Day of the Dead

“Day of the Dead”

1985

Directed by George A. Romero

A Laurel Production

Unrated, but it does contain strong language and plenty of gore. You've been warned, my yet-to-be-desensitized readers.

My overall rating: 4 out of 5.

Characters:

Dr. Logan (aka: Frankenstein): He wishes people would stop calling him Frankenstein. The good doctor spends his time dissecting capture zombies in order to understand their physiology and trying to tame them. Machine-gunned to death.

John: The helicopter pilot. He’d like nothing more than to gather up the remaining sane people in the facility, fly off to a deserted tropical island, and start humanity over again.

Dr. Sarah: Our main protagonist. As well as being the only living woman in the entire movie, she’s also the sanest of the bunch. She spends her time trying to get everyone to continue to work as a team, trying to keep Miguel sane, and trying to find a cure for zombism.

Pvt. Miguel: Sarah’s boyfriend. He’s cracking under the pressure of the world gone to hell, and hates it when Sarah tries to help him get to sleep with a sedative. Gets bitten, then gets amputated, and then gets eaten.

Bub: Logan's first (and only) successfully tamed zombie. Actually quite a likable character, what with his former single-mindedness giving way to some memories and almost child-like curiosity. Fate unknown.

William McDermott: A communications technician and an alcoholic. The guy drinks like a fish, yet we never see him truly drunk.

Captain Rhodes: After the death of Major Cooper, this fascist jerk tries to implement absolute power over the little slice of society within the underground sanctuary. Eaten.

Pvts. Rickles, Steel, Miller, Torrez, and Johnson: Military grunts who’d love nothing more than to break out of their hiding place and fight under the command of Captain Rhodes.

Dr. Ted Fisher: A scientist presumed to have been doing some work with the zombies as well, but it’s unclear as to what. Shot.

Major Cooper: He was dead to begin with, but we get to see him as a brain with a body strapped to a table.

The Plot:

Ah, good ol’ George A. Romero. Love him or hate him, you can’t deny that his films have defined a distinct subgenre in the horror realm. Pre-Romero zombie films were of the “witch doctor resurrecting corpses in the Caribbean to do menial tasks around the house/plantation.” Now zombies are unquestionably undead monsters risen from the grave to devour human/animal flesh, and will do anything they can to get it. I think the latter might be the ultimate workers’ union revolt.

“Day of the Dead” is the third installment of Romero’s zombie series and, like the other films in said series, features some definite social commentary about events at the time. But don’t let the fact that the Cold War had strongly divided people all over the world weigh in too heavily on your enjoyment of this gory little movie.

The movie opens on a stark white room containing only our heroine, Sarah, and a calendar on the wall opened to October. As she examines it, dozens of zombie hands burst through the wall and reach for her. Luckily, she wakes up from this little nightmare, and is, in actuality, riding in a helicopter with her dear ol’ boyfriend, Miguel, McDermott, the radio technician, and, of course, John the pilot. It seems the little lady fell asleep on their trip to try to find any survivors in an overrun Florida city. I have to agree with John’s decision to stay in his seat while our heroine and her boyfriend go outside with a bullhorn to try and call for survivors. If I had to land in the middle of an infested city, I’d want to get the hell out of there the second I saw any sign of real trouble, because I don’t want to be ghoul chow, either.

All that noise from the chopper and the shouting quickly attracts a huge mob of very hungry zombies. Before the horde can reach them, though, our characters quickly take off and safely reach the military facility. All this happens to a surprisingly upbeat synthesized 80’s rock score. I’ve always had an issue with the soundtrack for this movie; it’s just too happy for a movie about a group of people collapsing in the world’s greatest crisis. It’s like “We’re all going crazy and are going to die either at the hands of each other or ravenous rotting cannibals, but we’re just so darn happy!”

Moving along.

The soldiers left in the haven have gone a little wonky, becoming increasingly aggressive as the days go on. You can’t entirely blame them, though. These aren’t the kind of guys who want to just sit back and wait it out; they’ve been trained to fight, and by god, they WANT to fight! So, yeah, the whole “guard the civilian scientists while they try to figure this thing out” is starting to rub them the wrong way. I don’t agree with their idea of storming out, bustin’ heads, and fixing the whole thing with good old fashioned force. For all the movie tells us, they’re the only living people left in the world. I don’t care how well-trained your little group is, a handful of people against several BILLION zombies just ain’t gonna cut it.

The daily schedule seems to include rounding up captured ghouls from the tunnels in the underground military facility for Logan to experiment on. During the first on-screen excursion, Miguel loses control of a captured zombie, which promptly goes after Rickles. Before disaster can strike, Sarah regains control of it. Steel holds him above another zombie, but Sarah manages to save him in the nick of time by threatening Steel at gunpoint, thus deepening the tensions between him and his fellow soldiers.

Rhodes, being the jerk he is, is pretty pissed when he learns that Sarah gave Miguel a syringeful of sedatives in order to get him to catch some sleep and (ideally) get himself together. I might not be well-versed in the ways of the military, but even I know that a person operating on very little sleep is nowhere near as co-ordinated mentally and physically as someone who’s well-rested. Frankly, the thought of someone carrying a weapon, and who’s so sleep-deprived they’re hallucinating, scares the hell out of me.

Meanwhile, Logan has been dicing up the ghouls that’ve been brought to him so he can study just what makes them tick. Pretty well all he’s discovered is that they’re driven by a part of the brain that serves as the core of instincts. One of these subjects turns out to be Major Cooper, albeit without a face. One memorable zombie had its digestive tract severed, and spills the entire thing on the floor when it breaks a restraint and tries to go after prey. I don’t know about you, but Bub, who was watching the whole thing, seemed genuinely disturbed by the sight of seeing another zombie put down for misbehaving.

