Dawn of the Dead (2004)

Saw the 2004 version of Dawn of the Dead. It's much darker than the original but also wears its allegorical heart on its sleeve. No longer a parody/critique of consumer culture, it's very clearly got a post-9/11 America on its mind. This is made clear during an opening-credits montage of zombies scarily devouring victims that kicks off with a field of Moslems kneeling for prayer. Scary, right? I guess they couldn't find any footage of Christians quaking with the holy spirit. This montage also plays over the sweet, sad voice of Johnny Cash soulfully singing about the welcome certainty of death. This warns us that the film is not going to join us in being repulsed by the situation. This zomb-pocalypse is a reckoning and the best that can be had is a ghoulish delight in the proceedings.

So our heroes (a female nurse, Carl Weathers Ving Rhames, a guy in a dress shirt, and others) hole up in a mall. They are at first imprisoned by dumb security guys but soon turn against them. The security dudes are carted off to mall-prison shouting dire warnings about letting "the wrong kind of people" into the mall. To the film's credit, the nurse (the main-est of the main characters) calls them out on their weird phrasing. Throughout she's kind of the moral compass of the film, but the film cuts her off at the knees by providing little reason for anyone to stay moral. Often her pleas for dignity are silenced by further violence and emergency. Sure enough, havoc breaks loose and the guards are proved kind of right during a sequence in which a crazy-evil low-income biracial baby appears(!!!) and the security dudes are let loose again, to help out (oh ho ho! They have have given the foxes free reign over the chicken coop in exchange for the illusion of security! Oh ho ho!)

In addition to all this commentary, the film is quite entertaining. It's got a lot of cute musical cues. When they first get into the mall, a muzak version of Don't Worry Be Happy plays. The song Down With the Sickness is frequently played during kick-ass scenes. The thematic bits make for an entertaining symbolism-decoding session and the ghoulish delight which I mentioned in the first paragraph is there in places (during the end credits, we get a hilarious/cruel joke in the form of a zombie-head in an ice cooler.) It's very bleak, but it came out during the collective sadomasochism of the early '00s (the era which gave us Hostel, Saw, House of 1000 Corpses, and the also-about-9/11 The Devil's Rejects) when America just wanted to see someone suffer. I found this film most interesting as a cultural artifact. Bleak and slightly crazy, the film is kind of a downer but is also, in a weird way, kind of a nihilistic upper, with its guns-blazing dive into doom and its seductive surrender to the peaceful rest of mindless rage.