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 have stopped being able to work together.
The 8 is for a film that is genuinely 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.
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 could not 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 is no world outside the bunker, no sense of a wider situation, and no indication that anybody is coming, which is 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 a single trained zombie in a cell is a better version of the concept than an army would have been.
A constraint that forces you to remove scale usually improves the work. Twelve people who cannot leave is a situation, and an army is a spectacle. Ask what your story is about when you cannot 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 carries the argument better than a battalion.
Everybody Is Shouting
The performances are pitched enormously high, particularly Joseph Pilato’s Captain Rhodes, who spends most of the film at maximum volume threatening to shoot people.
That has been the film’s most common criticism for forty years and it is the wrong reading. These people have been underground for months, have no prospect of relief, and have passed the point where anybody modulates anything.
Rhodes is also not wrong about the central problem, which is that the scientists are using irreplaceable resources on research nobody can finish. His method is monstrous and his complaint is accurate. That combination is what 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 is not the sane one, she is the one who has not broken yet.
The opening dream is where that is stated. She reaches for a wall and arms burst through it, and the film then cuts to her awake, which establishes in ninety seconds that nobody down there is sleeping properly and that the audience cannot trust what it is 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 is the emotional center of the film and the only character in it capable of gratitude. The scene where he listens to a Walkman, and the scene where he handles a book, are played straight and are more affecting than anything happening among the living.
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 Bub’s humanity was produced by a man who has lost his own.
The revenge at the end is the payoff and it is entirely earned. Bub finds a pistol, remembers what it is 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, which 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 is 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 demonstrated instead of stated. Bub is never described as sympathetic, he is 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.
Let him earn 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 is genuinely difficult to watch. It is slow, it is anatomically specific, and it is performed entirely in camera with prosthetics and a great deal of material Savini sourced from a butcher.
What makes it land is that the film has earned it. Rhodes has spent ninety minutes being the worst person in the bunker, and the death is the film’s judgment delivered at a length that stops being satisfying and becomes horrible.
The specificity is what digital work still cannot 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 do not.
Savini also had a supply nobody else had, since he had been a combat photographer in Vietnam and built his work from what he had seen. That is 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 cannot 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, and it is the closest Romero ever came to stating his own position outright.
The survivors are the three who wanted no part of it. They reach an island, and the film ends on a calendar being marked, which is 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, which 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 is the only character in the film capable of gratitude.
Frequently Asked Questions
This film appears on 3 of my film lists