I thought I was going to have to heavily update this review after watching it again the other day, but now I read it over again and I can’t understand why I rated it so highly before, because basically, all the below still applies, only now it’s in my worst 5 movies of the year list. I would still say it’s worth watching once, with the volume up loud etc, because it has a one-hit kick to it. But anymore would be foolhardy. Not even a dustmark on the original’s negative.

As expected, this remake had no chance of living up to the original for me. For a moment though, I was thrown – the first 10 minutes or so, pre-credits, are downright perfect, and show how much can be achieved without heavy blood-letting and bad language, and how much potential this first time director, Zack Snyder, may have. But it’s downhill pretty much from the start of the opening credits.

The problem with this movie for me, I think, lies in the fact that it assumes nothing of the audience. Some might find this somehow praiseworthy – there has been a remake of the “prequel”, Night of the Living Dead, which sets up the zombies being “born” but it was in 1990, 14 years ago. So I guess the film makers figured they might have some zombie newbies in the audience and decided to make all the characters zombie newbies too. I really don’t think it works. Even the original Dawn of the Dead was made a decade after its prequel. George Romero dealt with explaining the zombies (in particular stuff like, how to kill them, and that it’s the bites that kill and resurrect) in the opening news sequences, a device that’s present in the remake but isn’t used the same way. So we end up with, basically, stupid characters, unless you happen to know nothing about the zombies.

I had to stifle a laugh as soon as I saw the pregnant girl as part of the main group… I mean, you just know how that’s going to turn out. But that alone isn’t enough – it has to be the most unconvincing pregnancy I’ve ever seen on film too. The baby turns out to be one of the worst visual effects in the movie, and the whole character could be happily excised from the screenplay as far as I’m concerned.

I need to get the screenplay out of the way because it’s the movie’s biggest failing. There’s a guy across the street from our main gang in the mall and throughout the movie he communicates by writing messages on a whiteboard which he holds up for Ving Rhames to read through his binoculars. At the beginning, he writes “Andy – alone” on the board by way of introduction. Then Rhames (or whoever it is who’s looking through the binoculars – I think it’s one of the others actually) has to turn to the others and say, just to clarify, “His name is Andy. He’s alone.” Now, fair enough, it had to be said because the others don’t have binoculars… but it’s just such an unwieldy moment. Then there are the action movie clichés – an ending straight out of “The A-Team”, and a doubter of the plan saying, “Let me get this straight, you wanna…. [blah blah difficult and ridiculous plan]…” to which the others go, “Yup… yep… pretty much,” and he responds, “Okay. I’m in.” There must have been hundreds of better Dawn of the Dead remake scripts out there, I don’t know why the hell this one was picked.

But that’s the screenplay. Snyder does his best with what he has. The actors are all as good as can be expected for a horror movie. Ving Rhames gets some nice lines and delivers them in his inimitable manner (“Go in the cubicle, say five hail Mary’s, wipe yo’ ass and you’re good with God,”) and there’s plenty of freaky looking faces plus a few cameos for original fans. The music is very different from the original but works with the very different visuals. Saving Private Ryan style fast film stock (I think it’s fast film stock, I always forget how the effect is achieved, I just flick my video camera into sports mode…) is used to interesting effect and increasingly towards the finale. And there’s a nice idea of telling the “after-story” while the end credits roll.

This will make a good night out for today’s young people who want a really quick fix and buckets of blood (boy, when did I get so old?) But it won’t last out the original, and won’t even last out other recent horror remakes like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Ring. Its problem really is, it’s too stupid.