Movie: #Zombies George A Romero – Dawn of the Dead

My Take:

• Still a ton of smoking going on in these movies!
• 10 years later
• “They kill for food.”
• It is like Marshall Law in effect.  Citizens are not allowed to barricade themselves into their homes, even if they have supplies.
• White guy with heavy brown makeup for one of the “Puerto Ricans”
• Social commentary for this movie?  Consumerism (hiding in a mall) and racist police officers killing the people in the projects.
• Amputee actors…
• Afro Zombie!
• “Shoot it man.  Shoot it in the head.”
• “Just hold it there till it spits back out at you.”
• A lot of blond men with feather hair and rednecks.
• The most redneck thing you know you would see in a real zombie attack – waiting for the zombies to get close to a car and trying to shoot the gas tank.
• Square head zombie!  Wait!  Practical effect – they cut the top of his head off with a helicopter blade!
• Roger is a show off.
• Hare Krishna zombie!! Tambourine and all!
• Screwdriver to the ear!!
• Nurse Zombie
• Where’s Waldo Zombie!
• Fran is gone like Barbara….
• Samuel L Jackson voiceover
• Boys Will Be Boys in the Zombie Apocalypse…
• Damn Roger….
• Why is there African music in the guns and amo store?
• Nun zombie!
• Baseball player zombie (Bach’s Archo Pitcairn)
• “We whooped ’em.  We whooped ’em good.”
• When there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk here.
• After everything, it comes down to the black guy being the waiter?
• Savini’s mustache comb!!
• Screwdriver to the ear zombie death!
• Cream Pie To The Face Zombie
• Taking your blood pressure in a mall while wearing a sombrero during the zombie apocalypse?!
• Chocolate man???
• The music!!! Closing song “Music of the Dead” by Homesick Abortions…just, wow.

This one us Uncle Jim’s favorite.  It was great 70s horror!!  I give this one a A-.

Did you see the movie?  Did you like or hate it?  Let me know in the comments below!

IMDB Synopsis: Following an ever-growing epidemic of zombies that have risen from the dead, two Philadelphia S.W.A.T. team members, a traffic reporter, and his television executive girlfriend seek refuge in a secluded shopping mall.

Starring:

• David Emge
• Ken Foree
• Scott H. Reiniger
• Gaylen Ross

Trailer:

Additional Movie Info:

It received a Rotten Tomatoes review of 75% Fresh.  It received a Rotten Tomato audience rating of 77% liking it.  Average Rating: 3.4/5 with a number of User Ratings: 403,377.

Movie Reviews:

• Roger Ebert
• NY Times

Specs:

It had an estimated budget of $650,000.  It has a 127 minute run time. Release date: 24 May 1979.

Additional IMDB Trivia:

• The two zombie children who attack Peter in the airport chart house are played by Donna Savini and Mike Savini, the real-life niece and nephew of Tom Savini. These are the only zombies in all of George A. Romero‘s “Dead” films that spontaneously run and never do the trademark “Zombie shuffle”.
• Filming at the Monroeville Mall took place during the winter of 1977-78, with a three-week reprieve during the Christmas shopping season (during which other footage, e.g. the TV studio, was shot). Filming at the mall began around 10 p.m., shortly after the mall closed, and finished at 6 a.m. The mall didn’t open until 9, but at 6 the Muzak came on and no one knew how to turn it off.
• Zombie actors took photographs of themselves dressed up in full zombie makeup inside a photo booth on the second floor. They then replaced the sample pictures on the front of the booth with the ghoulish ones.
• The outdoor scene where hunters, emergency crew and soldiers are shooting at zombies was done through local volunteers. Several local hunters arrived on-scene with their own weapons, the local National Guard division showed up in full gear, and local emergency crew (police, fire and ambulance) were present, all voluntarily.
• The MPAA had threatened to impose the X rating if George A. Romero didn’t make cuts. Romero did not want to cut the film, and he was adamant against an X rating, due to its stigma of hard-core pornography. In the end, Romero was able to persuade his distributors to release the film with no rating, although on all advertising and trailers, there was a disclaimer that in effect read that while there was no explicit sex in the film, the movie was of such a violent nature that no one under 17 would be admitted.
• Extras who appeared in this film were reportedly given $20 in cash, a box lunch, and a Dawn of the Dead T-shirt.
• Several members of the marauding band of bikers were played by members of the local chapter of the Pagans Motorcycle Club. The elaborate motorcycles they drove were their own.
• When Stephen idly uses the typewriter roughly 2/3 of the way through the movie, he types ‘NOW IS THE TIME…’. These are the first few words of an exercise widely used in touch-typing classes when typewriters were first introduced into the workforce. The entire sentence reads, “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.”
• The most profitable film in the “Dead” series.
• Much of the fake blood used in the blood packets was a mixture of food coloring, peanut butter and cane sugar syrup.
• Some of the zombies (notably one in the tenement scene) were actual amputees.
• The airstrip used in the film, the Harold W. Brown Memorial Field (aka Monroeville Municipal Airport), is still in operation as of 2013. The privately run airfield is approximately 10 miles from the Monroeville Mall, where the bulk of the film was shot.
• The only one of Romero’s ‘Dead’ movies to contain the word ‘zombie’. Before the bikers break into the mall Peter says “When they open those doors there’s gonna be a thousand zombies in here”
• Body count: 93. 17 humans and 76 zombies.