I don't think I'll ever understand the popularity Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead have enjoyed. They are awful, awful movies without a shred of entertainment value or intelligence of any kind. I've seen much better movies on MST3K. But for some reason everybody seems to think they're some kind of brilliant, genius horror movies with poignant insight into the human condition. I don't get it.

Day of the Dead is better than Dawn, but only because it's shorter. Dawn is more than two unbearable hours, whereas Day is a much more tolerable ninety minutes. Thank God Romero didn't tack on another half hour with a random biker gang this time around. While it lasts, though, Day of the Dead is reprehensible--it's just terrible actors, some of them improvising Jamaican or Mexican or Irish accents, yelling nonsense at each other to the background accompaniment of awful techno thrown together at the last minute on a cheap keyboard. And then the zombies get in and the villain characters get ripped apart. End of movie.

If anybody can explain the popularity of these movies to me, I'll be grateful. I consider it one of the most perplexing mysteries of the universe. Romero made what may be the best possible zombie film, Night of the Living Dead, but then apparently he got hit in the head or something and every subsequent movie he's made has been awful. Worse, he's got some kind of alien brainwashing ray to fool people into loving these unwatchable films. It's scarier than anything in his movies--isn't there anyone who can save the world from George Romero?

When I recieved this particular film in the mail, I had watched both versions of Night of the Living Dead (preferring the Tom Savini/Tony Todd remake) and for the last week or so prior had been watching Dawn of the Dead quite feverently. Also, I have seen the C Minus offshoots Return of the Living Dead 2 and 3. I must say this is my favorite of the 'Dead' series. I was in the mood for good campy zombie fun, that means to me: gore, and zombies, and zombies making gore, and gory zombies. The middle of this movie doesn't have very much zombie gore, or gory zombies, but is rather concerned with Dr.Frankenstien and Bub, a trained zombie. I, personally, found the ridiculous campiness of the entire thread to be hillarious. It would have gotten on my nerves, except I couldn't stop laughing with some brand of giddy anticipation. Speaking of, the ending to this film is absolute bliss, reduced to 20 minutes or so of human slaughtering and 'cannibalism' and a climactic "Show-Your-Respects-To-Bub" gun shot in the spine that had me cheering. In short, George A Romero's Day of the Dead is one of the best zombie films you can see.

Day of the Dead (1985) is the latest in my collection, and, I watched Zombie (1979, Lucio Fulci) after buying it a few days ago, and now, after getting Day in the mail and actually watching it, I have to say, Day is everything Zombie was not... from a decent cast, even with over the top performances, a good pace throughout, and an interesting screenplay... It doesn't quite live up to Dawn of the Dead, but its a fine addition to George A. Romero's saga. The gore effects are right up there, and look pretty real... the tension and breaking of the characters creates a sufficient atmosphere...

The only thing is that the ending is rather abrupt... Some say its due to Romero not getting enough funding, and that may partly be true, but it brings up another question to mind... She keeps having these dreams throughout, maybe she didn't survive at all? the end could be an expressed fantasy going over and over again in the mind of a zombie walking around somewhere... Maybe this is all the last moments of her life flashing before her eyes before her change into the undead, and then the fantasy at the end going over and over again while her dead body wanders a new meaningless existence? In that sense, it could be like something right out of the Twilight Zone or Outer Limits... and might be a final answer to the legacy, a final message about the world we live in and the zombies that now roam it, about the lost humanity that still exists, somewhere, buried deep within these 'undead' representations of ourselves... This would also go right in with the story, and therefore, the abrupt ending might be more fitting than if it showed they escaped and got away... Think about it, all of a sudden, we're treated as if they got away? Its pointed out in the film that the helicopter wasn't fueled up, and the zombies were there, so how did they escape? I don't think they did... and in a way, if you can find this answer, if it really is what was meant, then the ending makes a lot more sense, at least to me, as more a statement, the ultimate overrunning of oneself, the hero not surviving at all, but trapped, with one last fantasy, a small hope that didn't occur. I think, regardless of budget, Romero may have purposely decided it best to make the ending like this, without physically telling the watcher what it meant, therefore allowing a kind of interpretation, while also leaving certain clues inside the film itself as to what very well could have happened, and what did happen.

