Day of the Dead (1985)

I tell you what I'd love... to fill a movie theater with a bunch of teen kids who love drizzle like "The Perfect Man" and "Step Up" and that crap, play DAY OF THE DEAD, which looks great in capital letters, and watch the reaction. They, not knowing the unrelenting glories of old horror films, who stick to new ones that come out in theaters (e.g. Underworld, Resident Evil, or not even that, who wouldn't know the difference between George A. Romero and Wes Craven), would be absolutely horrified at the intensity of the great film. Man, I'd love to show those morons that the crap they watch is nothing compared the greats...

Love to see that.

Fmovies: Day of the Dead (1985) was the third film in the "Dead" series. For awhile this was going to be the last chapter until recent events have changed the mind of the series creator George A. Romero. Whilst it was going to be a huge budgeted venture for Romero and Laurel Films, a small budget and a few extras limited the scope of the director's vision for this film. But like all good film makers he made do with what he had around him and made a dreary and depressing film.

Society is dead. Zombies have overran the living and the survivors can only be found in very small numbers. One of these groups are bunkered inside an old underground bomb shelter. The survivors inside this subterranean military installation have been divided into three groups: the soldiers, scientists and civilian employees. Stress, sexual tension and a dire situation have split the group even further apart. The dead have been growing in numbers outside and dwindling supplies have made everyone desperate. But within the base their is some order. But what will happen with that collapses?

The third film of the series is not as great as the second film but it's a good film. Performances from the actors may be uneasy and the tight budget restrains the director's vision but it still succeeds as a very frightening and depressing horror film. Savini and company have made the gore more realistic and nauseating. Gone is the cartoonish blood and cheesy gore effects. State-of-the-art splatter effects have been included adding a whole new element to this awesome trilogy. I have to strongly recommend this film. If you love the first two, you'll definitely enjoy this this installment of the one and only trilogy of cinema!

Highly recommended!

Months after the first dead rose from their graves, the world has seemingly become overrun. Deep in a storage bunker in Florida, a group of soldiers and a group of scientists have formed an uneasy alliance in order to try and discover something that can help reverse their spread. However Dr Logan is not making the progress that the soldiers require and Captain Rhodes becomes increasingly impatient and erratic as a result. Things continue to worsen as the zombies gather above and Logan's work gets more worrying.

Having seen and enjoyed (if that's the word) the remake of Dawn, I decided to re-watch the three originals on their own values. While I had seen the other two before, this was the first time I had seen Day and assumed that it would be bigger than Dawn was (in the same way as Dawn extended the ideas from Night). In that regard I was a little disappointed to find that the film stayed on a rather small scale and didn't manage to really convince me that the world was actually over on the surface of the earth. However this is not to say that it is not a good story in itself, because it is, albeit very different from both Night and Dawn. To me it lacked the social commentary that was to be found in Dawn but it is still tense, gory and gripping. The claustrophobic nature of the bunker and the battling characters means that tension is easily created even when the zombies are distant and seemingly pose less of a threat than the humans do to one another. The film is a little weak at points – the medical experiments are given too much time and the character of Bub is not clear as to his reasons for being included as much as he was. I didn't like the idea of Bub, the film didn't seem to know what to do with him other than using him to fill out the story – Logan's progress with him seemed such a waste of time that, even if that was the point, it didn't work.

When the gore comes it is very hard to watch and a little sickening at times – bodies are ripped into and ripped apart in full bloody colour – as a horror it succeeds because I was looking a way quite a lot of times! Even though Shaun of the Dead has made fun of these slow zombies recently they still manage to be very effective here – I personally find them scary as they are relentless and simply wish to kill. True, the fast ones are scarier but these ones are too. The cast are more than just victims and are reasonably well drawn and acted. They have to be engaging or else the tension between them wouldn't work and, while hardly totally real people they still are good enough for a horror movie and they are not just fodder to rip apart – even if they are clearly penned as 'goodies' and 'baddies'.

Overall this is not the best of the trilogy but it is still a good horror film. The tension between the characters creates as much of a threat as the zombies do – even if some of the plot isn't that good. It all builds well to a gory finish that really only lacks teeth because both the film and the actual ending both fail to really show just how bad things are and never convinces that the world has come to an end in the way that the whole trilogy suggests it has.

