MISSING ROMERO

In honor of George A. Romero on the anniversary of his death, let's take a moment to remember his cameo in his masterpiece, Dawn of the Dead, in which be broke the fourth wall like a total fuckin' boss.

DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978) — FULL CBS BROADCAST, 1979

To lazily borrow some of this earlier Dawn of the Dead television promo post, pandemic lockdown and all the extra stuck-at-home time it afforded pushed me into embarking on an ambitious video project. File this one under fan edit: George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead as it may have looked if it premiered on network television in the late '70s, specifically December of 1979, modeled on the 1981 broadcasts of Halloween on NBC and The Exorcist on CBS. 

As the world continues to regress into a filthy toilet that refuses to flush, instead doing the same laps around the same bowl over and over, I've been immersing myself in way-back-when pop culture more and more as a means of comfort and escape, which led me to collecting recordings of network broadcasts of movies from the '70s and '80s with their original commercials intact. You can get lots of these on The Internet Archive, some more on Youtube, and if you really do your due diligence, from other collectors. In doing this, I've been able to collect some of my favorite movies in broadcast form, all with their original commercials, which is the most entertaining part. I can't tell you why older commercials are so hilarious and charming. Is it the corny approach to marketing, the awful skits, the dated fashions, or even the commercials that, by today's standards, are actually kind of politically incorrect? Whatever it is, there's something self-owning about a commercial trying to confidently sell you a product you've never heard of because it no longer exists, but at the same time, there's something oddly comforting about it, too — it's a return to simpler times, or at least a return to the times in which our bubbling cauldron of sins and hate lived under the surface of the world and wasn't so in-your-face throughout every 24-hour news cycle.

After accumulating all my must-have titles of these old broadcast recordings, including original airings of Dark Night of the Scarecrow and the Bob Wilkins Creature Features presentation of The Fog, one title eluded me, however: 1978's Dawn of the Dead, Romero's tale of four people taking refuge inside the abandoned Monroeville shopping mall from the zombie-ridden world that surrounds them — not because this broadcast was difficult to track down, but because it never existed; the movie's initially-issued X-rating almost ensured it would never be aired even on cable television, let alone a network station. With that, I decided to, as faithfully as I could, recreate what it may have looked like had CBS made the very reckless decision to present it for broadcast. Of course, I had to decide in which form to present the movie — meaning, would I include it as-is, squibs and all? Or should I really pursue making it look like a genuine broadcast for network television and cut out all the violence and bloodletting? After much back and forth, I decided it was necessary to go the censoring route. I know, I know — neuter Tom Savini's majestic gore gags? Who on earth would do that to such a genre masterpiece, and one especially known for its special effects? It all sprang from this amusing realization that Dawn of the Dead is the last movie a network would ever consider for broadcast — at least during that late-'70s era. Though it plays tame these days when compared to stuff like The Walking Dead, American Horror Story, and every show by Kurt Sutter for FX, the idea of cutting out all the gore from Dawn of the Dead for a hypothetical television broadcast became hilarious to me because it's such an antithetical title to show to a mass audience, especially when being presented by one of the anchor networks in all of television. (I was partially inspired to do this after watching ABC's 1979 Taxi Driver broadcast because so much of its content and dialogue had to be cut out that the remainder of the movie comes off as somewhat incoherent.)

Without further masturbation, my entire "CBS broadcast" of Dawn of the Dead is below, "recorded" by a Pittsburgh VCR in December of 1979, containing a VHS rip of the movie (edited for content), "original" 1979/1980 commercials (which naturally include TV spots for landmark horror films released that year), and CBS promos, all presented in purposely dubbed-over-many-times garbage quality. Nearly every commercial that's not a TV spot is a nod to something in Dawn of the Dead, so keep your eyes eagled. Whether you check it out just to catch a flick you've seen so many times before in a different form, or because you "get" the elaborate joke that it is (my edits are purposely clumsy, and don't miss my twist on the end credits), I hope you enjoy this standard-definition grindhouse experience. 

