Movies: Dawn of the Dead

There's a close battle between the original "Dawn of the Dead" and the original "Night of the Living Dead" (both, of course, directed by George A. Romero) for the position of "Mulliga's Favorite Zombie Movie." "Dawn," however, is easily more epic, more socially conscious, and more comic than its 1968 predecessor. In its two-hour plus runtime, we quite literally see the fall of civilization, told from a standpoint that is both immensely personal (4 people locked up in a mall) and impersonal (the stark television reports from increasingly harried scientists and civil servants).



"Dawn" follows the exploits of four friends who escape from the chaos of a zombie-infested Philadelphia into the relative safety of a suburban mall. What happens there is pretty much the crux of the whole movie, but let's just say there's something awesome about being able to walk into a store and grab anything you want. Here's an example - the survivors happen upon something that almost any horror movie participant would kill for - a fully-stocked gun shop:



You eventually begin to feel all sorts of things along with the four survivors - revulsion, apathy, exhilaration, and, most poignantly, depression. If you wanted to watch a zombie horror movie for insights on the meaning of life, this is the one to watch. While the connection between the walking dead and mindless shoppers is pretty explicit, the movie still gets a lot of mileage from the consumerism on display. Thankfully, unlike Romero's later entries in the "Dead" series, the social message never gets in the way of the plot or the characters, which makes "Dawn" a classic horror adventure.

Rating: 10/10 (hey, it's one of my favorite movies)