George A. Romero's Day Of The Dead Blu-ray Disc Review

Buy This Blu-ray Disc Now By Clicking On The Icon Below!

Title: George A. Romero’s Day Of The Dead

Region: A

Media: Blu-ray Disc

Genre: Horror

Stars: Lori Cardille, Terry Alexander, Joe Pilato, and Richard Liberty

Writer: George A. Romero

Director: George A. Romero

Feature length: 101 minutes

Extras: Feature Length Commentary By Writer/Director George A. Romero, Producer David Ball, Special Make-UP Effects Artist Tom Savini, Production Designer Cletus Anderson, And Actress Lori Cardille, Audio Commentary With Filmmaker Roger Avary, The Many Days Of Day Of The Dead Documentary, Day Of The Dead: Behind The Scenes Production Featurette, Audio Interview With Actor Richard Liberty, Wampum Mine Production Video, Theatrical Trailers, TV Spots

Languages: English PCM 5.1 Uncompressed Surround Sound, Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound, and Monaural Sound

Subtitles: English Subtitles For Deaf And Hearing Impaired

Packaging: Blue BD Case

Chapter Stops: 19

Sound: PCM 5.1 Uncompressed Surround Sound, Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound, and Monaural Sound

Year of Theatrical Release: 1985/Blu-ray Disc Release: 2007

Theatrical Distributor: United Film Distribution Company

Home Video Distributor: Starz Home Entertainment

MPAA Rating: Not Rated

Reviewer: Mark A. Rivera

Since the release of George A. Romero’s Land Of The Dead, which was set approximately three years after George A. Romero’s Night Of The Living Dead, fans have been trying to guess when Day Of The Dead takes place. I am guessing that it is about one year after the first film judging by the decay of society witnessed in George A. Romero’s Dawn Of The Dead. In Florida, a ragtag group of scientists and soldiers have been desperately trying to find survivors aboveground in the now lifeless cities overrun with the living dead while belowground grisly experiments are being performed by an insane scientist, who has been trying to find a way of controlling the zombies from a behavioral standpoint so that they can be trained not to attack and devour human beings. Tension between the survivors comes to a boiling point as the root method behind behaviorally controlling a zombie is revealed and soon the missile silo complex they have held up in becomes a tomb for those not so fortunate to escape the onslaught of zombies who are finally given entrance into the compound on the darkest day of horror the world is ever known.

Day Of The Dead carries over many of the themes developed from Night Of The Living Dead and Dawn Of The Dead to its logical conclusion in as much as one can in a film series like this. While the original film offered some strange form of radiation brought back by a satellite returning from Venus that was remotely destructed as it was entering the Earth’s orbit as the reason for the sudden reanimation of the recently dead, the idea was dropped or at least never mentioned again for Dawn Of The Dead, Day Of The Dead, and the 1990 remake of Night Of The Living Dead in favor of something more esoteric involving a curse or plague visited upon humanity by God for our misdeeds or whatnot and well that is as good a reason as any for something that truly is beyond our normal range of comprehension. By the time Land Of The Dead was released, it appears that the reason why this was happening and how it could be stopped was finally dropped. People have accepted it now as just another fact of life (no pun intended) and are now more concerned with surviving and in many ways Land Of The Dead carries over themes developed in the first three films and also included many ideas that Romero could not integrate due to budgetary considerations in Day Of The Dead, because otherwise he would have to submit the film to the MPAA and he preferred to have more control over Day Of The Dead rather than have people look over his shoulders while making the film. Back in the mid 1980s there was no DVD and even laserdisc was in its infancy. The VHS market could accommodate an unrated film, but it was more difficult to market unrated motion pictures because they were perceived as being pornography sight unseen and there was not even a sell through market yet for VHS tapes. Most people rented and copied films off of TV back then. Even the adult film industry on home video was still a developing market despite the success it brought to home video in general. So a lower budget with a scaled down screenplay that had the essential ideas Romero wanted to get across was the best way to get Day Of The Dead produced and maintain creative control, which included having the film released unrated.

