new Dawn of the Dead

Yeah, I hate to be all horror fanboy-y and stuff, but why oh why did they have to make this. I realize that it won’t destroy all existing copies of the original or anything, but I know know that non-horror buffs are going to be talking about what a bad movie Dawn of the Dead is and I’ll have to sit in a corner and cry.

kingpengvin is spot on when it comes to what makes the original work, particularly the transformation scenes with Roger (and to a lesser extent Stephen). What’s more, the phenomenal soundtrack for the movie and the atmosphere it helps to create will be entirely lost, and I don’t trust any of these people to come up with something as good or better.

If this movie opted for the depressing ending that Dawn didn’t use (and that I like better), I could maybe deal with it, but given the nature of this movie, I wouldn’t be suprised if it ended with someone coming up with a cure for zombie-ism and saving the world.

I am looking forward on seeing how this movie handles aspects of the original (the TV broadcasts they keep watching, the looting of the mall, the biker gang, the stagnation of life within the mall after a while) if they use them at all, so I’ll still see it. But I’m expecting suckage.

Well that was odd. First, msmith, thanks for the link. But, did it play “really weird” for anyone else? I downloaded it, to avoid the heartbreak of streaming video on my dial-up connection, and I think the file was corrupted in transit, or something.

It looked, well, wrong. Lots of visual distortion, heavy pixellating when the camera changed scenes…

Anyway, though my viewing was impaired, I spotted the jumping belly thing that El Elvis Rojo mentioned, but couldn’t tell if it was supposed to be a corpse or a live woman. Assuming the latter (or, hell, even if it is the former) I’m betting we’re looking at a dream/nightmare sequence there.

Remember Ripley, in the hospital bed, five or ten minutes into Aliens?

I’m willing to give it a chance at the moment, but I too am afraid it’ll be twisted so far from the original that only the most basic elements will remain.

If you wanna remake Dawn of the Dead, then do so, by all means. I’ll be pulling for you all the way, hoping for something enjoyable.

If you want to make a zombie flick in which the zombies, characters, plot, and pretty much everything but the setting itself are completely different from the original, don’t bother, 'cause you ain’t remaking a damn thing, you’re just making a brand new zombie flick.

And that ain’t a bad thing. But it ain’t Dawn.

Yes. The 1941 Maltese Falcon was a remake of the 1931 film.

Off the top of my head…
Cronenberg’s The Fly and Carpenter’s The Thing
in non horror there is THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN

In the Good film remade bad category there are numerous offenders butoff the top of my head the worst have been

Rollerball
Psycho
House on Haunted Hill

I’m giving Night of the Living Dead (1990) a pass because I like Tom Savani and Romero gave his blessing to the project. Also it tried to stay true to the feel and sbstance of teh original with a few interesting changes. Not great but certainly not a bastardized piece of crap.

Oh Msmith what the hell are you talking about. Because the original wasn’t a shit slick production it wasn’t good?!?
Lord help me! Obviously someone found something of value in it or at least they realized the profit potential to that particular film or they wouldn’t be stealing the title to sell this mistake.

What next how about a remake of the OMEN with a higher body count and oh yeah it was kind of ambigious about Damien being the son of the Devil. They will use CGI and make sure everyone knows he is. For a clever twist they will make the Mother take on the Peck character and she’ll be a hot young star who will spend most of the movie in a white wet tee shirt. Now that would be a good film…
Now let’s run it by the committe and see if there is any more life we can strip out of it so we can target a demographic to increase profit potential.

$#%^@ Sometimes I hate hollywood.

They made a remake of Maximum Overdrive as well. Do you want me to get started on that?

Look, I don’t want to get all up in yo grill with any Romero fans here. The best thing about the Romero films is the spooky atmosphere and the gritty 70’s realism. But lets face it. The lurching, “braaains!” chanting (I know…) zombie that you kill by shooting in the head has become somewhat of a cliche thanks to countless remakes and references to Romero’s work.

As kingpengvin pointed out, the dead don’t leap out at you at yell “BOOGIEBOOGIEBOOGIEBOOGA!!!” in Romeros world. His (IMHO one-dimensional) characters weren’t fighting zombies. They were fighting human nature. Most of the time, they were just as likely to kill each other or themselves through sheer stupidity. The zombies were just a force of nature that couldn’t be stopped.

I will judge the remake on it’s own merits, however I fear that the big mistake they will make is following the usually formula of 10 minutes to meet the characters, 1 hour of running around screaming and dieing, 30 minutes of kicking ass and another 20 minutes to arm and detonate the giant bomb that will put an end to all the zombies.

