Dawn of the Dead - re:View

well Jay let's talk about one of the most famous horror films of all time George Romero's 1978 film Dawn of the Dead and here is your ultimate edition the collector's box set that's when the movie was still commercially available yeah and here we have one of our main spoilers now here we have another main character Oh spoilers well when you say Don of the Dead a lot of people out there will probably think of the 2004 film the Zack Snyder film the Zack Snyder film Zack Snyder's first and most competent film as I say yeah that's probably his best movie well I'm a fan of the 300 now again but after that it's all downhill but there was a film before 2004 is Dawn of the Dead it was in 1978 and it's George Romero's classic Jay tell us all about Dawn of the Dead Donna the Dead is there's a zombie apocolypse smoker people hope and a mall and that's the movie and this comes ten years after the original classic horror film Night of the Living Dead yes Night of the Living Dead of course 1968 shot in black and whites made by George Romero and a small group people ended up kind of inventing what we now think of as um beasts before that there was like maybe some movies with voodoo zombies and stuff but the idea of recently dead corpses coming back to life and have to shoot him in the head or set him on fire it all came from Georgia marrow which is kind of crazy to think that you know like Bram Stoker's Dracula was you know how long was Bram Stoker's Dracula in 1895 a long long time ago which is of course based on a real-life person Oh Vlad the Impaler glad the yeah but then yeah you have like that you know Frankenstein all these classic monsters that have been around for you know hundreds of years and the last real monster that we think of as being like this mainstream monster was the zombie and it wasn't that long ago that it was invented you're forgetting about The Swamp Thing Oh Swamp Thing of course the most famous movie monster of all time is he a good guy Swamp Thing oh I'm thinking of The Creature from the Black Lagoon yes a little bit difference one thing is like a comic book character yeah Wes Craven made into a movie okay so Dawn of the Dead is is a radically different film than its 2004 counterpart yes that's that's putting it mildly because it was made during the era of a filmmaker makes a film rather than a studio and a corporate panel makes a film right yeah this is a very independent movie very low-budget George Romero i George Romero is one of my favorite filmmakers more so because of his attitude and his style then that is the technical qualities of his movies because his movies are very sloppy in a good way they're very improvisational he doesn't have any sort of like his movies are sort of made in the editing he just shoots lots of footage and makes it work in editing and I think his editing is the strongest quality as a filmmaker yeah I think I compared I'm not the biggest George Romero fan you're a bigger fan of George Romero than I am because I'm not a big horror guy and I compared George Romero to the industrial filmmaker who made that if you're not familiar with Zac please check out our that episode we've been plugging that one a lot lately I think we mentioned that on the last best of the worst is that it's one of the best bad movies ever made if you have a chance please see the the unmad 'add version oh yes you can see zetz white tennis shoes not presented in the the aspect ratio they wanted which makes it even more hilarious I think you see a boom mic a couple times you see that's tennis shoes and it makes it for a more pleasurable filming film experience but the guy who made Zach was an industrial filmmaker in Florida and then he's like I'm gonna make a horror film let's lock the camera down for 15 minutes yeah well that walks through the street we have to establish this location so let's just pan across the entire thing and it just goes on and on yeah so Donna the dead I mean George Romero like after Night of the Living Dead he I guess he saw a shopping mall or went into a shopping mall and said this would be a great place to hide during a zombie apocalypse I want to make a movie about that that was it and that was it and he himself has that the characters kind of take the backseat yeah to the the thrust of the story of the plot and it's more like just a movie about for people that have to survive by living in a shopping mall during a zombie apocalypse they're still here they're after us they know we're still in here after the place they don't know why it's it's a very methodical movie it's not there's not some sort of overarching story it's not a traditionally told narrative it's just here's the situation okay we found this mall what steps do we need to take to fortify this and make it livable and then what do we do next yeah it's just it just tells that process yeah and then that's not to say that it's lacking all humanity or all substance and the characters there are moments where they they start to crack a little they get in arguments there's some emotional connection between two characters we will spoil too much sure well they're strong characters there's we have our four characters who unfortunately the three male characters all have the most generic names possible so even though I've seen this movie 278 times I can never remember each of their names Steven Roger Peter and Fran is the female Peter is Ken Foree okay Steven is the PI hey flyboy please he has a nickname yes and then Roger is the other Peter and Roger are both SWAT team members and we're introduced to them in the opening of the film when they're storming a like a government housing looks like a yeah just an inner-city slums yeah [Music] currently the zombie outbreak has happened already we get our first and last and greatest head explosion yeah I don't know I've never seen scanners so I can't compare it to what is considered the best