Dawn of the Dead

Now if you haven't yet seen George Romero's seminal classic 'Dawn of the Dead' then hang your head in shame then go directly out and see it immediately! 'Dawn' is still to this day my own personal favourite film of all time and even after the twenty two years or so since its release I've yet to come across a more exciting and powerful piece of cinema to this day.

But I digress, for those that haven't yet seen this gem the story kicks off in the heat of the action where we discover that the dead have been coming back to life as flesh eating zombies. But here the film brilliantly shows thatg there path shows no restrictions, and the planet is overcome with the undead and the living are fighting a losing battle to stay in control.

We follow two renegade soldiers, their TV crew associate and her helicopter pilot boyfreind on their search for a safe environment away from the dangers of the zombie infested cities. After some effort they find a sprawling suburban shopping mall which they decide will be the ideal hideout to shack up in for some much needed respite from the chaos ensuing elsewhere.

Global chaos, gory carnage and some wicked thought provoking questioning of human nature are the order of the day in this epic movie. Romero's most stunning work with some great performances by the lead cast (Ken Foree is the business here in his best performance to date) and Tom Savini's is allowed to run riot creating some of the most exciting and groundbreaking gore effects (many of which have been duplicated endlessly by effects teams within the genre ever since).

Now a bit more about this particular DVD release, as many of SGM's more regular readers will know, some time ago we ran an email campaign for Anchor Bay to release the definitive 'Dawn' DVD collection. Their earlier 'Directors Cut' disc was a flipper release that cut the flow of the movie half way through your viewing pleasure and to date they hadn't planned a release of Dario Argento's cut of the movie.

For those that don't know, the production of 'Dawn' was developed by Romero with the keen assistance of Argento and company with the proviso that Romero allow Argento edit together his own version of the film for the European market. Argento felt that film needed paced differently from Romero's original US cut.

Well, thankfully with the good work of persistent horror fans everywhere Anchor Bay did indeed agree that 'Dawn' was more than worthy of revisiting with the Special Edition treatment (which is in the early production stages at this time).

But over in Holland, the folk at Dutch Filmworks had obviously taken notice of the great interest in this much wanted release and wasted no time in putting together a highly respectable package that would have 'Dawn's fans drooling in joy with it's prospective release.

So, here we have a very attractive double disc set containing both Romero's 'Directors Cut' as a non-flipper presentation in widescreen format and Argento's alternative more fast paced cut complete with thumping Goblin soundtrack in a full screen version.

There has been much grumbling around the net about this package's poor picture quality, but I was more than pleasantly surprised. Although neither boasted a pristine digitally remastered image (in fact the image is of VHS standard), both were fine enough to make me more than happy with this great value package. The Directors cut print was reasonable enough and didn't suffer the washed out colour problem that I found with Anchor Bay's original pressing of their disc. Ok the Argento cut is presented full screen, but it doesn't detract from the pleasure of watching this rarely seen version of the film which although misses out some twenty odd minutes of the originals running time (and the helicopter head slicing scene, due to it's dubious nature) it does have some very interesting alternate scenes and gory snippets not found elsewhere (and Goblin fans will be thrilled with the soundtrack treatment).

The package also throws in a host of other very welcome extras including Roy Frumkes original hour long documentary 'Document of the Dead' which takes you behind the scenes of the making of the movie (listen to Romero discuss how he DID film the other ending!). There's also a great selection of trailers and TV spots for the film from all across the globe (which I thoroughly enjoyed!) as well as the trailers for both 'Night' and 'Day' also, and bios for the main players involved in the production. Oh yeah, there's a still gallery and booklet in there too !

So, needless to say as a big fan of this movie I was more than satisfied with this package and can definetely recommend it to fellow fans of 'Dawn' also (especially if like me you can't wait for Anchor Bay to get their all singing and dancing 'definitive' package together!) The discs are PAL format which might not be so welcoming to some of our US readers, unless you've got one of those nice Apex players of course. Also, another attractive thing about this set is the budget pricing of it, two discs for the price of one (which more than makes up for the less than perfect quality of the prints themselves!)

A simply fantastic film gets a tasty DVD package release. Well worth checking out !!

Thanks to Han at Chainsaw Video