Sunday 26 January 2014

Review: Dawn of the Dead (1978)

Dawn of the Dead
IMDB rate: 8,0
Genre: Zombie

Finally, a review about the original Dawn of the Dead!
Now, I saw this movie only once before and well before you judge me for my opinion I want you to know this; I liked this movie, it was fun for the time it was made. But, I do think that the remake is almost as good as this one. I know that it's not very popular to say that you liked a remake almost as much as the original, but in some cases it's just how it is. Now I think that I have this opinion quite often, but this is mostly because in almost all cases I saw the remake before the original. Bear in mind that I'm only 20 years old and I just grew up with the remakes and not with any original movies. For me the original movies are old and look kinda funny, I don't know any better, because I grew up with more 'quality movies'. Now I'm not trying to say that I dislike every original movie, most of them are excellent and they are of course the basic of every remake. I just wanted to explain the reason why I sometimes actually like the remake a bit more.


This sequel of "Night of the Living Dead" is filled with splattered blood and brains in living color. The dead have come back to life to eat the living. This is the story of the escape of four people from an urban nightmare to a suburban nightmare. They barricade themselves in a shopping mall and try to start new lives.

The biggest difference with the remake and the original ones are of course the zombies: In the original they were grey and because of the filter they often looked blue. Their skin isn't all disgusting, in fact it's very smooth and grey and there isn't a lot of blood on their skin. In the remake the skin is all messed up and filled with blood, infections and nastiness. But the biggest difference of them all is of course that they were walkers in the 1978 one, and they were runners in the remake. Now for a Romero remake this is quite a big difference, since he became best known with his 'walkers'.

I liked them both to be honest, comparing the walkers and the runners. The walkers gives the people more opportunity to escape, while the runners.. well, they are quite difficult to escape.
The walkers has a bit more mystery over them, it's kinda cute how slow they are. With runners you're kinda fucked anyway.
Comparing the looks I like the new ones best, they look scarier and the illness of them seems a lot more threatening. It makes them look more dangerous and with that more aggressive.


Dawn of the Dead (1978) has a lot more character development compared to the remake. To me this wasn't something very interesting, since I care more about the zombies. It never really felt as if these people were in danger, which is kinda sad really since that's the most fun thing about these movies.

What I liked most about the movie is that the people escaped to a shopping mall, a shopping mall is big and has a lot of things that these people might need. It was also good that they made a fake wall to protect themselves from other people. I disliked the part where they started shooting the motorcyclists, they endangered themselves quite a bit, which isn't very smart in any way. If they wouldn't have started shooting, perhaps the bikers would have driven away.

It's also very awesome to see that they really settled in this mall-attic thingy, it's really shows how long they are already stuck in there which makes you admire them. It's very awesome to see that they survived for that long already, in good health. The characters are very easily likable, they are charming, funny and dependable. You start caring for these characters and it's devastating if something happens to one of them. While I don't care a whole lot about their character development, it's done in a right way.

A good message from this movie shows when the bikers starts threatening them, it's funny because all this time they were hiding from zombies, almost forgetting that there are other humans alive as well. It's weird to see that these humans are a bigger threat to them compared with the zombies. Humans can think straight, they are able to use guns and drive vehicles, which makes them more faster and a lot more dangerous than zombies.


I liked Dawn of the Dead, it's an excellent movie with a strong message. I would have liked it better though if there was a bit more focus on the zombies, rather than the characters. The characters didn't really seem endangered because of them, which is something I would have liked to see. I liked the remake as well, I will write a review about it soon. In some sort of way I'm not sure if it's fair to compare these two movies. They both carry the same name, which makes it kinda obvious to compare them, but thinking about it, they are very different. The only thing that matches are the threat of zombies and the shopping mall, while all the other things are not very much alike. Even the zombies differ a lot.
The only thing that I hated was the fact that it seemed to carry on for far too long, I couldn't help myself wondering when it would finally end.
It's a good movie, but while writing this review I tended to forget that it was made quite some time ago already.

My personal rate: 7,5/10




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