No we prefer our meat raw and alive :wink:

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I’m hoping the “I know” refers to the fact that you know that Romero zombies don’t just eat brains and only one has ever spoken on film. I agree it has become over used but when done right it still works.

Hell, the fast running Zombie was done back in the 80’s with Return of the Living dead so this film is not charting any new waters in its attempt to be a “better” version.

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Well we sort of agree. I tend to see one dimensional characters as ones who never change or have any arc during the story but We can differ on that.

But the humans being their own worst enemy is one of the important themes of the films one that I doubt this fim will recognize. nstead you’ll have people kicking ass and maybe one character who is bad throughout and you wonder why the group doesn’t feed him to the hoard.

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I will judge the remake on it’s own merits, however I fear that the big mistake they will make is following the usually formula of 10 minutes to meet the characters, 1 hour of running around screaming and dieing, 30 minutes of kicking ass and another 20 minutes to arm and detonate the giant bomb that will put an end to all the zombies. **
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Ahhh don’t forget if grosses are good they’ll want to leave it open for a sequel… the Zombies will not all be destroyed… the heroes will get away after a heroic sacrifice TM(likely by Ving)

I think We both see that this will likely be a rehash of the cliches but empty of any real ideas. I like the original because it did have ideas, it had themes and said something.

I didn’t think the characters in the original Dawn of the Dead were one dimensional. I mean, we spend a good half hour or so watching nothing but the characters develope. It was the focus of the film, I can’t believe that it would remain so powerful if it did a poor job of developing them.
And, again, I have to toot the horn of the slow moving zombies. The thing about zombie films that makes them so terrifying is the sense that, no matter what you do, no matter where you go, no matter how hard you fight…you will never get away. They’re everywhere, and whereas they are slow and stupid, there’s so damn many of them, those negatives really don’t work for you at all. And the swarm effect! When the door opens and there are like, six on the other side who just lunge…That’s one of the things I have to give Resident Evil. They sure knew how to have their zombeis act!
Fast zombies always just seemed too…comical to me. Maybe it’s the influence of the fact that most movies with them are comedies (Return of the Living Dead 1, 2 &3, My Boyfriend’s Back). Slow moving zombies just make more sense. I forget where I read it, but there was a bit of a breakdown for the actions of the zombies in the Romero films, where the zombies in Night were incredibly slow moving and jerky because they were the most recently dead; the zombies in Dawn were a bit more loose and faster, but still rather slow because their bodies were still somewhat adjusting to their current state; the zombies in Day were faster and more aggressive due to the fact that, although they were more decomposed, the zombies were older and their brains had worked out the kinks of getting them going again.
Now, I really liked 28 Days Later, and found the fast moving zombies in that film pretty damn scary, but there’s one things about them that really separated them from the traditional zombies, and that was the fact that…they weren’t ressurrected dead! Their conciousness was gone, but for all other aspects, they were still alive. That’s why shooting them in the chest or various other places not located in the head could kill them. Still, they were very damn effective zombies.
But still, all other forms of zombification that I’ve seen in this respect, all deal with a person dying first. If they get bit, they get infected, get sick, die, then come back. But they always die, and it makes sense that once the brain shuts down, it would take a while for the system to get things back up and running at a normal pace. So, instantaneous ressurrection into super fast zombies just doesn’t work for me. I like em slow, I like em dumb, and I like em EVERYWHERE!!! It’s just scarier that way.

I personally liked the “theatrical remake” of NOTLD.

However, I have a bad feeling about this one. From the basic summaries I’ve read, it seems as if the not-dead cast is larger–a sin already committed in the lackluster sequel to Dawn of the Dead.

Second, the film seems to be more of an “escape from the mall” flick rather than a warped wish fulfilment picture.

And worst of all is the complete absence of the Godfather of Gore, the very patron saint of zombie films (and particularly, blue and green zombie films), Tom Savini.

As best I can tell, that means this picture is entirely out of the hands of anyone who ever made a decent zombie flick prior to Danny Boyle. Boyle at least had the balls to go above and beyond the conventions of zombie flicks by offering a new story along with the new “rules.” (Okay, not that new a story… some might see 28 Days as a modern re-working of Day of the Dead, but that’s quite a reach.)

My initial guess is that this remake will focus on everything its predecessor deftly avoided, and wind up a farcical action picture. I sincerely hope I am incorrect.

My zombie freak husband just told me Tom Savini is in it. He plays the sherriff but doesn’t do makeup.