Now with the ideas that could not be fully realized integrated into Romero’s views on the decaying middle class in post 9/11 America and a general “Let them eat cake attitude held by some of the wealthy elite that have seized control of much of the country’s infrastructure over the past two decades, I can almost imagine that the raiders that attacked the mall in Dawn and military groups disillusioned with the failure of science and government to deal with the problem have embraced the privatization of the fortified cities as a means of survival. However for viewers to reach that point in the story as illustrated in Land Of The Dead, they must go through Day Of The Dead, which is arguably the darkest and grisliest in the series thus far. The fortieth anniversary of George A. Romero’s Night Of The Living Dead is in 2008 and whether by intention or coincidence or perhaps something unconscious in-between, Romero is taking his series full circle with the theatrical release of Diary Of The Dead, a prequel set during the first three days of the epidemic as captured on video as well as off the internet and other media sources by a group of young filmmakers documenting and learning first hand about the undead. George A. Romero’s Diary Of The Dead was acquired for North American theatrical and home video release by The Weinstein Company and will be released theatrically through the Dimension Films label early next year.

The things we learn about the zombies that were gradually theorized in the first two installments, such as that they are driven only by their most primal instincts and that is why they eat the living flesh, is explored. The zombies in some cases are able to display some residual memory or ability to learn as demonstrated in certain cases like “Bub” (Howard Sherman), but since these beings are still dead, their continual decay will eventually halt their undead life much the way the living will die from old age. The estimate time theorized in the film is approximate 10 to 12 years before the rate of decay will begin to affect their mobility. So in time this plague will pass, which makes the advice of just leaving the old world and going to some secure isolated place like an island for a few generations not a bad idea. Characters encountered early in Dawn Of The Dead at the dock are stealing a boat to get to an island. “Any island” as one of the characters states while our heroes, who were taking the weather helicopter up north to find sanctuary somewhere in Canada, end up making the mistake of trying to secure a life for themselves in a mall. The old world is gone and any attempt to hold onto it and pretend the world has not changed is futile in Romero’s Living Dead series once civilization breaks down into anarchy and people cease to work with one another for a collective good. Thus how ironic is it that going to an island for salvation turns out to be the best thing left to do by the time Day Of The Dead ends? Eventually we will learn from seeing Land Of The Dead that water is not a deterrent for zombies anymore and yet places with little to no people such as the far northern regions of Canada ends up being a destination that some of the characters of that film take to find salvation. I would imagine there would be many natural factors that would make living on an island a safe bet regardless, but in the end there is no such thing as guaranteed safety. A lot of life is based on faith, hope and sometimes a bit of luck and blissful ignorance. So while these movies are not direct sequels with the same central character appearing in each story and while there is no attempt to match up the films with the decades they were made in, thematically the films are truly a series and ultimately it is not hard to look past the various changes that have come with the passage of time and still accept these movies as a continuing series and not a bunch of unrelated horror pictures.

Like many “Romero” fans, I saw Day Of The Dead with a friend when I was a teenager in high school and I found myself both compelled and repulsed by the state of the art gore effects by Tom Savini and I was unhappy because I wanted both a happier and more definitive ending at the time though now I think the film provides an ending that fits and pretty much gives the viewers a sense of how things will end. In my opinion eventually over the course of many years the zombies will cease to function because the part of the brain that compels them would have succumbed to decomposition and if there are any surviving humans left, hopefully they will have learned something will remake the world in a better way than before. Romero suggested to me in an interview I did with him back in 2005 that the only way he could see it ending was in a detent and he hinted at that with Land Of The Dead. I hope he will make another film that shows this closure for the series sooner rather than later because I think that is what the series needs. By sense of closure I don’t mean a tacked on “happy ending” so much as a resolution that logically fits Romero’s film series in general. Perhaps even though the film is a prequel, Diary Of The Dead will have that quality, but I won’t know until I’ve seen it. There are lots of elements developed in the first two films that carry themselves out through the third film that include the possibility of beating the infection by severing a bitten limb fast enough from the zombie victim and there are a few dialogue nods as well as a music nod to Dawn Of The Dead in one of the film’s scenes involving a zombie being punished by Dr. Logan (Richard Liberty) by being locked in a room with the lights off.