Day of the Dead fmovies. The living have lost the war and now the dead have taken over.A small pocket of survivors consisting of a military and scientific team staying in a secure underground bunker doing research,trying to find an answer to why the dead are walking,and also trying to find any other survivors,but without much success.The sequence of events that follow ultimately lead to their self destruction.Plenty of gore including usual gun-shots to the head,decapitation,amputation,bodies ripped apart,entrails eaten,throat rippings etc.The special effects by Tom Savini are truly outstanding and these scenes where Dr Logan(Richard Liberty)tries to train a zombie are simply amazing.If you love gore you must see "Day of the Dead".Highly recommended.

I saw DAY OF THE DEAD at a drive-in; the second half of the double bill was DAWN OF THE DEAD (which I'd seen a dozen times by then, most often at midnight showings). I was stunned. DAY OF THE DEAD was as tight and as dramatic and as frightening as anything I'd ever seen. Although I'd championed Romero's movies in the pages of magazines like Famous Monsters of Filmland, Fantastic Films and Fangoria for years, I was totally blown away by the savvy evinced in DAY OF THE DEAD. No more of the tell-tale amateurishness of a "regional filmmaker," no more overindulgence: this is Romero at his very best, and a great movie by any standards. For critics who espouse the virtues of DAWN OF THE DEAD over DAY OF THE DEAD, take this simple test: watch them back to back, as I did the night DAY OF THE DEAD opened. If you're still not convinced, you may be a zombie yourself...

In 1985 this zombie movie virtually went by unnoticed except for many Romero fans. It was virtually dead a week or two after it hit the theaters. Many attribute its failings to the other many horror films released that year including "Re-Animator", "Fright Night", and "Return of the Living Dead". All these movies were R though and day was not. Romero stuck to his guns and made a very gory movie. Unfortunately, when dawn was released there were still many independent theaters, but by 1985 the chains had taken over and one thing chains do is not show movies like this. So it went by unnoticed and those that did notice it usually had nothing good to say about it other than the zombies looked really good. So suffice to say, I wasn't expecting much when I bought this movie except the zombies would look good. However, I am happy to report that I was very pleasantly surprised. Granted, Dawn was still a better film as it had more likable characters than the ones featured in this film. This would be the final Dead film George Romero would do until Land of the Dead was released, but I do not count that one as part of his original trilogy as they seem to belong together because Night showed us the humble beginnings of the zombie outbreak, Dawn showed us the zombies beginning to overrun us and this film shows us a bleak world where the zombies now outnumber the living 400,000 to one.

The story has a group at the beginning flying a helicopter in the hopes of finding some survivors. All they find is the dead and quite frankly, any survivors out there would be better off keeping their mouth shut as they do not want to go back to the facility this group belongs to. It is like a bunker and in it we have scientists who have no clue what they are doing, army people in a rush to leave said facility even though there is no indication there are any people left, two civilian guys just doing their jobs and Bub the most awesome zombie ever! Tensions are running high in the facility as the army people want to leave and there is a lot of arguing; however, things take a turn for the even worse and the zombies that are topside begin to lick their lips!

This film has great looking zombies and it does a good job with its setting. Originally, George wanted to do something much larger in scope, but could not get the funding so he had to scale back immensely which is why we sadly on get the one shot topside in the city and get to see how much the zombies have taken over. Everything in this film is rather good, except the characters! Seriously, Bub who is a zombie is the most likable character and then civilian guys. Everyone else just wants to yell and rant and this film is not a good one to watch when you have a headache! The good news is that this creates a finale where you really want to see a few of these guys eaten and suffer, unlike Dawn where you just kind of get a random motorcycle gang out of nowhere.

So this film is good, just not as good as Dawn as this one just does not have the action of that film and for a good portion of the film the only thing you have to look forward too in between the shouting matches between the scientists and evil Bono are the Bub scenes. It does help build up the finale and like I said, you really want to watch these guys get eaten, but it also tends to get annoying as no one really seems right. That is just the way it goes though, mankind is pretty much lost here and so why worry about trying to cure something that cannot be cured when you can just try and live out yo