headaches every head explosion pales in comparison to scanner this is a pretty good one though on a scale of had explosions it's up there although they left in about eight frames of their dummy head I was scanning through the footage early you know what that head is that's actually a cast that was done of Galen Ross who plays Fran in the movie because the original ending of the movie was gonna be her shoving her head into the helicopter blades so they just had this head of hers that they just painted brown and put it like an afro wig on to put a beard on it and they put beard on it and then they just blew it up they filled it with like like dog food and just random things that they had like in craft service and then they just blew the thing up and it's glorious it was literally Tom Savini with a shotgun blast of the thing nice you can get away with that kind of thing on an independent film when no-one's breathing down your neck and that's this whole movie it's what what can we do what can we get away with yeah but it's it's like you said it's not very cinematic I think you referred to George Romero's a blue-collar filmmaker yes it's not he's not mr. fancy pants he's not mr. look at me I'm the director I'm gonna this is gonna be lit all dramatically I'm gonna turn the camera and the music's gonna swell it's more just like here's a shot of what's happening right let's do that and then how about the ideas foot weird music in there I don't care he doesn't care it's that he creates it in the editing he shoots tons of different angles he gets whatever coverage he thinks he needs and then makes it work in editing and that's a style yeah and that's the same it goes with like I mentioned the lighting like the whole movie is just lit with like bright fluorescents because they didn't have time to do anything more you know elaborate than that yeah especially when you're doing these different setups and it's very improvisational they're coming up with ideas while they're shooting so it's like well okay we just need it brightly lit so we can get everything but this one I don't think he cared I mean I think it was more about the gag eye he cared more about conveying the theme and the yeah the gags the the gore effects which were also again going with the sort of improvisational filmmaking idea it was that was most of those things weren't in the script it was him turning to Tom Savini and saying like come up with ways to kill people like oh we can do this we can do this we can do that and a lot of them some of them were planned ahead and some were just thought up on the set like on the day of would you call this the throw everything at the wall and see what sticks approach uh yeah to a certain extent I mean the movie is chaos it portrays chaos but the actual like filmmaking of the movie is almost as interesting as the movie itself as far as just just controlled chaos yeah which doesn't work for every movie but it works for especially for a story like this networks right right there's no subtlety that needs to be conveyed it's all big picture stuff [Music] the remakes okay I think the first 10 minutes is just about the best zombie apocalypse stuff that's ever been in a movie yeah as far as capturing the chaos in in a really big elaborate expensive way that obviously someone like George Romero couldn't do yeah and then the rest of the movies just okay it's not bad well the core of an action movie yeah the difference between the two are one is very Hollywood and one is very low-budget independent it's not as far from Hollywood as you can get yeah because the 1978 Dawn of the Dead opens with Fran and flyboy mainly Fran in a TV station and it's just like she's just sitting there in the sound booth like kind of zoned out and that's our opening shot and then it's like okay we're doing this live broadcast of these two people debating about what's going on we're just thrust into the chaos we learn immediately that there's some kind of zombie outbreak and they're just talking about it and it just cuts to kind of the the TV station decaying breaking down this person just walks off the set this the you know who's running know camera three I don't know I'm swearing on the air it's a little cameo by George Romero in the control booth appropriate position for him as that as the director of the program and one of the biggest biggest most expensive things in the film that I believe a very large portion of the budget was spent on was the the paper signs that they taped to the cameras it prints it out on someone's printer I'm very I was always even as a small child very impressed with the level of quality of her life to just disguise those cameras as a fictional television station to contrast the Zack Snyder one opens how a movie probably should opened if you're doing it more by than numbers right which is it opens up with Sarah Polley who's a nurse at a hospital and she's working a long shift it's late and some kind of thing happening and you're not quite sure so it's someone in their day-to-day life and then it's like you know someone's sick and someone has a bite wound on their arm I got to go home she goes home and goes to sleep next morning she wakes up and the neighbor girl is in the house that's that's kind of like you wanna you want to use your first 10 minutes and you want to introduce your characters and you want to slowly introduce what's happening but without giving away too much and the 10 10 page mark boom that's when you understand what's happening bla bla bla bla bla escalation hit hit your mark zombies are everywhere this one the first word out of the first characters mouths Ami's are everywhere no [ __ ] around yeah fly boy comes in and says we got to get out of here I got the helicopter all fueled up [ __ ] all these people right and you get to understand the characters without because that's another thing in the Dawn of the Dead remake is that it's it's very like it