SHOPPING MAUL:
THE ZOMBIES THAT ATE PITTSBURGH
."Why did they just leave them
here?"
"'Cause they still believe there's some respect in
dyin'!"
- Roger (Scott H. Reiniger) and Peter (Ken Foree), discovering a
tenement basement full of zombies, DAWN OF THE
DEAD
Ah, 1978. Da Flatline was in college in Connecticut, failing at all levels, and annoyed that DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978) wasn't playing anyplace closer than Noo Yawk City. All I needed was a good reason to hop a Metro North Train and brave Times Square to relish George Romero's new Pittsburgh-based zombiethon. How about scragging yet ANOTHER computer engineering quiz? Good enough, I figgered. So I went and I watched and...
Well, I'd never seen anyone's head explode before. Nor had I seen a guy's abdomen opened up like a Zip-Lock bag fulla raw meat. Not to mention the screwdriver in the ear, the helicopter-blade semi-decapitation, the blood-pressure-machine arm removal... Even sitting through the campy viscera-flinging of ANDY WARHOL'S FRANKENSTEIN a coupla semesters earlier didn't prepare me for this.
After rewriting the horror-movie rules back in 1969 with NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (black and white, no name actors, real guts, no happy ending), Romero had spent the interim years floundering through a series of flops (JACK'S WIFE), near-misses (THE CRAZIES), and retreat-and-regroups (some sports documentaries for TV), all the while resisting the obvious move: NIGHT Part 2. The modern-day vampire/psycho meditation MARTIN helped restore his street credibility somewhat, but he still needed a major (or even a minor) hit. It took the double-barreled inspiration of Italian splattermeister Dario Argento (whose family helped with the financing) and an early-morning visit to a nearby shopping mall to give Romero the inspiration he needed. Filmed in bright color on a lean $1.5 million budget, DAWN was not only a worldwide hit (and one of the most plagiarized films of the last half-century!), but became the 2001 of horror movies; nearly two decades after its release, most of Tom Savini's gore illusions still look uncomfortably real.
As DAWN begins, any hopes that the horror had ended with the conclusion of NIGHT... are promptly dashed; the zombies are fast encroaching on civilization, and "real folk" are too busy panicking and fighting amongst themselves to marshall any kind of sensible solution. At a TV station where experts argue loudly about how to deal with the living dead -- and brain-dead station managers air outdated rescue station info, for fear that people will otherwise turn off their TV's! -- traffic-copter pilot Stephen (David Emge), his pregnant fiancee Fran (Gaylen Ross), and a salt-&-pepper team of SWAT troopers (the aforementioned Reiniger and Foree, respectively) swipe the station's helicopter and flee the chaos, looking for any kind of sanctuary. They find it in a deserted shopping center which, despite being overrun by the zombies, still has enough food, electricity, and other creature comforts for their needs. They barricade the doors, clean out all the ghouls, and hunker down into a life of (relative) calm...until a band of marauding bikers decide that they should get in on the good life, too...
While many people (Romero included) were baffled by some critics' description of NIGHT... as a Vietnam-war allegory, Romero himself quickly pointed out that DAWN was at heart a satire on American consumerism. The zombies wandering the aisles of the stores while cheery music tinkles in the background don't look that much different than real-life mall rats ("This was an important place in their lives," Stephen deadpans gravely at one point). But the human survivors are no less immune to the free booty awaiting them, playing poker with real (but now worthless) thousand dollar bills and generally falling prey to rich-kid ennui. Only level-headed Fran refuses to become completely seduced by the mall's riches; Stephen's and Roger's unreasonable greed will be their eventual downfall.
DAWN's headlong rush (the action sequences in this sucker move!) are tributes to Romero's skill as a film editor, in addition to writer/director; even though he doesn't move the camera a lot, he cuts his scenes together with guided-missile momentum. Take the exploding-head scene, in which a racist, battle-crazed SWAT trooper rampages through a tenement and starts shooting residents at random. There's no build-up (a la SCANNERS), no stretching out (a la MANIAC) -- he bursts through a door, pulls the trigger and BOOM! By the time you've gotten enough air into your lungs to scream, Romero's already four scenes further down the line. And while the gore's hyperrealism was intended to gross people out, Romero, Savini, et. al. aren't above having a little fun with it. According to Savini, the apocryphal Romero story is that he might hand you a severed head, but it'll be wrapped in a bag that sez "Shop at K-Mart." A better example might be the scene towards the end, when a biker trying out a test-your-own-blood-pressure machine gets bushwacked by a mob of zombies; as they drag him out of the chair, his cuffed-in arm is torn from his shoulder while the machine indignantly beeps "Please keep still while testing!" After more scenes of flesh-eating mayhem, Romero returns us to the machine: the severed arm flops loose as the cuffs deflate, and the blood pressure is reported to be "0 over 0."
With Romero professionally AWOL following the disappointing, Hollywood-compromised MONKEY SHINES and THE DARK HALF, the Living Dead Trilogy -- DAWN in particular -- are shaping up to be his most memorable movies. And why not? He raised the bar on cinematic violence and independent-filmmaker quality, did most of it waaaaay outside of the Hollywood system, and (hit it, Frank!) did it his way. As George himself put it, "[Any message in the movie] is just a handshake with the audience -- 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, etc.' Now, let's sit back, have some popcorn, and enjoy a good horror movie." And DAWN OF THE DEAD is about as good as they come.
When there's no more room in hell, the dead will follow these links:
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