True… but, then, I guess you could call me a traditionalist. I grew up with the Christopher Lee vampire archetype… a creature that was NOT human, and understood love and sex the way a pig understands international politics. The most horrifying kind of vampire to ME was a creature that used sexual magnetism and its own attraction to bait a trap. This was one of the things that ruined Bram Stoker’s Dracula for me – the fact that our title character turns out to be a dewy-eyed romantic, despite all his homicidal posturing. This was NOT the Dracula that Bram Stoker wrote about.
…and the zombies I grew up with were shambling parodies of their former selves, mindlessly hungering for the flesh of the living, in a world where death no longer meant eternal rest. Just the opposite.
And if one is going to go and change the major details… well… whatthehell did they option the original title, for? I think it’s already been mentioned in this thread that they didn’t even need to be holed up in a mall. It could have been anywhere.
In short, if you’re gonna do a vampire movie, do a vampire movie. Otherwise, title it Night Of The Succubus, go with the R rating, and do all the erotic horror you want.
Sorry, guess I wasn’t clear. What I meant was that if one wanted to make a movie about vampires that fed through sex, it would make more sense to use a succubus or incubus as the monster rather than alter the traditions associated with vamps. On that point I agree with you.
On the other hand, with zombies, the rules aren’t quite as well-established, so it bothers me little when somebody wants to put a new spin on it. I do think that a slower build up to worldwide catastrophe and the collapse of civilization would have been better, but I can likewise accept the version presented here.
I think we’re nearly all in agreement, though, that the original was better than this remake. It’s the standard by which all zombie movies should be judged.
this was a two story mall. When they come back running up the stairs from the sewers they are running UP stairs. They run thru the mall running and yell that they are breaking out NOW, because the mall has been breached by the zombies.
Then we seem them run to the elevators. If they are on the first floor of the mall, they can’t possibly be taking the elevator to the second floor because the garage with soup-up SUV’s is below the 1st floor of the mall (???)
So they have to take the elevator down below the first floor, right? And if they did, shouldn’t there be zombies down there already? Since coming back up the sewers I would have thought that the basement garage was breached already???
I just assumed it was a split-level mall. Then again, I could be wrong; I wasn’t paying that close attention to that detail.
Number Six, I concede your point; the running brain-eaters in Return Of The Living Dead didn’t bother me… but, then, this wasn’t connected to the serious Romero films. When one is REMAKING one of the serious Romero films, it seems like some thought should be given to these matters. The fact that they ran was bothersome, but not nearly so bothersome as the apparent changes in how zombieism worked.
I cannot satisfy Shade, since there doesn’t seem to be a motie for “rolling around on the floor in agony,” and last I saw, the :smack: (smack) motie wasn’t working properly…
It’s indicative, though, of how the filmmakers were thinking. In the original, the zombies are the threat only in the beginning. After taking the mall, they cease to be much of a factor, and our heroes loot, decorate, and wallow to their hearts’ content.
They do so amidst the background of some increasingly chaotic TV broadcasts. This punctuates how bad the situation has become… how the center is not holding… and so on.
I thought this was great. It was cheap. It filled time. And it served a VERY important plot purpose!
The remake skips over this almost entirely. We see a wallful of TVs broadcasting horrible news, confused politicians, and swarming zombies… and ALL broadcasting facilities are DEAD within 48 hours.
That’s nuts.
I keep thinking about the broadcasts from the original. What might they have done if they’d had portable steadicams, like we do now? Site-linked broadcasting, from the van, for live reports? I can’t help but think that stringing out the broadcasts for weeks, and watching the channels wink out… one by one… except possibly some children’s channel, totally automated… until a tape breaks…
…man, what would this have done to the sense of quiet horror this movie had to offer?
Can I point you at Terry Pratchett’s “Carpe Jugulum”? It has a lot to say about the traditions associated with vampires - specifically, that there are so many different traditions. Which leads of course, to a character hunting vampires having to ask each vampire where he comes from before rooting through a rather large selection of anti-vampire gear to find what she needs to kill it.
Be warned that it helps to have read some of the previous “Witch novels” of the Discworld. If you don’t want to do that, PM or email me and I’ll tell you what you need to know.
I just thought I’d come as late to the thread as humanly possible and say that I finally got around to seeing the movie last night and thought it more or less sucked ass.
Now, I don’t mean that to say that I was dissapointed with it. The original DOTD is easily one of my top 10 (maybe top 5) movies of all time; I’ve watched it about a thousand times, I know every line of it and love every minute of it. I tried not to be angry that they were calling this thing DOTD, but I knew I probably wasn’t going to like it very much. And I didn’t. It did, however, make me appreciate the original even more.
