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I must admit to being pleasantly surprised when I watched the remake of George A.Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead”. I was expecting a Michael Bay-esque shoot ‘em up pile of crap but what I was confronted with was a very good, intelligent and often frightening horror film. I had no burning desire to see this film, it was just that I found the Director’s Cut for £4 in the bargain bin at Blockbusters so figured, what the hell!

The opening scenes are incredibly good, starting off with the slightest hint that something strange was going on at a hospital as the female lead left work. She goes to bed and wakes up, opening her bedroom door to see the child from across the road standing in her corridor. The child attacks, bites her husband who then turns into a zombie himself and she is forced to escape into a world of chaos where the camera takes us out and above her car to show us the scope of the problem as explosions and smoke fill the screen. It mirrors perfectly the beginning of Romero’s vision, a world plunged into chaos with nobody being able to comprehend what’s going on.

We notice differences between the films straight away, Zak Snyder opting to allow the zombies the ability to run, putting our protagonists in more immediate peril and making the living dead more central to the plot than Romero intended. It means the film takes more of a disaster movie approach and loses the satirical impact, characterisation is also lost due to the number of people that eventually get holed up in the mall. The remake also falls into the trap of stereotyping certain characters, the only one who changes his ways is the security guard who’s the biggest stereotype of the lot (Rhodes anyone?)

Once at the mall, the scares continue but there’s no mopping up scene as in the first one, the zombies have pretty much ignored the place (lack of satire?). One fantastic deviation is putting them in an inner city mall, allowing them to communicate with the owner of a gun shop through signs, these short scenes are the most powerful in terms of humour and tragedy as we see him waste away through starvation whilst our protagonists live on fizzy drinks and hot dogs.

The biggest surprise is the gore content, extremely high for what I consider to be a more mainstream movie. One scene involving a zombie birth is harrowing enough but the red stuff makes more than a guest appearance in the final escape scenes where a truck is armoured up, A-Team style, with shotguns, chainsaws and other sharp/pain inflicting instruments. The moment one of the humans is shot and he drops the chainsaw is possibly the most gruesome scene I’ve ever witnesses.

In short this is a hugely entertaining movie that sits alongside the original “Dawn” rather than aiming to replace it. It ranks favourably with “Land of the Dead”, “28 Days Later” and even the sublime “Shaun of the Dead”, without giving you a ‘seen it all before’ feeling that the “Texas Chain Saw” remake did. If you get the chance then watch it, but watch Romero’s version first, it’s a bit more subtle!

"Beware the moon, and stay on the path..."