TEASER: DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978) ON NETWORK TELEVISION

 

I've been playing around with video editing during lockdown and this is my newest harebrained idea. 

File under fan edit - an opening to George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1978) as it may have looked if it premiered on network television in the late '70s or early '80s, similar to NBC's premiere of Halloween and CBS's airing of The Exorcist. I'm planning on creating the entire broadcast using a VHS rip of the movie and "original" commercials and TV spots - kinda like a standard definition grindhouse experience.

One question remains, however: if I embark on assembling an entire broadcast, do I make it as genuine looking as I can by...gasp...editing it for content? Silencing the profanity and, more egregious...cutting out the gore effects? Could I really do that to something as majestically splatter-filled as Dawn of the Dead?

Questions like these plague my very existence.

ZOMBIE 5

If you had told me ten years ago that zombies would not only infiltrate major cable television and make The Walking Dead one of the highest-rated shows of all time, but ALSO become the focus of a multi-million dollar globe-trotting film starring the massively-present Brad Pitt (World War Z), I honestly don't know what I would have thought of you. But, here we are. 

Zombies, for all intents and purposes, are "in" right now. And when I say "in" I mean in movies, television (drama) shows, comics, and feature novels. Not only that, they're invading real life, too.

And that's cool with me, really. Every horror-loving boy/girl loves his/her zombies. Sure, the genre might be a bit too saturated with them right now, but for every ten zombie projects that come to be, a few of them will be decent, and one will be great. To me, that one great project is worth the middling nine.

Beginning with Night of the Living Dead, co-writer/director George A. Romero appropriated the word "zombie" and turned it into his own monster. No, zombies were not always undead flesh-eating, stumbling, mumbling fools. And nowhere is it written in an ancient tome that the only way to kill a zombie is by destroying the brain or removing the head. This isn't common folklore like killing a vampire with a stake to the heart, or killing a werewolf with a silver bullet. Romero started it all. He took the concept of "zombies" - people brainwashed and drugged out of their minds with an assortment of mind altering chemicals and resurrected as slaves by their master - and turned it into what it's become. Everything you see on The Walking Dead was created entirely by Romero. If the world was just, he'd own his own concept of the nu-zombie and be one of the richest men because of it.

Many filmmakers have been "borrowing" Romero's zombie concept for the last fifty years, and because of the world we live in, the more high profile films to gain prominence are the Resident Evil films, which is all kinds of sad.

So allow me to take this time to highlight five particular zombie-infested films with which you may not be familiar. Seek them out should you feel so inclined, and you'll find that these celluloid collections of ghouls just might eat their way into your heart.

Mutants

Should the proposed 28 Months Later, the third part of Danny Boyle's 28 trilogy, never come to fruition, feel free to consider Mutants the honorary Part 3. Not only does this French-set film carry on what was alluded to in the final moments of 28 Weeks Later, but its extreme gore and visceral depiction of the zombie threat (considered more of an infected breed than the actual undead) resurrects Boyle's threat while also borrowing his trademark thrashing-camera chaotic cinema experience, all of which made 28 Days Later nihilistically wonderful. Mutants opens with a jarring introduction to our characters, forcing you to feel as if the movie had begun several months before you ever turned it on. With shit having already hit the fan, three people (two EMTs and an army soldier) are fighting their way through a zombie infestation. The two EMTs, Marco and Sophia, are also lovers, and with Sophia pregnant, the two take refuge in an old hospital and await the rescue Sophia hopes was successfully contacted via her broadcasts over the radio. But with Marco bit and the infection slowly taking over, it becomes a race against the clock as Sophia hopes someone has heard her pleas for help and will deliver to them both the salvation they need.  Oh, and because this is a zombie movie, a bunch of dickhead humans also make things difficult because that's a requirement in every zombie movie: the reminder that humanity is actually worse than flesh-ripping, blood-spitting ghouls.