While many of the characters exhibit the darker nature of human behavior in the film, it is not necessarily so over the top as some reviewers have labeled the film in the past. I mean Rhoades (Joe Pilato) is painted out to be the villain of the film and indeed he is villainous, but he is understandably upset and while his actions are ultimately both destructive to himself and others in the film, I am not sure anyone in his predicament might not react the same way. These are people caught in a tragic situation, losing hope and their sanity fast. In fact much of the reasons why the humans fail in Romero’s Dead Series is because they react when they should have thought things through. However if the dead were rising right now to feed on the living I am not sure if I would be able to think things through before taking action and so depending on the level of stress one can handle I think we are all capable of reacting in manners that do not best serve our needs or purposes. This fact makes even the most loathsome characters in Day Of The Dead believable because they are all too human and we all have flaws, except for all of you who are reading this review! ;)

George A. Romero’s Day Of The Dead has been released with an AVC encoded high definition (1.85:1) widescreen aspect ratio with a maximum resolution of 1080p where available. The darker nature of the film itself does reveal some fine film grain in some scenes, but Day Of The Dead was never meant to look as colorful as Dawn Of The Dead. This is still an improvement over the previous DVD releases I have seen over the years. The level of detail is truly astonishing. The textures of the drab interiors and clothes are only surpassed by the level of clarity the gore effects reveal with the crimson red blood spurting out to reveal many levels of guts and bones in even the most smallest of bites sustained by the characters in the film. An edgy English PCM Uncompressed Surround Soundtrack has been encoded onto the Blu-ray Disc along with an English Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Soundtrack and the original English Monaural Soundtrack with optional English Subtitles for the Deaf and Hearing Impaired encoded as options too. While the subtitling for the film appears to be new, the famous “Choke on it!” line has still been misquoted in the subtitles.

Writer/Director George A. Romero, Producer David Ball, Special Make-UP Effects Artist Tom Savini, Production Designer Cletus Anderson, and Actress Lori Cardille participate in feature length audio commentary that is both screen specific and retrospective. Savini and Romero share lots of great information regarding the making of the film and a few anecdotes regarding the special effects too. Lori Cardille’s father appeared in the original 1968 version of Night Of The Living Dead as well as the 1990 remake and early in the commentary she adds a bit of perspective to her role in the film, but later all she seems to do is react to what’s going on in the film without adding any input to the conversation. Academy Award® winning filmmaker Roger Avary delivers his own feature length commentary despite having no connection to the film other than he is a fan, but he does make a some interesting observations about the film and while I may not agree with everything he says, I cannot deny that he makes some valid points.

Extra value features include The Many Days Of Day Of The Dead (38:40), which features brand new videotaped interviews with Writer/Director George A. Romero, Producer David Ball, Special Make-Up Effects Artists Tom Savini and Greg Nicotero, Production Designer Cletus Anderson, Assistant Director Chris Romero, and Actors Lori Cardille, Joe Pilato, and Howard Sherman. This is supported by videotaped behind the scenes footage from the production where much of the mechanical effects are tested and viewers can see zombie make-up tests and how the action scenes were produced before their eyes (30:50). Both documentaries contain spoilers and should not be viewed before seeing the feature even by those who have seen the film before many times. Next is an audio interview from March 7, 2000 with Actor Richard Liberty, who seems to have been quite a nice person judging by his demeanor toward answering the questions in the interview (16:08). The promotional reel for the Gateway Center “Wampum Mine” storage facility where the film was shot (8:12) is also included along with three theatrical trailers presented in (1.85:1) aspect ratios that have running times of (1:59), (2:04), and (1:10) respectively. The one with the zombie in the theater is my favorite. Three 32-second TV spots and a BD exclusive film facts text commentary wrap up the extra value features on this Blu-ray Disc.

The seamless interactive menus are well rendered and easy to navigate. George A. Romero’s Day Of The Dead is available on Blu-ray Disc now at retailers on and offline from Starz Home Entertainment.

Return To The Previous Page

Buy This Blu-ray Disc Now By Clicking On The Icon Below!