Wel­come to The George A. Romero Zom­bie Cycle Film Fes­ti­val. Join The Dork Report in revis­it­ing all five canon­i­cal episodes in the orig­i­nal epic zom­bie saga:

• Part I: Night of the Liv­ing Dead
• Part II: Dawn of the Dead
• Part III: Day of the Dead
• Part IV: Land of the Dead
• Part V: Diary of the Dead

Day of the Dead (1985) is the third episode in George A. Romero’s con­tin­u­ing tale of civilization’s col­lapse in the event of a global zom­bie epi­demic. This and the big-budget Land of the Dead (2005) are tied for the worst entries in the series. What makes the first two (Night and Dawn) of merit is their sur­pris­ingly acute social satire, but here Romero loses his crit­i­cal focus in favor of gore and gen­eral unpleas­antry with lit­tle redeem­ing value.

After the ini­tial wave of undead in Night of the Liv­ing Dead and the col­lapse of cities and sub­ur­bia in Dawn of the Dead, Romero now jumps still for­ward in time. Sev­eral months into the zom­bie plague, a dozen humans hud­dle iso­lated in an under­ground bunker. Their fortress is suf­fi­cient to pro­tect them from the bar­bar­ians out­side the gates, but they have lost radio con­tact with the out­side world. They make occa­sional sor­ties to nearby cities via heli­copter, but encounter noth­ing but more hordes of zom­bies. For all they know, they are the last humans on the planet.

When there’s no more room in hell, zom­bies will break through the sty­ro­foam walls

The dis­parate batch of sur­vivors in Night of the Liv­ing dead was essen­tially a cross-section of civ­i­liza­tion, but Romero nar­rows his focus here onto the mil­i­tary and sci­en­tific worlds. The humans trapped under­ground include three sci­en­tists, two civil­ians, and seven sol­diers. All of them are slowly los­ing their minds save for level-headed sci­en­tist Dr. Sarah Bow­man (Lori Cardille), valiantly research­ing a cure. As is now cus­tom­ary in Romero’s zom­bie flicks, Sarah is an atyp­i­cal pro­tag­o­nist for a hor­ror movie. The most capa­ble and sane char­ac­ter in Night of the Liv­ing Dead was a black man (Duane Jones), a huge deal for movies of any genre in 1968, and still rare now. Sarah is a woman, another social group his­tor­i­cally sub­ju­gated by soci­ety, not to men­tion typ­i­cally reduced to scream­ing eye candy in hor­ror movies.

The nerve-wracking 28 Days Later (2002), direc­tor Danny Boyle’s con­tri­bu­tion to the zom­bie genre, bor­rowed this sce­nario of an iso­lated batch of male sol­diers act­ing with­out com­mand, sur­rounded on all sides by hos­tile forces, and locked in a fortress with only one woman. Not sur­pris­ingly, things get ugly. To a one, the sol­diers are despi­ca­bly racist and illog­i­cal. But leader Cap­tain Rhodes (Joe Pilato) is actu­ally cor­rect about one key fact of their sit­u­a­tion: the head sci­en­tist they have been ordered to defer to is indeed totally mad. Dr. Matthew “Franken­stein” Logan (Richard Lib­erty) is more inter­ested in domes­ti­cat­ing zom­bies into slaves than he is in either cur­ing (as Sarah is try­ing to do) or erad­i­cat­ing them (as, nat­u­rally, the sol­diers would have it). His star lab rat is a cap­tive zom­bie dubbed Bub (Sher­man Howard). The chained and tor­tured Bob is sur­pris­ingly sym­pa­thetic, pos­si­bly even moreso than hero­ine Sarah. He’s also the first instance in Romero’s movies of an intel­li­gent, self-aware breed of zom­bie we won’t see again until twenty years later in Land of the Dead. But nei­ther film makes much of the con­cept of zom­bies as a new life form, as opposed to the clas­sic remorse­less adver­sary typ­i­cal for the genre.

Bub Zom­bie wants his MTV

As dis­cussed in The Dork Report’s review of Night of the Liv­ing Dead, one key aspect of the zom­bie genre that has fueled its con­tin­u­ing appeal over the years is that a plague is a great lev­eler. Every­one is vul­ner­a­ble to dis­ease. Every­one is equal after death (or is that undeath?), be they male or female, rich or poor, of any race. And for the sur­vivors, once soci­ety breaks down (and it always does when the undead walk the streets), all the money and crea­ture com­forts in the world become irrelevant.

Must read: Home­page of the Dead’s com­plete Day of the Dead archives, includ­ing the orig­i­nal script

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.