Gore Spotlight: Day of The Dead

To alot of people, 'Day of the Dead' is an inferior installment to George A. Romero's 'Dead Trilogy', but to a heaping hand full of other 'Day' fans, it's as good as 'Dawn'. Ok, before you go all ballistic, let me explain just a little bit. 'Dawn of the Dead' will always be my favorite for nostalgic reasons, and for the sheer fact that it was one of the first horror films I ever saw. 'Day of the Dead' will always be a favorite of mine for its mind numbing effects and sheer hopeless apocalyptic overtone. Let's face it, 'Day of the Dead' is a dark depressing film that will ultimately have you wanting to commit a mass homicide by the time your left sitting there bundled in this huge dark cloud .. To me, this is what horror is all about. Sure, comedy in allot of horror films actually works, as in 'Return of the Living Dead' and the 'Evil Dead' series and a few others, but for a good old fashioned no holds barred horror film, 'Day of the Dead' pulls no punches and leaves you completely out of touch in the end.

By the time 'Day of the Dead' rolls around, the human population has pretty much dwindled down to something to the effects of 400,000 to 1, with the zombies outranking the humans. We have a small group of people who are most uncomfortable holed up in an underground missile silo. They mostly consist of a bunch of power-hungry Military men and a team of civilian scientist with a pilot and a drunken Irish electrician.

It's probably known to any hardcore 'trilogy' fan that 'Day' didn't receive the initial budget it was promised, but instead got half of what it was supposed to have. This was due to the simple fact that Romero refused to compromise the shocking special effects from an 'Unrated' version to a 'R' version, therefore resulting in the aforementioned cut in the production. Many people blame this cutback for the talkative aspect of the film as in dodging 'production potholes' or what-have-you, and at times I really would have to agree. It's true, we're subjected to numerous shouting matches between the characters. Hardly any of the characters have any redeeming qualities about them. Later on we are introduced to a rather strange soul by the name of Dr. Logan. The rest of the crew fittingly refer to him as Dr. Frankenstein because of all the strange and secretive experiments he conducts behind closed office doors. What sets him apart from the rest of the doomed characters is that he seems to enjoy the whole thing. He seems to have a passion for the 'disease' that makes zombies, and it ultimately leads him down the road to insanity. Ole Dr. Frank even has his own 'pet zombie' named Bub(his Fathers nickname) which he tries to train, or 'domesticate' . He seems to be doing a pretty decent job until he gets torn to bits by flying bullets.