Mention Day of the Dead to horror fans and you’re likely to be met with a dismissive, “I liked it” or “Oh yeah, that’s a good one.”  The truth is, many horror fans (and particularly zombie fans) can’t say what they really feel: Day of the Dead is no Dawn of the Dead. They’re absolutely right about that.

Sometime in the early 80s, George A. Romero famously migrated from his proud filmmaking home of Pittsburgh to the Sunshine State, Florida.  While there, George concocted another sweeping screenplay for what many believed would be the close to the thematic trilogy that began with Night.  It’s easy to forget that two decades passed before yet another dead film, Land of the Dead, brought luminaries like Dennis Hopper and John Leguizamo into the fold.  Allegedly Romero was offered 7 million to produce a hard R rated version of Day, but when he pressed to release the film unrated (as Dawn had been, to great success) the budget was halved to 3.5 million.

Given this smaller budget, Romero was forced to scrape a lengthy prologue and content that would have seen our rag-tag band of survivors in an all-out Warriors-esque turf war in Florida (some of which found it’s way into Land of the Dead).  As such, the film was truncated to a few minutes of exploration in the topside world before our heroes take shelter in an underground bunker where the remainder of the film takes place.  Though the movie begins in Florida, through the magic of cinema, we are invisibly transported to a real limestone mine near Pittsburgh.  Over the next two hours, the characters bicker and fight their way to the film’s climax.

On the page, Dawn of the Dead was an exceedingly dour film.  It was only during the shoot that Romero decided to lighten things up a bit.  Day kept a lid on the humor and the result is potentially one of the most seriously handled zombie outbreak films to date.  Romero’s goal here is to examine the fallout, and perhaps to pessimistically point out that we might never recover from a real zombie holocaust.

The problem many people have with Day is that it’s difficult to find a likable character amongst the bunch.  There’s the erstwhile Captain Rhodes (played with teeth-gnashing bravado by Joe Pilato), a mad scientist who spends the running time training a zombie, and an inexplicably cantankerous Irish man.  Stuck in the middle of this bunch is Sarah, a non-descript doctor type, who is doing her best to hold it together while the testosterone runs rampant in the rat cage.  Not a wisecracking adventurous type in the bunch.  Certainly no Flyboy, Peter, Roger or Fran.

Another problem is the mine itself.  While it provides a multitude of ready made set pieces and the familiarity of a closed environment, it lacks the random fun of being pent up in a mall.  In other words, I personally don’t fantasize a scenario where I’m riding out the zombie holocaust amongst military equipment in an abandoned mine.  While that may be quite a bit more desirable in theory, in practice it makes the film feel a bit flat.

So is Day of the Dead a bad film?  In my opinion, not by a long shot. It’s just that, given the striking similarities between it and Dawn, it’s easy to find Day wanting.  Romero has gone on record as stating this film is his favorite of the Dead films and if Dawn weren’t such a stellar outing, I’d be inclined to agree.  Day of the Dead is a fantastic apocalyptic horror film first and perhaps a zombie film second.  A complex deconstruction of the madness that would eventually grip us in the final days of humanity. ✪