Dawn Of The Dead (EOTWS)

End Of The Week Shorts #11 extract: Dawn Of The Dead (1978)

Seen as a straight zombie movie, Dawn Of The Dead is good fun, but objectively a pretty terrible movie. The direction is ok, just like the editing, but the acting and the script are so incredibly dumb at certain points that it's ridiculous. And the zombies... just bad. The main flaw with this movie is then the awfully designed narrative that has no real conflict and shallow characters that only manages to give us some bursts of spectacle to be immersed in. 

However, as most will be able to tell you, Dawn Of The Dead also serves as a poignant commentary on commercialised mindlessness and destruction - and it explores these themes pretty well. For this, Dawn Of The Dead is not only a classic zombie movie that had an immense cultural impact as part of a changing American movie industry, but is also one with, somewhat ironically, a bit of brains. 

All in all, this movie has significant redeeming factors and is intermittently quite a fun movie, but nonetheless suffers from a lot of dumbness - again, somewhat ironically.