombies. And a pregnant woman. And it's not as wrong as it sounds, but is in fact wronger, and here's where the character comes in. Most horror films have the moment where something really, really manky happens. The disembowelling in Dog Soldiers, the hanging babysitter in Scream etc, etc, and we think that would be the perfect time for our recurring character to show up. He's an Australian, and in that moment where we get the reaction shot of the cast to the unpleasant event that has just occured, this Australian will look at the carnage, point an unsteady finger at it as he walks away and say "Awww... no way... that's fucked" in a really thick Ocker accent. It'd be priceless.

So, getting back to the film, Dawn of the Dead rates four headshot zombies that bear a striking resemblance to celebrities (just watch it, you'll see what I mean).

[1] Side note (paraphrasing a good point from Ratti): Mr Boyle, if you didn't want people to call your film a zombie movie, maybe you shouldn't have put so many zombies in it. (or, at least, zombie-like things)