"Better Off 'Dead'"
by Scott Mantz

“Dawn of the Dead”
Sarah Polley, Ving Rhames
Directed by Zack Snyder

Where there's life, there's hope! Sarah Polley and Ving Rhames lead survivors to safety in "Dawn of the Dead"

“They’re coming to get you, Barbara!”

If you don’t know where that famous movie line comes from, then you might as well stop reading right now – this review isn’t for you. If you are familiar with it, then keep reading, because you’re obviously a fan of 1968’s “Night of the Living Dead,” George A. Romero’s landmark horror classic that basically invented the zombie genre as we know it.

What’s truly amazing is that almost 4 decades later, those flesh-eating zombies are still coming to get us, and they’re hungrier than ever! Just last year, director Danny Boyle gave the zombie thriller a facelift with the arty low-budget fright-fest “28 Days Later,” but that was almost like an appetizer compared to the full-course meal that is director Zack Snyder’s “Dawn of the Dead.” Make no mistake, this remake of Romero’s sequel from 1978 is not your daddy’s zombie movie, but is instead a high-octane adrenaline rush of pure excitement that will appeal to both longtime dead-heads and zombie virgins alike.

When the entire planet is taken over by flesh-eating zombies, there’s only one place to go – the local mall. That’s where Ana Clark (Sarah Polley) finds herself after a terrifying escape from her Wisconsin neighborhood. She and a small band of survivors – including a shell-shocked cop (Ving Rhames), a meek electronics salesman (Jake Weber), a street-wise civilian (Mekhi Phifer) and his pregnant wife – seal themselves off from the hellish zombies terrorizing the outside world, but they soon face an even bigger problem. Can they survive each other?

Zack Snyder, who makes his feature directorial debut from a taut screenplay by James Gunn, walks the fine line between balls-to-the-wall excitement and B-movie camp. The film is bookended with excellent MTV-style opening and closing credits sequences, and unlike the slow-moving zombies from the earlier “Dead” films, the zombies here are much more vicious and can run really fast. But despite the carnage, the film doesn’t take itself too seriously (after all, how could it?), and thanks to the biggest budget ever allocated to a zombie thriller, the R-rated makeup and visual effects are thrilling to behold.

Thematically speaking, the movie is extremely faithful to the original film, which was layered with a not-so-subtle commentary on mankind’s obsession with consumerism. After all, it makes perfect sense that the zombies would instinctively wind up at the mall, since that’s where they probably spent most of their time anyway before they became infected. Actually, since the mall culture is even more rampant now than it was 25 years ago (when the original film came out), the ironic message should be lost on no one.

“Dawn of the Dead” is probably the last place you’d expect to find a critically-acclaimed actress like Sarah Polley (“The Sweet Hereafter,” “Go”), yet here she is, acting her guts out with a fierce, strong and electrifying performance. The multi-talented Ving Rhames also gives the film a heap of clout as the conflicted cop who protects the survivors, while Jake Webber provides the voice of reason to the more irate survivors. In addition, Mekhi Phifer gives a haunting performance as a desperate father-to-be, and Ty Burrell provides just the right amount of comic relief as a self-absorbed survivor who’s only out for himself.

After almost 40 years, one can’t help but wonder why zombie thrillers continue to whet the appetite for bloodthirsty horror buffs everywhere. Is it the imaginative gore as the zombies pick off their hapless victims one by one? Or is it the sheer stupidity of the selfish survivors, who wind up being their own worst enemy in their narrow-minded efforts to stay alive? Maybe it’s both, but one thing is for sure. As long as they keep making zombie movies as fun, scary and exciting as this, there’s no doubt that they’ll keep coming to get you for a long, long time.

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