| |
Format: 
What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing Items Like This?
Theatrical Release Information
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
George Romero's 1978 follow-up to his classic Night of the Living Dead is quite terrifying and gory (those zombies do like the taste of living flesh). But in its own way, it is just as comically satiric as the first film in its take on contemporary values. This time, we follow the fortunes of four people who lock themselves inside a shopping mall to get away from the marauding dead and who then immerse themselves in unabashed consumerism, taking what they want from an array of clothing and jewelry shops, making gourmet meals, etc. It is Romero's take on Louis XVI in the modern world: keep the starving masses at bay and crank up the insulated indulgence. Still, this is a horror film when all is said and done, and even some of Romero's best visual jokes (a Hare Krishna turned blue-skinned zombie) can make you sweat. --Tom Keogh
DVD features
Zombie fans, all rise from the bowls of the earth and rejoice! Anchor Bay's Ultimate Edition of Romero's horror classic Dawn of the Dead not only delivers the DVD goods in spades but goes above and beyond all expectations. The ongoing fan dissatisfaction of which version is available can now end, and the neverending debate of which version is the best can continue ad nauseum. For Anchor Bay has included all versions of the film in their pure, grotesque glory for fans to fully analyze, dissect, and digest. Included in this four-disc set are the "U.S. Theatrical Release" (127 minute, unrated director's cut, with the famous "Goblin" soundtrack in DTS; this is Romero's preferred version), the Dario Argento-edited "European Version" (118 minutes, a faster pace, a few extended scenes, and more "Goblin" music), the "Extended Version" released for the 1978 Cannes Film festival (139 minutes, with additional scenes, more gore, and a music score of library tracks), and a bonus disc of documentaries. All films are remastered and presented in 1:85 anamorphic widescreen. The U.S. and European versions have 5.1 and 2.0 Dolby Surround, and all three versions are presented in their original mono. You may have your favorite version of the film, but there is no arguing about quality. They all look and sound fantastic. Each version has its own commentary track. The European version has the actors' commentary track, while the extended version has producer Richard Rubinstein. But it is the commentary track on the U.S theatrical version that is the real gem. It includes Romero himself, his wife Chris, and makeup artist Tom Savini. If you enjoyed the stellar commentary on Anchor Bay's Day of the Dead, you can expect more of the same. The three of them will take you on a strange trip down memory lane discussing every possible nuance and anecdote of Romero's crowning achievement. The extras on this set are too numerous to lay out in detail. However, two documentaries are particularly noteworthy. The Dead Will Walk (75 minutes) is an all-new documentary tracking the entire life cycle of the Dawn of the Dead phenomenon. It includes tons of interviews with cast and crew members. It is interesting to compare the new documentary with Roy Frumkes' Document of the Dead (92 minutes), an excellent, original documentary that was shot during the making of the film. All in all, Anchor Bay has done an exceptional job with this Ultimate Edition. If you make it through the set, feel free to award yourself an honorary Ph.D in the undead. --Rob Bracco
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
|
Tags customers associate with this product (What's this?)
Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
Check the boxes next to these popular tags or enter your own tags in the field below
Help others find this product - tag it for Amazon search
No one has tagged this product for Amazon search yet. Why not be the first to suggest a search for which it should appear?
|
|
|
Search Products Tagged with
|
|
Rate this item to improve your recommendations
Customer Reviews
|
|
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
69 of 79 people found the following review helpful:
Schlock as High Art, February 18, 2004
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.
|
|
|
35 of 38 people found the following review helpful:
When there's no more room in Hell the Dead will hit the Mall, February 17, 2005
"Shop 'til you drop" takes on literal form in "Dawn of the Dead", Splattermeister George Romero's 1978 magnum opus of the flesh-eating Living Dead. "Dawn" rightly deserves its title as the 'Mount Everest of Zombie Movies'.
The Zombie Apocalypse is all George Romero's fault! And if Grandmaster Romero let the Walking Dead out of their tombs with the groundbreaking "Night of the Living Dead", he gave the zombies the keys to the kingdom in this flick, which laid down all the rules for a Zombie Apocalypse and how to survive It---and, interestingly, managed to break many of them.
Rule #1: AIM FOR THE HEAD!: When "Dawn" opens up, Philadelphia is in its death throes, though the city doesn't know it yet.
The plague of flesh-eating monsters rising from their graves to devour the living has spread from the countryside to the big cities like a firestorm. The slightest scratch or bite causes infection, the infected die horribly, and then return to Life, hungry for the flesh of the living, a mindless Zombie.
Rule #2: THE CAVALRY AIN'T COMING. Things go down and go down hard in the housing project: faster than you can say "tastes like Chicken", SWAT troopers Peter (the great Ken Foree) and Roger (the underrated Scott Reiniger) get outta Dodge with traffic reporter/helicopter pilot Stephen (David Emge, hereafter known as "Flyboy") and Flyboy's girlfriend, Fran (Gaylen Ross).
When the Going gets Tough, the Tough go Shopping.
