Despite the sheer historical importance of Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), the innovative nature and satirical power of Dawn of the Dead (1978), and more recently the Zombie King’s much-underrated extension of the franchise in Land of the Dead (2005), I’m with Romero himself in naming the third in the series, Day of the Dead (1985) as a personal favourite (even if that makes me a “real troll”, as the Man himself has suggested).
Day of the Dead‘s claustrophobic intensity, intelligence and quintessential nihilism — captured so well in its depiction of the deterioration of humanity not just in terms of the Zombpocalypse, but emotionally and ethically through the interaction of the meagre group of survivors holed up in a military bunker — create a powerful and complex metaphorical image that encapulates and extends mid-80s disenchantment. Here the Dead become almost a cleansing — a violent, despairing step in a sort of evolutionary replacement strategy. In this film the real Dead are shown to be the Living (even if that theme is now a somewhat tired one). Its greatest creation, and indeed most positive character, is Bub, the “humanised” zombie — an artistically dangerous extension of his themes that in my opinion Romero pulls off with dark aplomb (with able help from actor Sherman Howard). It is this “extension” that Romero further explores in Land of the Dead.
My positive view of the film in no way corresponds to received wisdom or popular opinion, of course — though some discerning critical outliers have expressed similar opinions over the years. Now, it seems, in this age of the remake and following on from the box-office (though otherwise not unmitigated) success of Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake (2004), we’re getting Steve Miner’s stab at remaking Romero. This time it’s Day of the Dead that gets the treatment. Back in 2004 we had an unofficial “sequel” — in titular though not conceptual terms: Day of the Dead: Contagium. This one was a largely amateur effort, and for me not a bad one for all that — and the film bore no actual relationship to Day of the Dead apart from having zombies in it. The title was a marketing ploy and a homage rather than representing an artistic drive — and a mis-calculated one in that it simply caused the film to be judged more harshly than it deserved.
Anyway, Steve Miner’s effort will have no such excuse to offer as it has been conceived as a remake from the start. As seen in the following trailer, it’s easy to gauge how it might connect to the original film — the scientific/military complex angle and the inclusion of a zombie that seems Bub-like in its role — though otherwise it looks pretty well like other generic Zombpocalypse films we’ve been getting for decades now, albeit spiffier than many.
It’s being released straight-to-video on 8 April 2008, which may tell us something…