When you think of the French, do you think of loaves of bread, wimpy men, and an entire nation of people us Americans are pigeonholed into disliking simply because they don't like to go to war? Well, if you're American, that's a definite possibility...but allow me to add one more trait to that list: they make entirely fucked-up and non-apologetic horror films. Between Haute Tension, the absolutely insane À l'intérieur (Inside), and now Mutants, it's clear they relish having bloody chunks rocket across the room. The zombies in Mutants are very threatening and very real. The debate of walking vs running zombies would literally be eaten to death as these things barrell down the street or the hallway and rip chunks out of you like you're the Staypuft Marshmallow Man. 

Pontypool

This strange little film asks the question: what if it weren't noxious chemicals, Sumerian rat monkeys, voodoo, or space dust that resurrected the dead and turned them into zombies...but instead the sound of our own voices? What if a zombie infestation rapidly spread with each single syllable uttered by a human mouth? And could you imagine the Catch 22-ish situation a radio show host would find himself in? How does he help to warn humankind of the threat outside their doors without adding to the problem by sending his voice out over the airwaves?

An interesting premise makes for an even more interesting film called Pontypool, starring the wonderful Stephen McHattie (300, The X Files) as Grant Mazzy, the radio host who finds himself in that earlier-described predicament. Set mostly in the basement radio station run by Sydney Briar (Catherine Keener doppelganger Lisa Houle), the film at first is given legs by various call-in reports from area residents as well as one of the station's newscasters, and in an almost flipped-on-its-ear Rear Window-like maneuver, we can only listen as things outside get more and more intense. We experience most of the terror through eyewitness' verbal accounts described by the confused and the terrified, but after a while, our eyewitnesses begin to exhibit the same strange behavior gripping the small Canadian town of Pontypool. It's through these developments that the threat becomes more and more prominent, and it leads to a rather wacky conclusion that threatens to derail all the goodwill Pontypool has amassed by straddling a line, comprised of an intriguing concept, between distinct and ridiculous.

"Dead Set"

This series from the U.K. takes what just might be two of America's favorite things - zombies and reality television - and marries them to create a fun five-episode saga filled with all kinds of ghoulish carnage. And much to the relief of the found-footage haters of the world, what sounds like an apocalypse captured on home video is actually very traditionally shot, very rarely utilizing amateur footage to tell its story. This fun meta-re-realization of a what-if Big Brother cast find themselves locked into a loft and completely cut off from the outside world, so when a zombie outbreak occurs, they have no idea such bloodiness is happening right outside their door. A young and spunky Big Brother producer named Kelly (Jamie "My Father Is That Bad-Ass From Sexy Beast" Winstone) finds herself on the run from the growing zombie threat, trying not just to survive, but also to find her boyfriend, with whom she hasn't been entirely honest. Like many other films of its ilk, it's not just a story of someone looking for salvation, but redemption as well. And meanwhile, a bunch of people get eaten, ripped apart, and decimated in all manner of fun and crimson-colored ways. Plus someone shits in a trashcan and screams. Good times!

Boy Eats Girl

I saw this DVD somewhere for literally $1 and figured I had nothing to lose in giving it a shot. Despite the terrible title, I found the premise intriguing, and what I expected to be a once-and-done viewing turned into one of the happiest surprises of my bargain bin archaeological digs, and it's a film I've revisited several times. This 2005 flick from Ireland could easily be described as Dawn of the Dead meets American Pie (assuming you consider the latter to be reasonably entertaining), and tells the story of a boy named Nathan, who is madly in love with his best girl mate named Jessica. One night, in an only-in-the-movies misunderstanding, Nathan feels stood up by Jessica, and in a move that would make even the guys from Hawthorne Heights roll their eyes, Nathan goes home, drinks, cries a lot, and hangs himself (accidentally). Nathan's mother brings him back from the dead using an extremely vague spell found in an ancient text, but fails to tell the boy exactly what's transpired. For a day or so, Nathan feels stronger and faster, but his brief time as Peter Parker slowly regresses into a Bub for the Degrassi High Generation.

