Well, first off, this remake doesn’t suck. I made an exception to my standing rule of boycotting unnecessary – yet ever growing - American classic remakes for a few reasons. Firstly, if film had an anti-Christ, Michael Bay would be sporting a big old 666 tattoo and fortunately, he is nowhere near this production. Secondly, this movie was shot in my own backyard of Toronto and therefore sported familiar locales and homegrown talent like Sarah Polley, Lindy Booth and Matt Frewer among others. Also, people from the original 1978 staple, including Ken Foree and gore guru Tom Savini appear in some fun cameos. Mainly though, I think I’m just a sucker for zombie flicks.

This ‘reimagining’ can’t touch the original, but it does have some good stuff. While there were some glossed over Hollywood parts, the makers also made some efforts to avoid some of the usual traps, as well. Nice little touches like the rooftop conversations between Ving Rhames and Bruce Bohne - an especially creative device – were present throughout.

Dawn ’04 is also a lot gorier than I expected, which was a nice surprise. I was finally able to put those early reports of a PG-13 mentality to bed. A good mix of CG and makeup – balancing the two is often hard to do – is probably the thing I appreciated most. I think I prefer the classic Romero zombies to these ‘new and improved’ sprinting ones (ala 28 Days Later, although Dan O’ Bannon’s Return of the Living Dead zombies had some zip too), but they do serve to create more tension.

My main criticism is that the ending could have been a bit better – and yes, I mean the end credit sequence included. In their defence though, there’s only two ways you can end a zombie movie, up or down, life or death. Hopefully, there’s an alternate waiting for us in six months when the DVD is released (there was a never filmed alternate ending to the original that was scrapped too). I had a few other small problems with Dawn ’04, but they’re mainly just nitpicks because I wanted to hate it.

All we can ask for now is that with the success of Dawn of the Dead ‘04 (and I’m sure it will do well), someone with deep pockets will finally finance Romero’s fourth Dead film, Dead Reckoning. Then we can get the REAL party started.

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Copyright© Written By: Tom Servo
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