Film Review: Romero’s third movie keeps franchise strong
“Day of the Dead” is the third installment of George A. Romero’s zombie apocalypse, this time shifting the focus to a group of researchers and antagonistic military guards in an underground bunker.Romero beautifully blends the stress of surviving the masses of undead outside with surviving the other humans inside.
The military guards and doctors clash throughout the movie and are at each other’s throats by the end.
But divisions begin to form within the researchers too when head researcher Dr. Logan (Richard Liberty, “Cyberflic”) begins to move the zombie studies in a direction the other doctors aren’t OK with.
Instead of focusing on a cure, Logan tries to understand what makes zombies tick.
His most squeamishness experiment is the zombie Bub (Sherman Howard, “You Belong to Me”) and instead of dissecting him, he begins to teach and reward the monster. After a while Bub appears to remember things from his pre-zombie state, Logan and the audience begin to wonder if the zombies are still a little human after all.
The focus on human-to-human interactions alongside the human-to-undead interactions elevates “Day” from a gory monster movie to a film that raises questions about humanity and just what defines it.
Even with these intriguing ideas, “Day” wouldn’t be a proper zombie flick without a full-on zombie battle. When the humans finally do get in a major altercation with hundreds of undead, Romero doesn’t disappoint. There’s plenty of bloody, icky details enhancing every scene, from a zombie gnawing a severed ring finger to a victim’s screams getting shriller as zombies stretch his neck and vocal chords until they break.
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on Monday, October 29th, 2007 at 11:25 pm and is filed under Arts & Entertainment, Film Reviews.
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