I realize that everything I've so far described about Boy Eats Girl makes it sound massively dumb, but trust me when I say much of the film is very funny. The lead kids are likable (the ones you're supposed to like, anyway) and while it may sound sugary and lame on my part, there's something refreshing about knowing one of your best buds is slowly turning into a zombie, but you stick by his side anyway. It adds a level of charm and humility to the film and turns what's basically a stupid concept into a movie with heart. Plus lots of flying body parts. I'm pretty sure someone gets run over by a lawn mower at some point.

Zombie Honeymoon

Based on the title and presence of producer John Landis, who has directed some of our most classic comedies, you would think that Zombie Honeymoon is played mostly for laughs. You'd be wrong, nerds. The story, about a recently married couple on their honeymoon encountering a zombie on the beach who bites the man before disappearing back into the waves, is actually very poignant, and very saddening. Sure, there are moments played for laughs, as such a premise cannot sustain without occasional breaks for levity, but what could easily have been another shitty direct-to-video low budgeter actually tugs at the heartstrings a little more than you would expect. A wife for barely a day finds herself caring for her slowly transforming husband, at first thinking he is merely ill...but soon realizes that he is becoming a zombie before her very eyes. The only zombie movie on this list to not feature hordes of zombies running across abandoned streets, Zombie Honeymoon remains a very intimate and isolated story, taking place mostly in the vacation spot the couple has rented to celebrate their marriage. If you're looking for split heads and geysers of blood, look elsewhere, but those looking for something different should check this out.

JUST A REMINDER

DAWN OF THE DEAD (2004)

I wanted to hate Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead merely on principle. 

The brand new remake train had barely been rolling before one of the grandaddy of all zombie horror classics was announced: George A. Romero’s seminal semi-sequel Dawn of the Dead.

The jaws of horror fans everywhere dropped like a ‘70s Tom Savini over a mall banister.

“How dare they?”

By now, the remake of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre had come and gone, leaving behind a relatively positive reaction on audiences and a wildly successful profit. If that was to be the beginning of a remake craze that still hasn't gone away, no one at that moment would know. But when Dawn was announced, Internet considered rioting in the streets before deciding to just stay home and bitch about it on Internet. And, if we’re being fair, the earliest snippets of preliminary information re: Dawn proceeded through the usual rank-and-file motions that most remakes would follow — an untested music video director would helm; there’d be no involvement from its original writer or director; the cast would be relatively obscure (including a then-unknown Ty Burrell).

Oh, and the guy who wrote the Freddie Prinze Jr. Scooby Doo movies was handling the screenplay.

: O

But a funny thing happened: Dawn of the Dead proved not only to be the best 2000s era remake to come down the pike, but it transcended all the remake baggage to become an excellent, vicious, dark (and light) contribution to the horror genre.

The aforementioned screenplay by that Scooby Doo guy (James Gunn, who would go on to write and direct the beloved Guardians of the Galaxy flicks for Marvel) was undeniably clever and whip-smart, and which included cameos from a large portion of the original’s cast. (Ken Foree even gets to recite his infamous line of dialogue — “When there’s no more room in Hell, the dead will walk the earth.” — now with a much bleaker approach.) Even the character of Andy, the gun store owner who has been living on the roof of his store, and who communicates back and forth with our cast via dry erase boards and binoculars, was extremely well utilized, offering an atypical but effective relationship that you’d hope to see in these kinds of films where characterization sometimes falls by the wayside. (And the conclusion of his character is eerie as hell.) The screenplay lacks the commercialism subtext from the original, but as confirmed by participants this wasn’t by accident. Gunn, especially, felt Romero had already done it, and didn’t feel the need to do it again.

Signs of the Zack Snyder to come are present, but still dialed back, offering a sense of a filmmaker establishing a style and oeuvre that would be on more prominent display in 300 and The Watchmen. Though Dawn is incredibly gory in spots, the action elements are rousing and intense; Dawn’s entire first and third acts are nothing but mounting tension and propulsive fight-or-flight scenes, filled with an incredible array of gore gags.

