George Romero's "Dead" movies, Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, are perhaps best known for their graphic gore, but that the success of those films was due to more than just Romero's willingness to show blood-and-guts is confirmed by this movie, the third installment in his trilogy. Day of the Dead more than outdoes its predecessors when it comes to grossing out the audience, yet I nonetheless found it disappointing. As surprising as this might be for a low-budget horror flick, Day's fatal flaw is in the area of plot and characters. Romero may not have gotten Oscar-caliber performances in Dawn, but the performers were likable, and the story of their travails, though not exactly complex, was an involving adventure story. In the final Dead movie (as of this writing) on the other hand, the story never takes off. The characters spend almost the whole movie locked in an underground complex protected from the hordes of the undead. They are divided between scientists studying the zombies and soldiers assigned to protect them, plus two helicopter pilots. Of course, there is much conflict between the two groups as there is with the zombies. So far, this sounds like a good setup for a horror movie, but Romero botches the execution, probably due to an over ambitious desire to make a serious statement, which should not be a horror filmmaker's first priority. Romero should have gradually increased the tension between the characters, as in The Thing. Instead, they're screaming and pointing guns at each other almost from the very first scene. This dissipates all of the tension, and clearly prefigures the ending. There's very little real conflict, since the soldiers are depicted as complete bumbling fools. Romero lets the actors playing the soldiers overact shamelessly, and the dialog he writes for them is simply terrible. These guys are so annoying that I couldn't for them to get eaten. What's the point that Romero is trying to make here- that soldiers are bad? When, inevitably, the military turns on the scientists, it's for reasons that the scientist could have at least tried to explain. Another problem with the story of Day is the pacing.Dawn of the Dead may have had a relaxed pace, for which it has sometimes been criticized, but it worked because Romero began with the zombies overtaking civilization, relaxed the pace after the heroes barricaded themselves, and then finished off with a spectacular final attack by the zombies. Here, on the other hand, there's barely any action until the very end. That's means that dialog has to carry the weight up until the end, and neither Romero nor his actors are up to snuff.
Review of Day of the Dead
