Dead man shopping

There must be something in the air if a movie about flesh-eating zombies laying siege to a shopping mall is "now on its third smash week" here in Manila. But apparently people are still lining up to see Dawn of the Dead, Zach Snyder’s remake of the George Romero classic from 1979.

It’s no secret that zombie movies scare me. My last indelible zombie viewing experience was 28 Days Later, that rude little thriller which retooled the zombies for the New Millennium: no longer did they lurch and claw pitifully, like the zombies in your lolo’s day; no, they galloped, they growled, they vomited infected blood and then they ate human flesh. These were zombies with an attitude.

The new Dawn of the Dead picks up on the 28 Days Later template (which itself was part homage to the original Romero trilogy as well as to low-budget zombie flicks like The Omega Man). It opens with a truly shocking 10-minute sequence (shocking, unless you’ve seen the ’79 version). Canadian alterna-actress Sarah Polley plays Anna, a nurse who comes home after a long shift, falls asleep next to her husband, only to wake up in a world populated by reanimated dead. The couple’s daughter stands there in the doorway, and she’s not hungry for a peanut butter sandwich…

It’s a shocking scene, specifically because it shows that, in this Dawn of the Dead, nothing is sacred, including childhood and motherhood. Polley crashes her car while escaping from a suburban neighborhood crawling with the dead, and hooks up with a small band of survivors (including Ving Rhames and Mekhi Phifer) who decide to hole up in a nearby shopping mall.

It’s hard to watch this Dawn without comparing it to the original. In Romero’s version, the shopping mall was both sanctuary and symbol. "Why do you think they come here?" asked one survivor of another as the zombies clawed away at the glass doors, trying to get inside. "Comfort. Instinct. Maybe it reminds them of something." Yes, comfort for the zombies is a vast multi-level shopping area (complete with constant Muzak), and if that satirical point has lost a bit of zing since 1979, the zest for mall-going is still as strong as ever.

The "instinct" line is reprised in the remake, and it still says a lot about people’s desire for an air-conditioned, urban oasis. Studies have shown that people feel less stress, more psychologically at ease in shopping malls than elsewhere. Is it the piped-in music? The plethora of shopping choices? The feeling of community? Well, whatever the reason, it’s an instinct hard-wired into the zombie psyche as well.

After picking off the straggler zombies inside the mall, our survivors proceed to go on a shopping spree (or at least drink as many lattes and cappuccinos as they can stomach), meanwhile scanning the scattered news reports for word of a rescue mission. Outside, they can’t help noticing, the zombies surrounding the mall are growing into the thousands.

And here is where the remake veers away from the sense and sensibility of the original. For the survivors in Romero’s version, the mall really is their fortress: they reinforce the glass doors (the zombies are too stupid to use tools to smash their way in) and make their new home virtually zombie-proof. Hey, they’ve got all the food, the music, the clothes, and the guns and ammunition (from a sporting goods store) to last a lifetime. So they’re in for the long haul. It’s only after a gang of Hell’s Angels smash their Harleys through the glass doors and try to take over the mall that the zombies pose a real threat. (Those bikers are torn limb from limb in graphic detail for their trouble.)

But in the remake, the survivors create all their own problems. First, there’s an African-American (Phifer) and his pregnant Russian wife. Only problem is, she’s been bitten by a zombie, and those who die of such a bite tend to pop back to life again, with a new appetite for human flesh. There’s also a Rambo-like security guard who jockeys for control over the group against resident cool guy Ving Rhames. Then there’s the silly blonde and her yuppie boyfriend (who has a yacht stashed away in a nearby harbor). All they do is drink and screw and take videos of themselves in the process of both. Needless to say, they’re eventually lunch.

With questionable logic, the survivor group decides to leave the safety of the mall in a reinforced shuttle bus (which, when covered in aluminum and barbed wire, looks remarkably like a local jeepney). They’re heading for the harbor, and that yacht, in the hopes of finding a small island nearby that isn’t inhabited by zombies.

What the new Dawn of the Dead lacks is the shock factor of the original. There’s plenty of horrific makeup on display, but the actual cannibalism shown in the original is absent, apparently still taboo to this day. Snyder directs with equal doses of homage and irreverence, but he’s clearly playing to a young audience. Check out the opening and closing title sequences (soundtracked by Johnny Cash’s apocalyptic The Man Comes Around and Jim Carroll’s People Who Died respectively) to get a sense of this first-time director’s in-your-face approach.

And be sure to stick around for the final seconds of the credit sequence to learn if these mall survivors find themselves a zombie-free zone or end up stuck on Killigan’s Island…