Films: 1980s

(1985) Day of the Dead

Sunday, September 07, 2008

Day of the Dead
Director: George A. Romero
Release: 1985

In his third installment of the story he started with 1968's "Night of the Living Dead," director George A. Romero at last writes large the premise he hinted at in earlier plots that locked characters in houses and shopping malls. He buries the living.

A simple setting decision makes it plain that the only thing not living anymore in his post-apocalyptic Pennsylvania are the people with hearts beating in their chests. They're underground; the dead roam the earth.

In their bunker, Romero's soldiers and scientists are falling apart faster than the corpses that shuffle the streets of America. They are collapsing, at last. Without the underpinning of civilization, there is no real use for them. The meaning of their lives is as interred as they are.

It is years into the undead plague. The cities and towns of the nation seem to be empty, but for wildlife and post-life. Both, presumably, view the warm-blooded two-legged stragglers that slip through this nightmare landscape as potential food. But in the wetlands and everglades of Florida, a science lab lingers, concealed at the bottom of an elevator shaft.

Within, Captain Rhodes (a maniacal Joseph Pilato) and chemical biologist Sarah (Lori Cardille) are locked in an ideological battle. Rhodes' and his dwindling contingent were assigned to support a study of the zombies arranged in the lair during the final days of organized government. But now, as Rhodes sees it, the assignment rings hollow. Formulas and theories no longer promise survival, and the labs have taken on the nature of a prison.

Additionally, in the bowels of the underground complex (also a storage facility for mankind's records and mechanisms), head scientist Logan has gone mad, playing surrogate father and Victor Frankenstein to a slowly evolving deader named Bub (a brilliant performance by Sherman Howard).

As psychology and the retaining fences around the complex break down, the conflict comes to a head (and many heads are torn free - Romero pulls few punches, visually, in this one).

"Day of the Dead" is the least optimistic of the franchise. It's characters see no light at the end of the tunnel like the farmhouse captives imagined in "Night of the Living Dead," nor can they replicate a middle class existence with the riches of the shopping mall like they did in "Dawn of the Dead." This one is a slow burn to dissolution. The director dedicates roughly the first hour of the film to dialogue and an exploration of exactly what the waning light of humankind means.

Terry Alexander, as Jamaican helicopter pilot John, serves as Romero's possible mouthpiece on the subject. He converts, by degrees, Sarah to his worldview: That archiving and preserving the world that used to be is no longer useful. A new generation must begin, he argues, taught never to restart the world ended by the resurrected dead.

And "Day of the Dead" is overtly religious in subtext, unlike it predecessors' relatively secular approaches to racism, classism, and capitalism. "Day of the Dead" lays on the crucifixion imagery heavily, and characters cross themselves furiously in their final moments. John describes the zombies a curse visited upon humanity for "trying too hard to figure out His shit." As cautionary tale, this one slips further and further into the realm of a mystery play of the Day of Judgment.

But the film is also, and perhaps primarily, biological in its thesis. Romero emphasizes over and over that it is the primordial world we cannot escape. John's recommendation that the next generation be cut off from the knowledge of the past, and Logan's proclamations that humans and the zombies are, in fact, each other ("We are them! They are us!"), both amount to the same thing. The deepest puddings in their heads full of gray jelly rule humans. In the end, it is instinct over intellect. There is no road out of "Day of the Dead." Perhaps the nihilism inherent bred the initial poor reaction from audiences and critics, who proclaimed it a depressing and mean-spirited movie.

Later in his career, Romero would declare "Day of the Dead" the best of the Dead films. It may be his best, but so much intellectual poison is dumped into "Day" that attempts to organize and reconcile the working of the words and images is complicated. Sometimes, "Day of the Dead" takes one's breath away, such as when Bub realizes Logan's fate, or when he salutes a doomed Rhodes. What does they mean, these gestures? Is Bub sympathetic, pathetic, or a horrific representation of the normal world - a world filled with "zombies" stumbling through rules and technology that hold no basic meaning?

Even its ultimate scene is ambiguous. Survivors escaped to a tropical island fish. And one starts a calendar, marking off Nov. 4, year unknown. There are no prospects. Just a continued marking of time.

"Day of the Dead" is an epic of the internalized experience, the inner world, a challenging and relentlessly grim juxtaposition of corpses on the surface, and warm bodies under the dirt.

James O'Brien
Cinescare Staff

updated 1 year ago