The movie overall decided to go with a slower pacing, more built as an experiment in isolation, in the tradition of 'John Carpenter's The Thing', being ordered to continue something that may be futile... in a sense, it reminds me a little of Re-Animator, but done to the style of George Romero... To wrap it up, it may not be the best film, but its got it where it counts... I liked it... and remembering Zombie, which should have stuck to the water, Romero proved once again he's on top of things, regardless of the limited minds not letting him do what he wanted to because of their lack of funding... Maybe Romero will get to do the original script he had in mind in the new millennia, someone believing in his vision coughing up the money needed? I can hope...

First, let me say that I'm not going to go too much into the plot summary as others have already done this. Second, I'm not going to follow the usual idea that third sequels tend to be rubbish. Thirdly, I feel I should add my views on a film I've seen way over a hundred times since I discovered it four years ago.

The film has a lot to live up to. 'Night Of The Living Dead' is genuinely creepy, especially the very first zombie who still scares the hell out of me. 'Dawn Of The Dead' was a great film let down by a few budgetary constraints (such as the lack of finance for it's original ending to look convincing, and the 'accidental' use of a certain piece of music from 'Monty Python And The Holy Grail' in an apparently thrilling scene). 'Day Of The Dead' had to be as good as, if not better than these two films.

The first problem was that the movie we see is not the movie intended. The original script can be found on the internet, and paints a very different picture which could, with a few modifications and updates, be made today and garner much appraisal. But finance problems reared their ugly head again, and the big plans for this sequel (which thrill me even on the page in script form) went down the proverbial swannie.

Some key characters remained, others disappeared, but the script was always going to be a struggle to complete convincingly. And there are moments when you'll be cursing the dialogue and the acting - but hey, it wouldn't be a low budget horror movie any other way!

Personally I feel that there is much to commend this film, as long as you can get past the appalling Casio-Synth style soundtrack. Terry Alexander is fantastic, a performance full of energy, humor and above all pure greatness. Together with Jarlath Conroy (the Rowan Atkinson look-alike) he gives the film some light relief from it's bleak vision of mankind's future. Also capable of bringing a smile is the late Richard Liberty as Dr. Logan - aka Dr. Frankenstein. And best of all, Sherman Howard excels as Bub, the kind zombie.

The effects are gory to this day, there are plenty of jumps and above all else, the same humor that fills 'Dawn Of The Dead'. It's a shame that a vintage film suffers from cuts and trims to this day, yet 'Day...' does, and really it deserves to be viewed uncut and often. Like the rest of the trilogy, this film ranks alongside the best horror movies of all time, and no big budget made Romero all the more creative...

There's a noticeable similarity between George Romero's Dead trilogy and the later Alien franchise. Both series start with tense, claustrophobic films that quietly scare the audience with a degree of subtlety; both expand on their ideas for their first sequels, placing the same principles in a warlike setting and upping the action considerably; and, sadly, the pattern continues into the third installments, because, like Alien 3, Day of the Dead is a hefty anti-climax.

As the movie opens, the living dead are still munching their way through a thinning crop of humans, and this installment is the most desolate, with its small group of characters speculating as to whether or not they are the last survivors on earth. It's a promising start that raises hopes that Dawn of the Dead's apocalyptic atmosphere will be continued, and further hope is found in the basic plot that sees scientists in an underground bunker attempting to find a solution to the zombie problem. It's a shame that these fresh ideas and fresh perspectives, which could have made a classic movie and a classic trilogy, are wasted on a film that lacks the intelligence, class and logic of its predecessors.

It's a real disappointment. I'm not often impressed by horror, and I'm put off by the genre's tendency to churn out needless and endless sequels, so it was great to discover the intelligence and invention of the first two movies in the series. But Day of the Dead falls into the horror pitfalls that its predecessors had wisely avoided. Where there was invention there is now cliché, where there were solid characters there are now cardboard cut-outs, and where there was tension there is now boredom and twiddling of thumbs.

While the acting in the first two movies was nothing to write to the Academy about, here it nosedives past the quality found in TV movies, plummets beneath am-dram, and lands a few hundred miles below amateur porn. Joseph Pilato's performance in particular is so hammy that, if he followed the De Niro school of method acting, he must have spent months being salted, smoked and cured in preparation for the part.

