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Zombie movies. Lots of "serious" types look down on them. That's a shame, because some of them are really first-rate films. Dawn of the Dead, the middle film of George Romero's "dead" trilogy, is a case in point. You want zombies, we got your zombies RIGHT HERE! You want blood? Guts? Flesh eating? Oh boy, does Dawn of the Dead ever deliver!
And then it does something really unique - it also delivers drama, engaging characters with realistic delimmas, a smartly crafted story, and a heavy dose of dead-on social satire. And did I mention that it's just flat-out scary as hell, too?

There is one scene in particular, toward the beginning, that still haunts me - twenty some-odd years after I first saw it. The National Guard has been called in to clear a tenament building. In the basement, they find a cage where the dead have been locked away. The simple, unsettling music of Goblin rises on the soundtrack, underscored by a heartbeat-like bass drum. There are the zombies, many in death shrouds, feasting on body parts. Guardsman Peter Washington (Ken Foree) steps into the nightmare with a pistol to dispatch the zombies with bullets to their heads. The whole thing takes on a surreal, hellish texture, like a Bosch painting. Foree's performance is striking - he is truly IN THE MOMENT, as they say, without a hint of the winking self-awareness we see in other genre flicks. If the dead really started coming back to feed on the living, this is exactly what it be like. This is the toll it would exact on people trying to grapple with the situation.

Yet, in a way, Dawn of the Dead IS self-aware. It knows when to step back, too, and admit that it's playing with you. Another scene, of this sort, occurs when we see a group of rednecks hunting the shambling corpses as though they were deer. They sip coffee from thermoses, pass sandwiches around, and banter about their accuracy with their rifles. It's a very funny bit, in part because it's so deadpan.

Those are just two favorite examples. There is much, much more to this film, and almost all of it works beautifully. Even the sometimes obviously low budget and gleeful use of library stock music doesn't hurt. Romero turns these limitations to his advantage, by making them serve as searing comments on mass media, consumerism, and pop culture.

Performances by David Emge, Scott Reiniger, and Gaylen Ross are worthy of mention, too. They play real people in an extraordinary situation, rather than two-dimensional horror-movie characters.

Dawn of the Dead schlock as high art - complex, funny, scary, and engaging. And thank goodness it's coming back to DVD, because it's one worth watching over and over again.