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Day of the Dead gore poster
Posted: Mar 25, 2008 in Movies
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Just saw this poster for the remake of the Romero film "Day of the Dead," which ordinarily wouldn't be news, but the poster struck me with its gore. Note the film stars Ving Rhames, who was also in the Zack Snyder remake or Romero's "Dawn of the Dead," but he's presumably not reprising his role from that film.
The word on this one is that it was ridiculously bad and is headed straight to video, but I wanted to get everyone's thoughts on the copious gore in this one sheet. What do you think, other than "Gross!"?
My biggest objection? There is no tagline stating "From the Director of "Friday the 13th, Parts 2 and 3."
In snippets that played over the end credits of the 2004 remake of "Dawn of the Dead," it was pretty conclusively implied that that the remaining survivors, including Ving Rhames, died. They fought their way onto a sailboat and set sail. They run low on food. (Also includes one of my favorite bits, where they find a floating styrofoam cooler, open it up and find a zombie head looking around and flapping its bony jaws.) Anyway, the land on an island, think it's deserted and turns out it's full of more zombies. The camera they'd been using to record their exploits gets dropped. They're dead.
Could be it's meant to be an entirely new storyline only vaguely connected to the previous film. George Romero's zombie films have followed a rough chronological order and sometimes re-used the same actors in different roles.
"Night" showed the early outbreak of a zombie attack. "Dawn" depicted the outbreak spreading all over the country, and showed people surviving for weeks in a mall. "Day" seemed to be set a couple of years later, with an unhappy pairing of soldiers and scientists trying to find a cure. "Land of the Dead" seems to be set a few more years down the road, with the humans living inside a city fortress, and essentially the rest of the world is zombie.
But the more important question is: Where do you stand on the perennial debate of fast vs. slow zombies?
I'm a slow zombie guy. Face it, dessicated muscles and brittle joints aren't going to motor a deadling along at Joseph Addai speeds.
Besides, it's their relentlessness that makes zombies compelling film antagonists. One on one, a human shouldn't have too much trouble outrunning them or outfighting them. But when there's dozens of them surrounding you, lurching toward you in that shuffling, shambling way...
OK, I think I need to pop "Return of the Living Dead" into my DVD player tonight...
In snippets that played over the end credits of the 2004 remake of "Dawn of ...
And don't forget "Diary," (which I haven't seen yet). I guess Romero goes back to the beginning and chronicles it "Blair Witch" style.
Romero has said, though, that he feels that his films are disconnected and not sequels in the true sense. He has even hinted that they don't even necessarily take place in the same "universe," in that there is no narrative cohesion between films. They're just individual zombie films that happen to all end with "of the (Living) Dead."
I did particularly like the end of the "Dawn" remake (I really liked the whole film, to be honest. It was pretty wicked, fast-moving zombies nothwithstanding). We didn't actually see them all die, though, leaving open a small possibility that Ving as the rough-and-tumble cop, managed to survive (which is why I didn't mention that one specifically :).
But the implication, of course, is that they did all die.
Really I don't have a preference between the traditional loping zombie and the contemporary Snyder Sprinter Zombies. If you want to get technical about it, you could say that most of the zombies we see are more recently deceased (and presumably haven't read their handbook and/or visited their caseworker), and are still operating on relatively healthy (albeit dead) muscles, tendons and bones.
If you went more off of the "virus" part of it, you could make the case that Snyder's zombies are the product of an intermarriage of Danny Boyle's quasi-zombies from "28 Days Later" and Romero's true zombies. We don't see any of them coming out of the ground...maybe Snyder's zombies are in the funeral-home stage and not yet buried and atrophied and rigor-mortized yet.
It's not specifically mentioned, but that's always a possibility.
In Romero's "Dawn" especially there was an element of comedy to their shuffling gait as well, with the heroes able to just duck around them one-on-one or even in dealing with small groups. It wasn't there in the other ones as much.
Oh, and I hope you all got my "Beetlejuice" reference there. :)
From the bits I've seen of the film, it seems the poster is the scraiest part. Mena Suvari and Nick Cannon? And the film didn't even merit an R rating. It seems like an MTV re-imagined Romero knock-off.