spells out who these people are and they're very kind of superficial movie characters these characters I think the four lead actors some of the supporting roles the acting isn't the best but the four main characters I think are all really strong and you really understand them and they don't have any sort of conventional arc like a conventional movie movie arc Fran has the most she starts out kind of weak and submissive and then she gets more aggressive and like I want to learn to shoot the guns I want to learn to fly the helicopter but it doesn't follow that's the biggest difference between the dona to remake them this is yeah one is a solid movie in a very conventional structure and this movie is more it has more personality because of our idiosyncratic and different it is it's a solid movie in an unconventional structure sure so they're good examples of both yeah there are a lot of good elements of the Dawn of the Dead remake like you said ty burrell I think when I look back in in my brain I saw it one time and the things that stick out to me our ty burrell is annoying even though I loved him in Modern Family which is my favorite television programs oh that's so awesome I don't you laugh it shows [ __ ] brilliant okay you guys have a good that show has more puns then I know what to do with excuse me when you two fellas are done blowing each other maybe Davy Crockett can tell us the deal here it's it's very it's it's a movie that's meant to appeal to everyone in the broadest way possible and this movie is like well just musics weird like what's going on like there's lots of lots of weird touches to it it's like someone in 1978 made it who was smoking the grass oh you think so possibly there was some grass smokin III don't see Tom Savini as a man who who would partake in the Mary Jane Wow well paints and zombie makeup man but I could be wrong you never know we should also note that the Zack Snyder Dawn of the Dead remake takes place in Milwaukee wisk yes it's some sort of fantasy version of Milwaukee where when you go out over Lake Michigan there's like tropical islands out there somewhere there's Lake Milwaukee a gigantic island somewhere somewhere presumably in Lake Michigan yeah that you can get to by boat and that you could live on it has palm trees on it yes even though this isn't a tropical climate there are palm trees you but anyway back to Dawn of the Dead so we have four characters who feel like real people they're very subdued there's no wacky obscene character traits oh that's awesome I think it's great cuz it's like we're stuck in the situation what do we do and everybody's just focused on dealing with that yeah but but like screenwriting 101 says so-and-so needs to be concerned with their spouse no concern at all I mean it's like they don't even mention significant others or family or just [ __ ] it there's only two children in the whole movie and they get gunned down by Ken Foree mediately he didn't even know they were zombies I was gonna say rich I felt like that was a very rich comment no I was just about to go read but then I realized I was talking to you but that when they get into the mall they we methodically watch them take all the steps necessary to to secure the mall which is the funnest part of the movie but when they get into the mall it's like okay it's overrun with zombies what do we do well we gotta secure the entrances we got us we got to systematically clean them out for some reason they decided to take all the zombies that they kill there's lots of headshots in this movie lots of glorious headshots but they take all the zombies that they kill and put him in a freezer as opposed to just like going off on the roof and just throwing them off I'm not sure why they put them in the freezer next to all that food that they could use now that food has been contaminated they do a lot of work they shoot all the zombies I'm not sure what order they come in but they they murder murder if they're zombies eliminate all the zombies from the inside of the mall then they have to secure the entrances and for some reason in the storage / office rooms they have stockpiles of spam well that's the spam room don't knock it it's got its own and don't knock it it's got its own key my only thing that I always think of when I say when I think of myself securing a location for a zombie outbreak so you guys secure all the drinking water that you can oh yeah that's what I wouldn't even thought of yeah I would my first order of business other than food I guess killing the zombies killing zombies comes first I'm finding every possible container in the entire building whether it's just the bowl in the department store or a plastic container for something fill them all up with running tap water before it gets shut off that's number one and then number two is is stockpile all of your your perishable foods make sure you eat those first and then secondary would be your non perishables such as your cans your ramen noodles things of that nature I would go and order but water number one priority that's not even mentioned in the movie it's not that's misstep it really is this movie sucks now but let's talk about makeup you mentioned headshots I got a book when I was very little called grand illusions I don't even think I don't know how I ended up getting it but it's yeah it's just a book with all of techniques used for all the movies he had done up till that point so the whole section I'm down to the Dead all the headshots are just you take a quarter tie it to a fishing line put it on the actors head cover it with like wax or some sort of makeup appliance and yank it off and so you get a perfect round hole and then probably some sort of burst of I don't think he's an air compressor or what but something behind the head to have the brains burst out the simplest effects and this isn't Tom Savini 'he's best work this movie although all them Grey's aam be but