Day of the Dead (1985) Review
8/10
A helicopter circles a Florida city calling for survivors and nobody answers. Below ground in a military storage facility, a handful of scientists and soldiers are the last organized people anybody knows about, and they’ve stopped being able to work together.
The 8 is for a film that’s unpleasant to sit through and entirely deliberate about it. The dialogue is shouted, the characters are exhausting, the bunker is claustrophobic, and all of that is the point instead of a failure of tone.
I respect this film more than I enjoy it, and I’m fine with that. A hundred minutes of people screaming at each other in a hole wears me down, and I think it’s meant to. What justifies the 8 is how coldly it commits to the idea that the living are the problem, and how it ends up making a zombie the one I’m rooting for.
It was the least liked of the original trilogy on release and has aged into the most interesting. Nothing in it works as entertainment and almost everything in it works as an argument. Its reputation has reversed almost completely. Reviews in 1985 found it shrill and unpleasant, which it is, and the same qualities now read as the most honest account of institutional collapse anybody attached to the genre has produced.
The Budget Cut Made It
Romero’s original script was considerably larger, involving trained zombie armies and a fortified island, and required a budget he couldn’t get without accepting a rating he refused. He took half the money and rewrote it as twelve people in a hole.
That constraint produced the film’s entire character. There’s no world outside the bunker, no sense of a wider situation, and no indication that anybody is coming. That’s far more frightening than the epic version would have been.
The opening establishes it in one shot. A calendar on a wall, and when a hand touches it, the plaster crumbles and cockroaches pour out. Nothing in this place is being maintained and nobody is coming.
What remains of the larger idea is Bub, and the money running out was a stroke of luck. A single trained zombie in a cell is a far better version of the concept than an army would have been, and I’d take him over any horde Romero could have afforded.
A constraint that forces you to remove scale usually improves the work. Twelve people who can’t leave is a situation, and an army is a spectacle. Ask what your story is about when you can’t afford the version you planned. The answer is often the version you should have planned.
Establish the absence of rescue immediately and never revisit it. One shot of a decayed calendar does what fifty minutes of radio silence would.
Keep one element of the abandoned larger idea. Bub is what survives of the trained-zombie concept, and a single specimen makes the argument better than a battalion.
Everybody Is Shouting
The performances are pitched enormously high, especially Joseph Pilato’s Captain Rhodes, who spends most of the film at maximum volume threatening to shoot people.
That’s been the film’s most common criticism for forty years, and I think it misreads the film. These people have been underground for months with no prospect of relief, and they’re past the point where anybody modulates anything. Pilato’s volume does wear on me by the last act, and it’s part of why this sits at an 8.
Rhodes is also not wrong about the central problem: the scientists are using irreplaceable resources on research nobody can finish. His method is monstrous and his complaint is accurate. That combination makes him work, and the film refuses to give him a moment of unreasonableness that would let the audience dismiss him.
Lori Cardille’s Sarah is the only person operating at a normal volume, and the film makes clear that her composure is costing her something. She’s not the sane one, she’s the one who hasn’t broken yet. The opening dream is where that’s stated. She reaches for a wall and arms burst through it, and the film then cuts to her awake. That establishes in ninety seconds that nobody down there’s sleeping properly and that the audience can’t trust what it’s shown.
Bub
Howard Sherman plays a zombie kept in a cell, conditioned with rewards, who remembers how to hold a razor, salutes an officer, and recognizes music. He’s the emotional center of the film and the only character in it capable of gratitude. The scenes where he listens to a Walkman and handles a book are played straight, and they move me more than anything happening among the living. Bub is my favorite character in the whole trilogy, living or dead. What Romero is arguing is unmistakable. The zombie is learning, the humans are deteriorating, and the film draws the lines so that Bub’s salute to a corpse is the single act of decency in a hundred minutes.
Logan is the other half of that. The scientist who trained him is also dismembering bodies in a room nobody is allowed into, feeding specimens with the remains of dead soldiers, and the film is clear that a man who has lost his own produced Bub’s humanity.
The revenge at the end is the payoff and it’s entirely earned. Bub finds a pistol, remembers what it’s for, and the film gives him the most satisfying kill in the trilogy against the man who taught him the salute’s meaning by mocking it.
Sherman performs all of it through prosthetics that leave him one working eye and no mouth movement. That makes the achievement stranger. Everything Bub communicates across the whole film is done with a head tilt, a hand and the way he holds his shoulders at the moment somebody else walks into the cell he’s kept in.
Give a monster a capacity for something the humans have lost, and the argument makes itself without a word of commentary. The requirement is that the capacity must be showed instead of stated. Bub is never described as sympathetic, he’s simply shown doing things nobody expects.
Small precise gestures beat large ones. A salute, a held book, headphones. Each is a fragment of a former life surfacing, and the audience assembles the person.
Give him a payoff. The reader who has been asked to feel something for a monster deserves to see that investment repaid, and the repayment can be violent.
Savini’s Best Work
The effects in this are the high point of practical gore and nothing has surpassed them in forty years, largely because nobody builds them this way any more.
The Rhodes death is the sequence everybody remembers and it’s difficult to watch. It’s slow, it’s anatomically specific, and it’s performed entirely in camera with prosthetics and a great deal of material Savini sourced from a butcher.
What makes it work is that the film has set it up. Rhodes has spent ninety minutes being the worst person in the bunker, and I was ready to cheer when they got him. Then the scene keeps going, past satisfying and into horrible, and I think that stretch is the film passing judgment on me along with him.
The specificity is what digital work still can’t reproduce. A practical effect has weight, resistance and mess, and the camera can hold on it, and that combination is why these shots still function when far more expensive ones don’t.
Savini also had a supply nobody else had, since he had been a combat photographer in Vietnam and built his work from what he’d seen. That’s the difference between an effect designed to look horrible and one designed to look correct.
The Argument
Three groups occupy the bunker. The military want control, the scientists want understanding, and two civilians want to leave and be left alone. The film’s position is that the first two are the problem. Rhodes and Logan are both pursuing something that can’t work, at enormous cost, and their conflict destroys the only functioning arrangement anybody has.
John the helicopter pilot delivers the thesis in a long speech about people being punished for trying to run things they were never meant to run. It’s the closest Romero ever came to stating his own position outright, and I like him best for handing it to the man with no rank and no plan.
The survivors are the three who wanted no part of it. They reach an island, and the film ends on a calendar being marked. That’s the same image it opened with and now means something entirely different. Terry Alexander and Jarlath Conroy play the two who built the escape and kept quiet about it, living in a caravan inside the bunker with a curtain and a radio. Two people who have made a home in a hangar while everybody else argues is the film’s only functioning arrangement.
A story with three factions is more useful than one with two, because the third can decline to participate and their refusal becomes the position the work endorses. Two factions produce a winner. Three produce an argument.
Give your thesis to the least powerful character. John has no authority and no plan and is correct about everything. That makes the speech an observation instead of a manifesto.
Bookend with the same object changed. A calendar decaying at the start and being marked at the end says everything about what the survivors have recovered.
Should you watch Day of the Dead?
Yes, and expect to find it unpleasant. Twelve people underground who have stopped being able to work together, the best practical effects anybody has produced, and a zombie in a cell who’s the only character capable of gratitude.
The shouting and the grinding misery hold it back from a 9 for me, and the nerve behind them keeps it at a solid 8. I think it’s the smartest film in Romero’s original trilogy.