The cast work well as an ensemble, with the only minor weak spot being Sarah Polley, who doesn’t seem entirely comfortable working in such a specific genre. She’s just fine in the smaller moments, especially when we see the adrenaline melt off following the harrowing opening escape scene and letting the reality sink in, leaving her a sobbing mess. But in the bigger, more genre-appropriate moments, she’s not nearly as convincing. Ving Rhames enjoys a more prominent role here than he was getting during this era of his career, playing the prototypical Snake Plissken-ish bad-ass who abides by his rules exclusively, but he’s good at this type of role and easily embodies the kind of part essayed by Ken Foree in the original. (With a clear intent on being deceiving, director Steve Miner cast Rhames as a similarly bad-ass military man in his woeful remake of Day of the Dead in an effort to suggest the two films were related. They aren’t.) A pre-House of Cards Michael Kelly plays C.J., the asshole security guard with a heart of gold who ultimately ends up playing the film’s most interesting character, and the actor subsequently offers the absolute best performance in the entire cast.

Dawn of the Dead shouldn’t be as good as it is, and even if Zack Snyder had gone on to do nothing else notable for the remainder of his career (you’d probably have people out there who would confirm this), he at least proved there is such a thing as doing a good remake, and laying out how to do it: respect the original and its fans, take the concept and do something familiar but new, and leave it all out on the field. (Plus a Tom Savini cameo never hurts.)

THE RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD (1985)

Happy Return of the Living Dead Day!

My love for the horror genre was written in the stars long before I ever fired out of my mother. But certain films along the way cropped up early on during my wee-one years just to make sure I stayed on the right path: Don Coscarelli's Phantasm 2 was there to show me that not every battle between good and evil had a happy ending. Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street proved that no place–not even your bedroom–was safe. And Dan O'Bannon's The Return of the Living Dead proved that "horror" could be hilarious.

Rumors suggest that following the bungled release of 1968's Night of the Living Dead, in which the filmmakers lost copyright to the entire film following a last-minute title change, George A. Romero and his partners John A. Russo and Russell Streiner parted ways, each divvying up this potential new zombie franchise to take in different directions. Romero was awarded the partial phrase "of the Dead" for all future "official" sequels while Russo and Streiner walked away with "of the Living Dead" for less official spinoffs. Now, is this true? As Trump says, all I know is what I read on the internet. But it sounds so silly and spiteful that I wouldn't be surprised if it were. Having said that, Romero obviously went on to create two celebrated sequels, Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead, along with...some others...while Russo, Streiner, and Night alum Rudy Ricci would wait to seize on their creative cinematic rights until 1985, which saw the release of The Return of the Living Dead.

Despite all the contributors (ultimately the Night veterans had very little influence on the final product), The Return of the Living Dead is fully a Dan O'Bannon film. Twenty years before Shaun of the Dead brought comedic zombies (or zombies at all, really) into the mainstream, O'Bannon rightly realized that rotting, wailing, running zombies chasing down a bunch of angry punk teenagers was actually kind of funny, and he played up the humor to maximum effect. Imbuing his story of the resurrecting dead with a wry sense of humor containing sarcasm, slapstick, and Vaudevillian timing, what O'Bannon does that's even more clever is give the horror aspects of his screenplay real bite (sorry), making scenes of marauding hordes of the dead sprinting–sprinting!–after their victims much more terrifying. Forget "removing the head or destroying the brain"–this time the living dead are wholly unkillable, regardless of what you have in your arsenal. "I hit the fucking brain!" growls Burt (Clu Gulagher, Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge) after putting a pick-axe into a zombie's skull without it doing a thing. By comparison, Romero's slow-moving, easily killable ghouls were barely a threat. O'Bannon ups the terror, but brings the humor with it. (He claims that naming his two leads Burt and Ernie was entirely coincidental, and he was completely unaware of the duo's long-running residence on Sesame Street, but when two of the film's hapless and doomed paramedics eaten by the living dead are also named Tom and Jerry, you really have to wonder.) 