sometimes they look green sometimes they look blue I think it's just you didn't have much of a crew so it's just we got to make up all these zombies quick just paint them great and leave it at that yeah well a lot of that goes to the either the film stock or the color timing or because the blood too is very it's almost like neon it's very vibrant red which actually makes it grosser in a weird way it's it's like sickly it doesn't look realistic it's really about it looks gross it's very orange and they Thompson beanie actually didn't do the blood I don't know if you know this they ordered the blood from the 3m company he says on the commentary and I don't know what that means is like 3m just manufacture fake blood at some point no see I read that they actually had a someone in the food industry do the blood a chef boyardee I get it they went to the the manufacturing plant and they said how much can you filter out the O's in your SpaghettiOs and give us a couple gallons of this bright orange maybe they couldn't do that and they actually had someone on the set with like like a strainer yeah dumping out all the I don't know what they did with all the O's they donated them to charity okay it's funny cuz this is probably the most like when you think of zombie movies this is the one everybody thinks oh this is sort of the iconic zombie film but as like the lamest looking zombies in it Night of the Living Dead black and white it's fine they look like ghouls you can't tell Day of the Dead is of course Tom Savini news masterpiece the zombies and that look amazing the makeup effects are great the gore is legitimately nauseating Day of the Dead is an amazing film as well yes [Music] [Music] it's weird yeah Daler dad is my personal favorite of the movies but I think Dawn of the Dead is a better movie overall there's a higher budget so it actually has less of that sort of weird creative energy that I think something like Donnellan that has yeah it would be a more conventional setting if you're talking about the Dead trilogy it's like each one has its own unique perspective yeah like the the first one is very very original and it takes place in the farmhouse it's black and white and it's it's like it's the it's that's the quintessential zombie movie that everyone thinks of is Night of the Living Dead classic Dawn of the Dead Donna dad's the one everyone ripped off Jonathan yes that's a crazy 70s movie there's they're there there's a biker gang that throws pies at zombie and something just got out of control you could tell it's just a bunch of dudes having fun making a movie yeah the third one is mud is very dark it's more disgusting mm-hmm we've reached a point where the only people left are all horrible [ __ ] like Jim said in our last best of the worst episode watching this movie makes me feel like I have the flu watching Day of the Dead it makes me feel like I'm covered in disgusting bugs [Music] it's a very bleak like this is more fun movie day that that is a lot Bleeker which that's why I like it more just because that seems more appropriate for the subject matter I like this because there there's um I mean originally the original ending was not hopeful and and it's still even though the two of the main characters survived it's still not hopeful right but there is like let's go on there is something happening it's ambiguous in a way where it's like well maybe they could make it they can survive somewhere we at least know that biker gangs are surviving out there so other people probably are too yeah in Day of the Dead it's like they land and I think Miami in the beginning or somewhere or some city in Florida some major city and they're like which is desolate yeah everybody's dead remember the crocodiles except for the crocodiles we got to go back to our our underground bunker yeah and scientists and the military are working together to find some kind of solution to the zombie problem and everyone just goes nuts [ __ ] dead and then there's there's like underground caves or there's hordes of zombies if they're using is like experiment experiment material yeah and it's just like yeah I'd go nuts in that environment and it's really like it's claustrophobic it's dirty it's depressing it's the polar opposite of Dawn of the Dead I can see why do so many people hated it when it came out because Donna the dad like it's big it's open there in the small we have the run of the whole mall and and there's sort of a like a fantasy element to it like a wish fulfillment element yeah if you take out the fact that zombies are eating everybody but and then yeah Day of the Dead it's just like everybody's a miserable [ __ ] and we're stuck in this tiny hopeless facility there's a wonderful little montage and Dawn of the Dead once they maintained once they get control of the mall where they're just having fun with all the stuff in the mall yeah like friends putting on makeup they have a nice steak dinner they're playing with all the clothes and toys and stuff and and then it's like yeah and now we're bored and then yeah well that's the thing is let that's the whole deal with the movie is yeah we have we're safe in here or you know but then then what like we've we've got this place to ourselves we've got the zombies out oh but there's nothing else to do whoever just wait it out it's it's just sort of ignoring the overall problem what's your favorite scene from Dawn of the Dead Jay I think my favourite scene is the opening that just a stet just sets up the entire tone of the movie them in the the television station just showing the chaos because once they get to the mall it's mostly just the four of them for the whole thing so it's nice to see at the beginning what's going on in the world before they kind of escape from it my favorite scenes when they throw pies in zombies faces that's something you wouldn't see in a studio film and that's that's this movie is so all over the place