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Tuesday 14 July 2020

George A Romero: Trilogy of the Dead: Day of the Dead



Day of the Dead is the last installment of the Trilogy of the Dead, and my least favourite I have to say.

The world is over run by zombies and the government have scientists holed up in bunkers across the country to try and find a cure or at least a way to fight back wholesale.

We open up with a helicopter flying over a seemingly deserted town trying to get someone to reply to their radio messages, they have no joy so decide to land and use a a loudhailer to see if there's any survivors.
All this noise brings out the zombies and we get our first look at what the make up maestro Tom Savini can do with a budget, and it's both brilliant and gruesome!


Back at the bunker we see the effects of being cooped up in isolation for an extended period of time (I'm sure we can all related to that!)
The military commander has died and egomaniac psycho Capt Rhodes has taken over, and there's tension between the military and the scientists.

Cut to the laboratory and we have Dr Logan, nicknamed Frankenstein by the men, performing various experiments on zombies, one he has cut open completely as it squirms on the operating table, another is just a body and a brain! 


But Logan's especially proud of one of his experiments, Bub, a "tame" zombie. 

As I stated this is my least favourite of the 3, I think the acting is awful, very wooden in places and over the top in others but it's a good storyline and the Savini effects are some of the best practical effects that had ever been seen!
The ending's a bit crap as well!

Tom Savini  considers this his best work, in fact he won the Saturn Award for best SPFX in a movie, he was nominated in 1979 for Dawn of the Dead but lost out to William Tuttle for Love at First Bite!

Romero actually stated that this was his best movie and favourite of all the Dead films, there's no accounting for taste.


One of the iconic scenes shows a newspaper with the headline "The Dead Walk!", it has been used in other films and TV programmes such as Resident Evil and The Walking Dead.

The American critic Roger Ebert thought that Jarlath Conroy's Irish accent was so bad that he cited it in his review of the film, Conroy is actually Irish!


The filming took place in the Wampum Mine in Pittsburg, it is a storage facility and people do visit it.

Famously the guts and entrails used in the death of Rhodes were real, they were pig guts from a local slaughterhouse and they were spoiled because someone unplugged the fridge they were being stored in, most of the people invoved it that scene were physically sick because of the smell, just think about poor Joseph Pilato!

Bub actually does speak, he says "Hello Aunt Alicia", it's the only time a zombie speaks in a Romero film.

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