A meeting between the military grunts and the scientists only deepens the tensions between them. Rhodes actually starts tossing around threats to assert his dominance. Logan’s not put off, though. He’s kind of like that nutty high school science teacher that the twits at the back of the room try to screw around with; it doesn’t matter what you do or say, the guy remains completely composed.

After a fight with Miguel, Sarah decides to go for a bit of a nighttime stroll in the facility. She meets up with McDermott, and the two of them join up with John in the trailer that he and McDermott have been living in. They shoot the breeze for while, the result of which is yet another theory about why the dead began to rise.

Sarah later finds Fisher unsuccessfully trying to help Logan domesticate a zombie with a pretty rank can of something called “Beef Treats.” Yeah…I don’t want to know what it is, either. When they leave, the zombie is left in the dark to “think about what [he’s] done.” Logan leads them to his own lab and introduces them to Bub, who’s much better behaved than the other zombie. He even gets his own artifacts from before the apocalypse to play with, such as a book and a razor. When Rhodes and Steel stumble on this scene, Bub salutes them, hinting that he may have been a soldier in life. To top it off, he still remembers how to use a gun.

Yeesh…zombies with guns. They were bad enough with just their hands and teeth, but guns? Yikes.

Rhodes is completely unimpressed. But then, he doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who’d be impressed with much of anything.

Another bunch of zombies are rounded up, one gets loose, and a soldier (either Torrez or Johnson) is bitten and shot. Miguel is also bitten on the arm, but takes off running before he can be put down. Sarah knocks him out and amputates the arm to try to save him. The poor guy wakes up when they cauterize the wound with a flaming torch; how terrible would it be to wake up and find that not only are you on fire, but you’re now minus a limb? This act of humanity is the last straw for Rhodes; the soldiers will no longer offer any support for the civilians.

Sarah and McDermott book it to Logan’s lab to get some morphine for Miguel, and discover more of the doctor’s grisly experiments, which now include the re-animated head of the recently bitten soldier. To top it off, they also see him giving Bub some suspiciously fresh treats after Bub discovers the joy of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Apparently, one is only truly civilized after listening to classical music; but then, didn’t we already know that?

After Rhodes and his surviving men discover that Bub’s treats came from their dead buddies, everything goes to hell. Logan is shot, the scientists are disarmed, Miguel makes up his mind to go up top, John is told to either take the soldiers in the helicopter, Fisher is shot, and Sarah and McDermott are locked in with the facility’s feral zombies and left for dead. To top it off, that oddly upbeat soundtrack is back to screw with my mind. Hell truly arrives when Miguel lets in the horde just outside the facility, and I strongly suspect he did this to get back at his fellows for leaving him to die and reanimate.

The final minutes are filled with the movie’s best gore sequences, which include partial decapitation via a shovel, part of a face being peeled off, a head torn off, and the staple Romero zombie feeding scene. And, of course, plenty of tasty headshots.

Rhode’s death is by far the most satisfying though. Bub discovers Logan’s dead body, and, armed with a handgun, hunts down Rhode to take revenge. A couple of stray shots cripple the murderous jerk, giving Bub plenty of time to trap him against a door, behind which there are a crap load of zombies. The moment that door is opened, Bub takes another shot that effectively incapacitates Rhodes and the other zombies proceed to tear him in half. Like all good gun-slinging heroes, Bub lurches off into the figurative sunset.

Of course, this leaves Sarah, McDermott, and John as the only survivors. While the soldiers were being slaughtered, our protagonists manage to make it to the helicopter (Get to tha choppa!)

This film bombed when it was first released, but has since earned cult status. Sure, it’s no “Lawrence of Arabia” by any means, but if you’re in the mood for something a little different from the standard zombie movie fare, give “Day of the Dead” a try.

“The Graveyard Feast” exclusive dish:

The Sloppy Rhodes

I made this rather tasty dish with Rhodes’ graphic

death scene in mind. The guy was torn in half, exposing plenty of entrails, so I’ve created a meal with some nice meaty chunks and spaghetti overflowing from a torn bun. This is a quick, albeit messy, recipe. It only took me about 20 minutes to make. I’d advised serving these things up in bowls, as they are really quite messy and tend to become soggy.

Ingredients:

1 lb lean ground beef

A handful of spaghetti (take the amount you and your guests could normally eat in one meal, and use about a quarter of that)

1 can tomato paste OR tomato-based pasta sauce OR condensed tomato soup

Medium or Hot sauce to taste

1 tbsp ketchup

1 tsp basil

1 tsp parsley

1-2 Kaiser Buns per person

1. Begin to cook the ground beef in a greased pan (1/2 tbsp of margarine is a great low-fat choice for this), breaking it up as it cooks. While you’re doing this, cook the spaghetti in a pot of boiling water.

2. When the ground beef is brown through and through, add some of the hot or medium hot sauce to give it some flavor, and then remove it from the heat source. The spaghetti should be done cooking by now, so drain the water from it (keep some of the water only if you’re using condensed tomato soup in this recipe).

3. Add the tomato soup OR pasta sauce to the spaghetti.

4. Mix the basil and parsley into the spaghetti and sauce.

5. Combine the spaghetti and sauce with the ground beef and mix.

6. Tear the Kaiser buns and hollow out the middle; scoop the ground beef/spaghetti mix into the bun and serve.