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The dawn of good horror?
By John Behling
Published:
Thursday, March 25, 2004
The Parkwood 18 Theatre. 7 p.m., last Friday night. Teens squeezing through the ticket lines, spilling down the corridors, oozing into stadium seating. Why do they come here? Is it instinct?
"This was an important place in their lives," on an opening night in 1978 when "Dawn of the Dead" first took screens.
I suspect many of those packing in to see the remake last week hadn't seen the original - even though it's out in new DVD release. They came anyway, drawn perhaps by a bluish-flash through the fog of collective memory.
A Citypages reviewer writing on "Starsky and Hutch" drew the conclusion that in pop culture, vaguely familiar is gold. The writer pointing out that the spoofish remake of the '70s cop-drama bears about as much resemblance to the original series as Starsky does to Hutch. It goes to show that remakes aren't about the original, and sometimes they aren't even about the original audiences.
But what about those of us who love Romero's smart, bitter satire? Should we prepare for the unpleasant yawn that was the "Texas Chainsaw" remake, should we even go at all?
This is indeed the film that horror fans would love to hate. And I would love to hate it too, but in all reality it's a pretty good movie ... a pretty good movie that really has nothing to do with George A. Romero.
Suburban working mom, Ana, is too busy making out with her hubby in the shower to hear the news reports, but soon enough she'll find out that something has gone wrong in the world. She awakens to find a zombie in her bedroom and a warzone in the streets.
Romero's films ("Night of the Living Dead," "Dawn of the Dead," "Day of the Dead,") brought us into a crisis that had already started, showing the gravity of a world torn apart in the long stares of his actors rather than with a camera panning over the ruins.
However, Snyder's 'Dawn' speeds along from before the storm and quickly into it, setting a pace for the film that won't let the mind wander.
Soon Ana meets up with a ragtag crew of survivors who hole themselves up in an abandoned shopping mall. Here's where the quotation "This was an important place in their lives" appears, as the survivors stand on the rooftop, watching zombies approach the mall.
From here, the film dabbles in the shop-till-you-drop escapism of Romero's film for at least one montage, showing the group playing blissfully with the spoils of an unguarded mall. It is slightly creepy to see an updated-looking mall (named Crossroads Mall even) with all the trappings of yuppie decadence.
But let's not get distracted, what drives this film isn't character study or satire, it's busting heads. It's all about equipping two decked out war vans with barbed wire, chainsaws and explosives. It's about kicking dead ass and splattering brains.
And in this department it earns the honor of becoming the "Aliens" of zombie films. A successful conversion of horror to action, which could be the perfect thing for a generation raised on one part Arnold, one part Wes Craven. It could be the best zombie A-film yet and a step in the right direction for A-horror filmmaking - it's at least entertaining.
Let's face it, A-filmmaking isn't where horror excels. It's in the low-budget, backwoods realm where the video-freaks' top-10 lists originate.
Which brings me to the person who should be rightfully pissed about this remake: Danny Boyle. If Romero left unscathed by this remake, the director of "28 Days Later" is left with one festering wound.
Snyder hastily applies Boyle's "screaming sprinting zombie" dogma to the zombie film manifesto, perhaps stretching even more of a gap between today's jolt-amped-go-go-go-teen and Romero's methodically plodding films. Also stolen is Boyle's method of shooting action in jittery 10-frame-hell - the effect of trying to hold a camera while zombie hands rip off your legs. And for good measure there's sparse usage of Anthony Dod Mantle's beautiful lowfi-DV aesthetic. The film drops from full-color 35mm brilliance to undersaturated, underexposed grime for the feel of a privileged director slumming in his bag of tricks, rather than an indie shooter making art out of budget constraints.
And I think Paul Anderson has a gripe or two here as well. No one makes video games look as cool as Anderson ("Mortal Kombat", "Resident Evil", the cold-as-ice Brit who knows how to seal realism tightly in a box outside the 16 x 9 box, and just go to town.
That's what Friday night cineplex zombies will discover at this "Dawn." Videogame violence in widescreen; action in horror clothing, but at least it's good.
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