Posted by The Bastard at 0-1pool47-9.nas18.portland1.or.us.da.qwest.net on March 19, 2004 at 17:55:39:
If you allow for the fact that it's nigh impossible to top the original movie(s) and go in wanting to enjoy the movie as opposed to wanting to pick it apart and compare it to Romero's late seventies flick(s), any fan of horror movies is in for a damn good time.
During this movie, I found myself in my seat thinking "Man, don't go in there," for the first time in I'm not sure how long. With other modern day horror pictures, I sit mentally mocking the idiotic protaganists, hoping for their quick and gory demise. I was pleasantly surprised to find that this was not the case.
The film mixes suspense, gore, the shock factor, the extremity of human emotion, and humor in a way that hasn't been done in years. I haven't seen every single horror movie that has come out, true, but I've seen most of them, and for me, this new Dawn Of The Dead is among the best to be made in the last ten years, maybe the last fifteen.
I did feel there were too many slow-motion close-ups of weapons being fired (Oh, look, Ving has a shotgun), and again, this film just isn't the original, but I do have to admit the speed at which the zombies move (as opposed to Romero's lumbering and persistent freaks) makes them much, much creepier. Think of the "infected" from 28 Days Later compared with the back up dancers in Thriller...