At best, Pilato's co-stars manage to make their underwritten and over-clichéd characters look two dimensional. From the gung-ho military men to the crazy scientist, from the drunk Irishman to the platitude-spouting West-Indian who wants nothing from life but to lie on a beach, they have none of the complexities you would expect from having seen their predecessors. To add insult to these critical injuries, the dialogue they're saddled with is repetitive and banal.

A great strength of the first two films was their moral ambiguity, but here it's ignored in favor of outright stupidity. When I watched this installment, it was introduced by critic Mark Kermode, who discussed its ambiguity at length, insisting it allowed the audience to choose whether to be disgusted by the scientists or the military or the living dead, seeing that each was evil in their own way. Unless he's traveled to a mirrored universe where reality is inverted and this movie has a goatee, I'll have to say he's talking out rubbish. There is no doubt as to who we should be cheering for. The bad guys are ridiculously bad, managing to be sexist, racist and murderous, and the worst suffers by far the most grisly death.

Strangely, it's the gore of the death scenes that comes out as the highlight of the movie. Night of the Living Dead had scared us without showing much, and it was to its credit, but here Romero takes the opposite approach without betraying his earlier work. Sadly, it's the only part of the film for which that can be said, but the effects are remarkable and worthy of the highest praise. Unfortunately, these scenes also show up a flaw that the first two movies had mostly managed to escape; the inconsistent strength of the zombies, that sees them struggling to push through a chain-link fence one minute, and happily ripping a body apart the next.

Day of the Dead is a huge anti-climax, and in every sense a wasted opportunity. There are great ideas here, and great potential for an old idea to take off in a new direction, but they are lost in a film that has too little in the way of imagination and too much in the way of running time. If Night of the Living Dead was the fine starter, and Dawn of the Dead the filling main course, Day of the Dead is the turd Romero squeezed out the morning after.

This movie is good in some levels but then again in some stuff it just quite didn't cut it for me, I was used to the action packed experience in Dawn of the dead and Night of the Living Dead and this movie just took the premise and tried to make it dark and ambitious, I feel Romero got a little too independent, sign showing, consumism critics and social problem exposing rage that made this movie a clichéd full zombirama! It's just past of my collection because it's part of the trilogy but I don't cherish it as the first 2 installments, I really can't care less for those people in this movie and if they get eaten by zombies...horribly disfigured or elected president of Zombie nation is the least of my preoccupations and that mad scientist is overdone and overrated. I'll give it a lousy 7 out of 10 on teaching zombies to use a walkman movies.

Much has already been pointed out about the merits and negative aspects of Romero's third dead film. There is not much sense in beating a dead horse(unless it was a zombie horse of course). The Day of the Dead film is a good film in its own right. Most reviewers automatically make comparisons with it to Dawn of the Dead and Night of the Living Dead. It is a different kind of film than both of those. Night is a pure shocker and its whole goal is to shock with the unknown in a unrelenting manner. Dawn was a shocker but at a different level..you knew you were going to see blood and guts but maybe not at such a hyperbolic level. Dawn is also a thinking picture about the materialism of our society, but because of the great amounts of never-before seen gore it was laced with a great deal of black humour and sheer slapstick. Day, however, is what Dawn is without all the hyperbolic gore or the humour. It is a thinking picture about what a group of people, 12 I guess divided into scientists and military people, do while basically stuck in a fenced underground military installation. Easily the most humane of the three pictures, Day focusses on the way people react in a crisis with differing ways of looking at things, and shows the stress of having lived days, weeks, and months in the new order. At one point, there is a wonderful speech given by John about why man should stop with his petty bureaucracies, why man has brought the plague of the undead dead with his search for the "Truth" and answers of the universe. Day of the Dead is really a wonderful essay on human nature both good and bad...and showing that each has a different way at looking at things and a different breaking point. The cast of unknowns is pretty good. Lori Cardille does a fine job as the only female in the camp, and two shining performances come from Richard Liberty as "Frankenstein," a doctor known for his creative bloody experiments on the dead, and Howard Sherman as "Bub" the thinking ghoul. All in all a very good film when taken as an entity by itself. It doesn't pack the scares like NOTLD. It has some extremely gory moments(one body literally torn in half), but does not come close to reaching the hyperbolic heights of Dawn. Yet, it is a fine conclusion? to the Dead series by a very capable thought-provoking director named George Romero.