Review of Dawn of the Dead (1978) by Ben L — 16 Feb 2015

I'm not a horror movie expert, in fact I kind of despise them, but I would like to suggest that there is one key element you need in a horror film to make it work well. You have to get the audience to connect with and care about the characters, and I think this is even more vital in an end-of-the-world type of movie like Dawn of the Dead because the characters become representative of all humanity. So my big struggle with this movie is that I didn't like any of the characters. For one thing they didn't seem to have much depth to their stories, most of them were just stereotypes. They tried to have these moments where they shared some of the past, but it was too little too late. It didn't help that, after establishing a small handful of characters, they felt the need to continuously inject more people just so they could have more bodies to add to the body count. If anything these added characters just became a distraction from the original group that I wanted to get to know better. This mall of people were possibly the last human beings on Earth, and I just wanted them all to die. It was a mindless zombie movie and I was rooting for the zombies...never a good sign.

The plot of Dawn of the Dead is virtually non-existent. Some people hole up in a mall trying to avoid the zombie apocalypse. That's the whole story. Amazingly despite some walls made of nothing more than glass and thousands of zombies crowding around the mall, they seem to be remarkably fortified in the mall. In fact they actually have to create plot reasons for the characters to venture out of the mall or to bring zombies in. The other annoyance I found in the Dawn of the Dead was how inconsistent the rules of zombie transformation seemed to be. It's like the duration of time from bite to death wildly shifted depending on the requirements of the plot. And that's just one example of how every beat of this movie felt like it was written solely for the convenience of moving the plot along. For example, it didn't make sense for Michael and Ana to suddenly start making out, but they needed those characters to be in love so it would add some poignancy to the end of the movie. Oh and speaking of the end, if I cared one ounce for these people I would have been simply livid with the credits scene. What is the purpose of tacking on an everybody-dies ending? I found almost nothing to like in this movie. I can't give it the lowest possible rating because at least the story was somewhat coherent and I didn't feel the need to shut off the TV halfway through, but I will gladly never watch this again and might even avoid other films that feature these actors since they were so terrible in this movie.