"Bang! Yore dead!"
Released on this day--19 July--in 1985, George Romero's DAY OF THE DEAD, the 3rd installment in the director's original zombie trilogy.
DAY was originally supposed to be a much larger picture--the initial screenplay was a banger--but given Romero's insistence on releasing the film without an MPAA rating, the budget simply wasn't there for that. What made it to the screen was an incredibly bleak vision of a future in which the walking dead have entirely overrun humanity, both in the world outside and in the souls of those still theoretically living.
George would sometimes name this as his favorite of that original trilogy. Given that this particular triptych is one of the high-points in the entire history of horror cinema, it isn't a substantial knock on DAY to point out that, Romero's affection for the runt of his litter aside, the film is, by any serious estimation, easily the least of them. Many felt let down by it. Like DAWN OF THE DEAD, its immediate predecessor, DAY is an ambitious stew of often-disparate elements that simply don't hold together as well as in DAWN. Some viewers latch on to some of those elements while being alienated by others. Much of the intellectual content of the earlier pictures is in short supply here (though it's not, in my view, as entirely absent as some of it critics would have it). Some of the "acting" barely qualifies for the word. Joe Pilato's performance as Col. Rhodes is, by design, absurdly over-the-top ("I'M RUNNIN' THIS MONKEY-FARM, FRANKENSTEIN!!!") and can seem quite jarring, as none of the prior dead films (nor, elsewhere, this one) featured anything like it, nor--and this is a particular problem for this kind of movie--is one likely to ever encounter anything like it in real life. It initially feels like a cartoon dropped into a drama. The characters often fail to react like human beings, even human beings under sustained stress. At one point, Col. Rhodes draws his gun and, right in front of everyone, threatens to straight-up murder one of his unruly men. The men are absolutely shocked by this, the sort of thing that, in the real world, would result in the good colonel being unceremoniously fragged in his sleep, if not right there on the spot, but, only seconds later, Rhodes is ranting at the scientists in the compound and those same men are, with the click of a switch, amen-ing him on.
On the other side of the ledger, DAY's merits are substantial. Richard Liberty's Dr. Logan--referred to by the others as "Frankenstein"--is an incredibly nasty piece of work, a perhaps-once-promising scientist now reduced to a merry Mengele working out apparent past indignities by creatively carving up the dead in his laboratory with the ebullient elan of a sadistic child ripping the wings from flies while still believing what he's doing is science. What we see is bad enough; the film merely hints at some of his no-doubt-worst depredations. Sherman Howards' Bub is one of the great screen monsters, a zombie who, under Logan's tutelage, is revealed to retain many fragmentary memories from his life--an idea that makes the dead tragic and their fate even more horrible. Terry Alexander and Jarlath Conroy, as pilot John and his radio-man sidekick Bill, offer genuinely likeable characters; Gary Klar and Ralph Marrero as Steele and Rickles are their opposites, a sort of demented Laurel & Hardy duo who regularly manage to make the worst of the male species appallingly entertaining, which makes them even more unsettling when they get ugly on our heroes. In its dead creatures and gore, DAY features the absolute career- best work of make-up effects maestro Tom Savini. The tone of the picture is, as mentioned before, relentlessly bleak, in a way dear to the heart of horror fans but rarely seen on the screen. It's a real nightmare; this truly is the way the world--the way everything--ends. If received in the right spirit, even Rhodes' absurdist posturing is entertaining.
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| Joe Pilato's, well, best moment |
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| Richard Liberty's Dr. Logan--"Frankenstein" |
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| Sherman Howard's Bub salutes a pile of puss |
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| Nah, ain't Maybelline... |
While DAY doesn't always cohere and, as a whole, can't hold a candle to either NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD or DAWN OF THE DEAD, it's the kind of movie that sits in dark corners of the mind and grows in esteem with time, and the general disappointment with which it was initially greeted has mellowed over the years into a more positive reassessment. Even some of the pieces that can put people off are part of what mark it as an original, innovative, even daring work. Warts and all--especially with the warts--it's a magnificent beast.
--j.