During one scene where they look to Night of the Living Dead to provide answers on how to kill the undead (destroy the brain!), Freddy (Thom Matthews, Friday the 13th: Part VI Jason Lives) asks, "What do doctors use to crack skulls with?" Frank (James Karen, Poltergeist) answers, "Surgical drills!" at the exact moment Burt re-enters the scene holding a pick-axe. Humor like this seems very broad, especially when compared to today's standards in horror films where someone would stop to ironically muse on the meta of the conflict before continuing on, but it's a sadly extinct, wry sense of comedy that, for anyone who has ever seen or read an interview with Dan O'Bannon, senses was a part of his genetic makeup.

O'Bannon, famously, opted to make his take on this somewhat new zombie universe more humorous in an effort to avoid treading directly on territory he felt strongly was owned entirely by Romero. But at the same time, in lieu of this respect, you get the sense that O'Bannon was also having a hell of a time sending up this genre that, maybe, people shouldn't be taking so seriously after all. After all, Romero's zombies were flesh-eaters, taking their sweet time in stripping flesh and entrails from their victims for a warm feast–this is intrinsically frightening. O'Bannon's zombies seem only interested in braaaains, which they shouted repeatedly while chasing down a victim. While the image of them chowing down on brains is still the stuff of nightmares, everything leading up to a kill is kind of a cartoon.

It's during a routine training session at Uneeda Medical Supply where Frank unleashes the zombie-resurrecting 2-4-5 trioxin gas from barrels stenciled with Property of the United States Army, which douches himself and his new hire, Freddy, in the necromancing fog slime. This is part of the overall palpable sense of distrust O'Bannon shows toward the American military throughout, beginning with Frank refuting any inference that the barrels containing infected corpses might leak (even though they do), and ending with the very downbeat and cynical finale which sees the military dealing with their "missing Easter eggs" in the only way they know. And in between, brief scenes with Colonel Glover (Jonathan Terry) present him as a dry, bitter, and disillusioned man who orders nuke strikes like other people order pizza.

But even out of this anger comes further opportunities for humor. When Freddy asks why those tanks of diseased bodies ended up in the basement of a medical supply warehouse, Frank smiles slyly and says, "Typical Army fuck-up," with the word "typical" giving his response its meaning, as if it were part and parcel among the many other Army fuck-ups worth mentioning that deal with the misdistribution of dead bodies. After shit hits the fan and one character logically suggests that they call the number stenciled on the side of the tank, Burt looks besides himself as he demands, "Do you think I want the goddamned Army all over the place?," as that would be worse than the recently resurrected corpse screaming and pounding on the inside of the walk-in freezer.

The Return of the Living Dead's use of somewhat dated and primitive techniques for special effects is the thing, among many things, which make the film so lovable and enduring. Seeing the Tar Man or the female half-a-corpse strapped to the table opening their mouths once, but somehow emitting multiple syllables, of course doesn't look all that convincing. It makes no sense that their very tongueless and lipless mouths can emit 'S' and 'P' sounds. But it somehow goes along with the spirit of the film, which leans heavily on, "Fuck it, let's just have fun."

After all, have you seen the poster?

They're back from the grave and they're ready to party!

Calling The Return of the Living Dead the greatest zombie film of all times feels like an insult to George A. Romero, being that its existence directly stems from his 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead, but also because O'Bannon avoided doing a more serious-minded zombie film, as he felt it would tread too closely on Romero's territory. However, where Romero was able to carry respectability through his zombie series up to and including Day of the Dead (which was pulverized at the box office the same year by O'Bannon's film), multiple attempts to sequelize The Return of the Living Dead–either maintaining the humor or not–proved that it wasn't so easy. (This more than includes Return of the Living Dead II, which tried so hard to be its predecessor that it not only brought back James Karen and Thom Matthews to play different characters who "feel like they've been here before," the sequel even ripped off its predecessor's incredible opening music, known as the Trioxin Theme.) Inspired by what came before, The Return of the Living Dead was lightning in a bottle, made from a perfect combination of sensibilities, willing performers, and grisly special effects. Though it may not enjoy the same critical or historical reputation as its mama, Night of the Living Dead, it's easily just as beloved...but only by people with braaaains.

WHAT THEY USED TO DO