or it's like what can we do let's just do it you know it's there's an interview with George Romero that I think it was in the a/v Club really talking about once the biker show up and it's like chaos and they're running the bikes through them all and they were just filming this in the mall just running these motorcycles through them all but one of them sticks his arm while the zombies are attacking everyone he sticks his arm in the blood-pressure machine and of course the zombies rip him out of it the arm stays in there and the interview they asked him like why is that in the movie like why would this biker do this so why would you put that the movie and his answer was because we could and that's the spirit of the whole film should you warn potential viewers of the 1978 Dawn of the Dead film those who haven't seen it that it may be more boring or than World War Z I haven't seen World War Z I would say this movie is less boring than the Dawn of the Dead remake there's more action and craziness and slick cinematography in the remake but I think this is a far more interesting engaging movie than that one that's one way you have to you have to sit down and you have to watch it yeah I think I think knowing how the movie was made helps to like I think it's a fine movie even if you don't kind of understand the the the style of filmmaking that they were doing at that time that very loose sort of improvisational style but I think it works as a movie without that but I do think it it benefits from knowing that too when you think about the fact that it's just oh we got them all all to ourselves at night you know the mall closes at 10:00 or whatever and then we're here till 6:00 in the morning and we're just running motorcycles through it and and trashing things it's a less polished Hollywood production which tells you how to feel like oh this character this is happening to this character oh you should be scared now oh you should feel this now you shouldn't like this character because they're selfish and you know this doesn't tell you how to feel and that's one of one of the key points is here it is like these characters or don't like them and that gives it more character that's what makes it a more interesting movie yeah both visually and in the writing it's just visually it's just bright lights everywhere and then yeah the writing the characters are are under written in a good way yeah I think I think any good character that's on screen is one you could I mean that's your general rule of your protagonist or your lead characters that you need to be able to project yourself into them into their situation so a good movie you you become engaged in it when you feel like you're in the movie you know in rewatching Dawn of the Dead bub has always been my favorite zombie performance but I think flyboy at the end of Dawn of the Dead his body language though I like the way he has his one foot like like I don't even know how he did that like it looks broken I think that's when he fell they pulled him back down as an actor like the way he's able to keep it like twisted over like that and then he's just got the gun dangling off his finger he's got the best body language and best performance maybe ever for a zombie Bob you feel more emotion for of course which is kind of where Romero was going yeah throughout the series or he doesn't even care about the humans anymore and his sympathies start to go more towards the zombies like maybe we should just give it to him well that was a twist on it like you can't just make an a third zombie survival movie or pee will hole up somewhere and you know he was that's why I like day as well I'm not quite there I my heart's with Dawn of the Dead always but Day of the Dead has it's playing with ideas more yeah the humans are the real bad guys the zombies are just are just pure instinct and creatures the humans are the ones that have the real evil yeah the the bickering the bitterness the hatred the distrust all those things that are in that movie and the zombies are just sort of like the vehicle to tell the story of joke-a-lot Oh yelling so I would recommend honor the dead if you can find it yeah there's a blu-ray on Amazon it's like $100 yeah you could probably find an old DVD maybe yeah use copies I I don't know how much this set goes for anymore this is you can find the ultimate edition this has three cuts of the movie tons of documentaries it's great yeah I have the collector's edition here which is I think it's like 15 or 13 minutes longer than than the theatrical release this one probably extended yeah it's the original director's cut okay yeah yeah there's that and then there's the European cut the Dario Argento supervise which takes out all the humor and and just makes it more of a straightforward kind of Gore film they they they digitally removed the the pies and they hit zombies with cannolis and stuff Wow [Music] Italian jokes and happy Halloween I'm saying it to you oh yeah happy Halloween Thank You Jay happy Halloween happy Halloween [Music]

Channel: RedLetterMedia

Views: 1,507,469

Rating: 4.8965349 out of 5

Keywords: redlettermedia, red letter media, red, letter, media, plinkett, half in the bag, best of the worst, mike stokasa, jay bauman, rich evans, dawn of the dead, night of the living dead, day of the dead, george romero, george a. romero, zach snyder, 1978

Id: EdTNuZWA4mY

Length: 33min 40sec (2020 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 25 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/ScienceOfPatterns]

I really enjoy Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead (I also like most of Snyder's films anyways) but I don't like how literally all of the social commentary from the original was ripped out. That often happens with horror remakes; people are too focused on the monster, and that's not the biggest part of what makes movies compelling.

[u/munchem6]

It's like poetry, it rhymes.