Zombie Bracket – Round One – Day of the Dead (1985) vs Dawn of the Dead (2004)
At long last we come to the end of round one. Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive managed to give Fido a whopping that hasn’t been seen since Steve Buscemi was in high school.
Now for the final matchup … and this one is not going to be an easy one. George Romero’s Day of the Dead versus Zach Synder’s Dawn of the Dead. Two favored zombie movies butting heads to determine who will move into the next round and who will be used for target practice.
Here’s the synopsis for Day of the Dead:
Day of the Dead, the third and concluding chapter in George Romero’s zombie trilogy is the most distinctly 1950s-style science fiction version of the lot. Set in Florida, as the film begins the dead have taken over the world, outnumbering humans 400,000 to one. The handful of surviving humans have taken refuge in an underground missile silo and argue and yell at each other like players in a Rod Serling Twilight Zone episode. Among the survivors are Sarah (Lori Cardille) — a scientist who is trying to reverse the process whereby the dead turn into flesh-eating, irrational zombies — and Dr. Logan (Richard Liberty) — an out-of-his-mind psychologist who wants to capture the zombies and turn them into domestic help. Things heat up when the military tries to take over the scientific experiments. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide
And here is the synopsis for Dawn of the Dead:
The feature-film debut of director Zack Snyder, Dawn of the Dead is a modern retelling of George Romero’s 1978 horror classic, which was actually the second film in a trilogy that began with Night of the Living Dead and concluded with Day of the Dead. Sarah Polley and Ving Rhames star as two of the last remaining people on an earth that has been ravaged by flesh-eating zombies. After escaping to a shopping mall with a handful of other survivors, they decide that they only way to truly elude the approaching throng of undead is to somehow make their way to an island that is supposedly zombie-free. Jake Weber and Mekhi Phifer also star. ~ Matthew Tobey, All Movie Guide
Which is the better zombie film?
Updated Zombie Bracket (special thanks to Matt for some zombie bracket corrections)
Day of the Dead. Dark, intriguing, gruesome, fabulous. My favorite Romero movie!
It’s such a pity that Kati is wrong :p Dawn all the way.
Day took an idea about zombies learning/remembering too far and started the downward spiral of Land into Diary. Survival also takes this theme to an extreme but at least makes a proper story of it.
New DotD does have fast zombies and a ridiculous zombie baby but overall sticks to the themes and is a lot of fun to watch. The same cannot be said of Day.