At the risk of enhancing my geek factor, I’d like to clarify something about the Romero films: they potray something going terribly wrong with the way the world works. It’s not (apparently) a virus or anything else that can be identified and controlled. It just… is. Possibly God has it in for us.

More to the point: you don’t have to be bitten by a zombie to become a zombie. It’s true that they cause a lethal infection, but remember – if you die for any reason – heart attack, car wreck, gunshot – you’ll rise as a zombie (provided your brain is intact).

For some reason I seem to recall that they do mention in one of the newscasts in the original NotLD, something about a satellite returning from… Venus? Have to dig up (har har) my copy of the flick and see if I’m remembering or inventing this bit.

Something about an unmanned probe returning, but communications, or more likely telemetry, is down with the thing.

Quite possibly has nothing to do with the zombies themselves, and it was never mentioned again in any of the Romero flicks. Don’t recall offhand if this was touched on in the Savini remake, though.

I remember in the original they talk about a satelite from venus that was contaminated with some sort of radiation and was thusly detonated in the atmosphere. This was one possible reason for the zombies, but the military wasn’t letting the scientists really confirm anything during the news broadcasts. After Night though, I don’t think they ever mentioned the satelite again. It’s been a while since I saw Day of the Dead, did they ever mention a virus in that film? It wasn’t my favorite of the three, so I didn’t pay that much attention to it, sorry to say.

And I got another question while thinking about it last night. As pointed out, in Romero’s world, if one were to die of a heart attack, they would rise as zombies. But what if they were ressussitated? It seemed to take a few hours for a dead person to come back, so what if they were revived say five minutes after they kicked the can? Would they slowly turn into a zombie, or be okay? Hmmmmmm…any thoughts?

From what I understand, in the original NOTLD, no reason whatsoever was given for the dead returning to life. The thing about the satellite returning from Venus was stuck in there as an afterthought, because someone wanted SOME kind of reason for all this stuff happening.

28 Days Later, I might add, follows the Romero style and tradition. The zombies are fast, sure, but not smart, and easily evaded, so long as you don’t tangle with them in mobs. The true enemy – the SCARIEST enemy – in that movie is the live folks.

I liked the NOTLD remake from 1990. I think it was a decent movie, and it even had some things to say that didn’t get said in the original. Was it as powerful as the original? No. It wasn’t the same film, and it wasn’t released in the original time frame. The original, put out in 1968, when a lot of folks thought American society was going to hell with no brakes, was one of the REASONS the movie was so powerful.

But the remake wasn’t a bad movie. The young people of 1990 probably preferred it to the black-and-white original.

Dawn Of The Dead was a classic, hands down. It tackled the problem of the zombie enemy and the living enemy in interesting new ways, and managed to throw a spin on consumer society, too. It was a great movie.

It has not aged well, though. I watched it just the other day, and was struck by the … AGE… of the thing. It’s an old seventies movie. This does not make it any less a great movie, but I can easily see where some folks today would simply look at it and call it “an old seventies horror movie.”

So let them make their remake. If it’s good, peachy. Not enough good horror movies out there.

And if it’s a turd, well, we still have the originals.

Day of the Dead, which I think deserves a re watch by Romero fans, has the scientists baffled as to why it is happening. They try various things but in the end their head guy Dr. “Frankenstien” Logan gives up trying to solve the why and decides to deal with what to do with our dead friends.

Now what I want to know is why the @#$@# they give money for remakes and crappy rip offs based on video games (HOUSE OF THE DEAD/Resident Evil) and no one wil slap down the cash to Romero to make a new film?

I mean he has shown that he can make profitable original Dead films right?

Hasn’t he been working on another “Dead” movie for the past couple of years? Twilight of the Dead, I believe it is called.

Aside from his dead movies, though, Romero hasn’t really done anything big and exciting, to my knowledge. Most of his work has been low budget, cultish movies (like The Crazies) but overall, he’s never had any big blockbusters to my knowledge. That’s the best (and quite frankly, only) reason I can think of that is keeping him from having been given a good chunk of change to help make another sequel.

Actually it will be called Dead Reckoning and he hasn’t done much yet.

I’m bumping this old thread only because the new trailer is out and the film is not looking any better.

see for yourself
http://www.apple.com/trailers/universal/dawnofthedead/

In fact I think my worst fears are being realized. Too many characters meaning a lot of carnage of people we won’t really care about. Goofy scares. Feh

If I wanted a goofy Zombie flick I think I’ll be seeing
Shaun of the Dead