DAY OF THE DEAD
The third time is so rarely the charm
You just know that one day, in preparation for putting this movie together, Tom Savini stopped his car in the middle of a busy street, and said aloud: "Y'know, I'm not a foley artist, but I wonder what kind of a sound a man would make if he screamed while getting his head pulled off."
The answer to his question and many more are given to us in Day Of The Dead, the latest (and probably final, the lazy bastard) installment of George Romero's Living Dead movies. It features Tom Savini's best gore effects that I've seen him do (if there's better than this, I wanna see 'em), but it doesn't really offer anything else. With more gore, more sheer quantity and screen time, this movie could've worked with gore as its only hook. As it is, it begs for not just more gore, but more of everything else.
Budget constraints necessitated the shelving of Romero's original vision for this film (a vision I've heard alternately described as "Braveheart...with zombies" and "Blade Runner...with zombies") and a serious scaling-down of his ideas. So what we're left with is a motley assortment of cranky military guys who haven't been laid in even longer than I have (somehow), some helicopter pilots, and a group of scientists, all gathered up together in a vast underground complex after zombies have overrun the earth. Their attempts to establish contact with other survivors have all failed, and they may well be the only humans left. Most of the people are either cracking or very close to it, and if you want volatile, well, one of the scientists is a woman (Lori Cardille).
The straight-up horror of the first film is gone, and so is the social commentary and zombie-shoot action of the second. So what's left? What's Romero trying to do here? To tell you the truth, I have no idea. As a horror movie, Day Of The Dead doesn't really work; nothing actually happens until about the last twenty minutes or so. There are only three remotely compelling characters, the dialogue is usually banal, the kind where swearing all the time is confused with wit, and the gore effects - while magnificently done while on-screen - are scant until the conclusion. But does it work as any other kind of movie? Well...no, not really.
There's a difference between a horror movie that's driven by its dialogue (The Prophecy, Exorcist III) and one that's just talky. Day Of The Dead is just talky. Instead of actually doing things, these people just don't shut up, and so rarely do they say anything interesting. Cardille is always interesting, as is Richard Liberty as Dr. "Frankenstein" Logan, who's trying to domesticate the zombies. And it's awfully hard to ignore a maniacal Joseph Pilato. But everybody else is either nondescript or excruciatingly tiresome. I understand that endless repetition of similar (and similarly stupid) vulgarities by two of the goons is part of creating the atmosphere of abrasion between the characters, but it keeps begging the question of why these two idiots - who surely can't be good for anything - are allowed to carry on.
Still, there are those three characters, and in the absence of action and vision, I guess characters are what we have to look at.
Putting in a real blast-furnace of a performance, Cardille has always left me wondering why she never showed up in more movies. (she was only in a couple of others; last I heard, she ran some sort of theater society or something in Pittsburgh) She weaves a character that most of the time seems "strong-woman" enough to be a cliché, but there's always more going on here; her weakness for her quickly cracking-up lover, her pessimism about her research. Yeah, she's a tough lady, enough to give Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor a hell of a bitescratchkickfest, but she's a woman with a lot of pain, doubt and fallibility.
Joseph Pilato gives a near-hysterical performance as Rhodes, the wild-eyed man in charge of the military contingent. His is not an easy task, keeping in check the men who work under him and taking the reins of an assignment that was originally headed by his now-dead commanding officer, and trying to determine if his orders from a dead government are worth following. However, he just doesn't seem up to that task. Two men under his command in particular cause virtually all the problems for him - Rhodes probably couldn't be entirely blamed for arranging a convenient "accident" to thin the herd. (he says at one point that there have been five military men killed on this job; I'll betcha my next beer that the stupidity, arrogance and incompetence of those two idiots caused at least three of them) Instead, he directs the hostility of his men toward the scientists and foolishly allows much of their behavior to get out of hand. At a couple points, Rhodes himself goes off the deep end, threatening to kill people for no better reason than they were unwilling to put up with his own incompetence. Not to mention that scene where he casts two people into a big zombie-chamber to either die horribly or live a tortured, nigh-eternal un-death instead of just shooting them. (Criswell, you know I've got nothing but love for ya, but I've got no idea what you're talking about with your admiration for this guy)
And Richard Liberty has quite a bit of fun in his role, always splattered with blood from someone, or something. The discovery of a tape recording his character makes is a little much (he's talking to his mother, Norman Bates-style. Why would he record that?), but he plays this mad scientist with bouncy enthusiasm. In a movie loaded with cranky assholes, this guy shines as a bright (if crazy) guy who seems to love his work. (a friend of mine met him a few years ago, and says that Liberty was rather brutalized by the massive squib use involved in his exit from the film)
The situations are, well, few. To say that this movie doesn't have much plot kind of misses the point; there could be a case made for saying this movie has it in spades, but still, so little actually happens! After fifteen minutes or so of people talking and arguing, we might just be treated to a scene where we actually see something happening. Usually, the wait's longer than that.
But man, that gore is great, when it finally shows. Organs slipping out, heads getting pulled off, people getting ripped apart...this has got to be Savini's finest hour. Even the zombies themselves (which were just normal people with gray makeup and glazed expressions in the previous film) look great. This would have made a grandly entertaining thirty-minute movie. But it's 100 minutes long.
Ultimately, how this movie turns out is just as a downer. It's slow, tiresome, bleak, annoying, sad, cruel, and a big letdown when compared to its predecessors. It disappeared quickly from theaters, probably for those very reasons, but maybe also because audiences had their fill of zombies for a while after Return Of The Living Dead. And next to that movie, Day Of The Dead looks like a sorry piece of crap.
And yet, despite the fact that I'm sitting here bashing this movie left and right, it's a film I have no small amount of fondness for. I love the gore (while it's there), some of the nastiest I've ever seen. I like the setup, and the way the nature of the zombie plague is examined a little more in depth. Cardille's performance has impressed me for over a decade now. But none of it is given enough time in the film ('cept Cardille); it's pushed aside for endless, ENDLESS scenes of bickering, bickering, bickering. It doesn't even feel like real conflict after about five minutes. It's just bickering, and it made me wish these idiots would say something interesting or shut the hell up.
I first saw this movie when I was about thirteen. Even at that age, with our minimal knowledge of the language of film, my friends and I found ourselves repeatedly saying "Man, has this movie been cut." The edits on the cut version of this film are laughably bad. Do not, I repeat, DO NOT see the cut version of this film; without the super-gore, it's about one-fifth (my estimation) the movie it is.
It's not that bad of a movie, but it made me wish that the liquor store was still open when I drove past there earlier tonight.
(the totally unanticipated mass defence of this film in the wake of my original posting of this review prompted me to have a seventh - yes, seventh - look a few months later, which resulted in my writing a REALLY long examination of just why this movie doesn't work for me. It's right HERE if you wanna read it.)