Rule #3:HE WHO GOES "YEEHAWW" HAS A HALF-LIFE MEASURED IN NANOSECONDS. Romero moves at a taut, brisk pace, letting the feeling of impending doom sink in, the sense of increasing wrongness, all underscored by the brooding, thudding, unearthly pulsing of the Goblin soundtrack.
What's interesting about "Dawn of the Dead" is just how much of a collaborative effort it really was: "Dawn" reprised the team that had helmed "Martin": Mike Gornick on the camera, Romero calling the shots, John Amplas (who played the young vampire Martin) running casting (and who gets gunned down as a rooftop gangsta in a quick cameo), and special spatter effects guru Tom Savini finally strutting his stuff (and getting in some quality screen time with a machete, to boot).
Some have criticized Romero & Crew for lacking artistry in their cinematography, but think about it: "Dawn" was still a low-budget family affair, and Romero's best work has always had an edgy, guerilla feel. But the new print is gorgeous, and clear up any questions about Romero's genius: there is some beautiful stuff here.
Take the scene with the helicopter lifting off against a dying Philadelphia skyline---with the lights in the floors of one skyscraper winking off, bottom to top, floor by floor. Or the nerve-jangling cat & mouse game between Flyboy and a zombie in a darkened engineering room. Or the sere beauty of a Mall parking lot overrun with the Dead hankering for that Blue-light special on human flesh, Aisle 9---all of this lends a brooding, sick, rotten atmosphere to "Dawn". It works in spades, and it's gorgeous, too.
Rule #4: THEY'RE DEAD, THEY'RE ALL MESSED UP. Yes, Romero laid down the "Rules" of the Zombie apocalypse. They move at a lumbering crawl, you put `em down with a blow or bullet to the head, they don't use tools, they're deadly but stupid, they can't learn. Purists judge a remake, or any Zombie flick, according to the rules of the Romero canon.
But take a look at "Dawn" and you'll find something interesting: Romero proceeds to violate---or toy with---nearly every rule about the Living Dead he put forth. You think turbo-zombies first showed up in "28 Days Later"? Not so: zombie kids in an abandoned airport charthouse charge at Ken Foree like they've got a Delorean in their tushses. Zombies can't use tools? Seems one of them finds a wrench very handy in breaking a truck window to take a chomp at Roger.
Rule #5: NO GUTS, NO GLORY. If you love "Dawn of the Dead", you *must* pick up Anchor Bay's lovingly assembled "Ultimate Edition". First off, the print is gloriously restored: the colors are so intense and the picture so clear that "Dawn" looks like it could have been shot yesterday---long gone are the days of cheapo full-screen VHS copies that made early versions of "Dawn" look like porn.
There are four DVDs, tricked out in red and black and handsomely mounted in a glossy package crammed with goodies (including the shot-for-shot comic---nothing special in itself, but a nice addition). You get commentaries with everyone, the original 'Making of' Documentary, a brand-new documentary made especially for this edition, even a creepy commercial for the Monroeville Mall.
The real treasure trove here is the ability to watch all three versions of the movie: the original US theatrical cut (the best, in terms of pacing and atmosphere), the Extended version (featuring a tense and effective stand-off at the Phillie docks), and the shorter European version. It's intriguing to compare how editing and music can radically alter a film: in the Euro version, we have much more of Goblin's soundtrack---but everything feels off, not nearly packing as much punch.
Rule #6:DON'T GET TRAPPED IN THE BASEMENT. Time has been kind to "Dawn of the Dead" and George Romero; justly so. "Dawn" is a deliciously wicked little jewel of a movie, one I can watch over and over again. The consumerist angle, done to death my movie critics, is a little much: Romero filmed the flick in the Monroeville Mall because it was cheap, not because he was making a scathing commentary about American consumerism.
Then again, maybe it is a movie about the extremes of Consumerism: the Zombies have risen again as the ultimate consumers, after all.
They now consume our Flesh.
JSG
|
|
|
34 of 41 people found the following review helpful:
* 2* disc DVD set coming later this year, February 4, 2004
Judging from the sales-rank, many of you (like myself) have pre-ordered the Dawn of the Dead single disc coming this March. From what I've gathered, it represents only the THEATRICAL version with little or no special features. Whether this is a way to spur interest in the re-release or just..uh, well squeeze as much from the market as is possible, is unclear. NONETHELESS, a 2 disc set is due for sometime in 2004 (apparently prior to Halloween). According to a Fangoria report, the multi-disc set will include both theatrical and director's cut editions as well as audio commentary by producer Richard Rubinstein and possibly new tracks with Romero and Tom Savini. There will also be a sizeable still gallery with additional features yet to be announced. I'm more excited about the 2-disc set and curiously peeved at the single-disc version. But it's Dawn of the Dead, what'a'ya gonna do, they've got the good stuff and I need it.
|
Share your thoughts with other customers: 
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
Customer Discussions
Beta (What's this?)
New! Receive e-mail when new posts are made. Click the "Track it!" button on any discussion page.
This product's forum
(1 discussion)
| |
|
|
| |
Active discussions in related forums
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
Related forums
|
Product Information from the Amapedia Community
Beta
(What's this?)
Look for Similar Items by Category
|
Cart
See all 515 customer reviews...