The theater I watched it in had about 15 other people in it, most of whom were yelling at the screen at various parts (“She’s gonna bite his ass![”), which made it more entertaining than if I’d been watching it at home, but overall it’s not something I would have been dissapointed to miss in the theater.
I guess what surprised me is that elements that I thought would be better in this movie weren’t. The gore is more realistic, yeah, but since I couldn’t care less about any of the characters (and before I go any further, I’d like to say that Kevin Zegers, who played the “good” security guard, is amazingly hot) I didn’t really care what was happening to them. There were no scenes that were even close to as fun as Roger and Peter running around JC Penny when they first break into the mall, or the whole gang clearing out the zombies after arming themselves at the totally bizarre gun store in the mall. And I was actually a little dissapointed with the zombies themselves (not the fast-moving part, I knew I was going to hate that from the beginning, and I totally hated it) just because they were so boring. Yeah, the zombies in the original are just blue people for the most part, but they strike me as a lot more memorable, even if it’s only because you spend parts of the movie rooting for and feeling sorry for them.
So basically I got exactly what I expected to out of the movie. I thought it was a fun popcorn flick while I still think the original is brilliant. Not something I’d buy on DVD (I liked 28 Days Later a lot more), but it was fun to sit through once.
Don’t really have much to add except that after seeing it on friday I keep coming back to this quote I saw on the IMDB:
"Bob Strauss in the Los Angeles Daily News seems to prefer the new version, writing, “This will be considered by some a travesty of Romero’s well-regarded sequel to his low-budget masterpiece Night of the Living Dead. But let’s be honest here. The original Dawn went on way too long, and its central shopping = brain dead joke, while a brilliant metaphor, was beaten to, well, death.”
While I won’t say I prefer the new version (I lurve the original), believing the original is some profound untouchable masterpiece is revisionist history at best.
Out of all of them, *Day Of The Dead * was my least fave. I’ve been told that his backers tried to steer the movie, then cut the budget when he dug in his heels…
Used to be, but ever since I Am Legend, science has been a source of explaining pretty much everything away. Most recently, you’ve got movies like Near Dark, Blade, Underworld, and Ginger Snaps to name a few that all look at vampirism and lycanthropy as a form of virus that can be scientifically overcome. Again, it all depends on your source, of course. I had no qualms with the zombies from Luccio Fulcci’s films being explained as ressurrected by evil spirits and thus being supernatural (I do have a problem with the fact all his films sucked). But NotLD did mention radiation causing mutation, and in Day of the Dead they talk about infection, which isn’t something spirits do to you. The belief that you can cut off a bitten limb before one becomes completely infected shows a sense of contagion (ie a virus). I haven’t seen any movies where someone’s bitten by a vampire and cuts off the limb and ends up okay, but there have been some where the condition has been cleaned up with the help of antibiotics of sorts.
Basically, if you’re going to go the supernatural way, then fine…if you’re going biological, okay. The fact this movie doesn’t chose either side, yet the original goes more scientific/biological set a precident that this film does as well. And the way they showed the transformations helps to build that belief. Thus, people have issues with certain aspects of the film due to that (ie. the speedy spread).
Ben being black adds a depth to the movie that would otherwise be lacking, as the not exactly competent Harry doesn’t listen to what a black man says no matter how much sense it makes. If a white actor had played Ben, you’d just have had two white guys waving their dicks at each other.
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And why couldn’t it just be a black guy and a white guy doing the same? In fact, why do we have to take note of Ben’s blackness or Harry’s whiteness as a factor at all? Romero made a film in which race explicitly Does Not Matter, and yet some people insist on seeing it through the prism of race. Noone will let two guys just be two guys if they have unequal amounts of melanin in their skin, and that’s a shame.
That’s because Romero is making the point that man’s inhumanity is his greatest danger and his ultimate undoing. Romero’s theme throughout the series is that it’s not the zombies that are the problem as much as it is people being unable to cooperate.
No, they don’t. Freeze fram the DVD–the hanging zombies are all white.
Again, that’s the audience supplying a subtext that isn’t there.
A. You’re not being ironic. Look it up.
B. I haven’t seen Jabberwocky in years.
Strange Fruit, the song you were apparently alluding to, is about the lynching of black people and your previous post was about the racial dimensions of the Ben-Harry conflict, so your Matt Shephard reply is a total non sequitur. You said the rednecks had strange fruit, that is that black zombies had been lynched, which is clearly not the case. Matt Shephard’s tragic death has no relevance.
Maybe they were gay zombies, which leads to the question–how do you tell if a zombie is gay?