Dawn of the Dead TV Preview



Last night the USA Network showed the first ten minutes of the new Dawn of the Dead to promote the movie's release on Friday. There's no doubt about it, that first ten minutes is a neat bit of filmmaking.

We follow a hospital intern who leaves work and goes home. She has a nice night with her husband. The next morning she wakes up to find out that the newly dead have become cannibalistic maniacs and society has all but collapsed while she was sleeping.


"Want... brains... And Olsen Twin videos... but mostly...brains..."

This set piece, which serves a similar function as the apartment building raid at the beginning of the original Dawn of the Dead (1979), highlights the scariest thing about this apocalyptic scenario -- our loved ones are the greatest threat. The intern's hubby is bitten by the cute little neighbor kid, and after he bleeds to death he revives and pursues her down the street as she drives away from her home in a panic. It's easy to see how this could destroy civilization in a matter of hours.

Perhaps the largest departure from the George Romero film evident in the trailer is that the zombies in the new film don't shuffle like arthritic mall walkers, they can run. Some zombie purists (can you imagine such a thing?) have objected to this change, but I like it. If we're supposed to accept that the recently dead are mobile, why can't they be as nearly mobile as they were when they died? Looking closely at the trailer for the film it appears in some scenes the zombies do the zombie shuffle, but perhaps that's a result of those particular zombies having been around awhile. I'd like to think the filmmakers have thought the logistics of zombiedom through that far.

As much as I liked the first ten minutes as presented, they don't really guarantee the rest of the movie will be good. Showing more or less anonymous characters caught up in the end of the world is easy. The tough part comes next, when the movie has to focus on a small number of characters and make us care about whether they live or die.

Posted: Tue - March 16, 2004 at      

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