October 1 of 13

The first film of the October 13 this year was one of the all-time classics among the zombie genre, written and directed by the father of the zombie movie, George R. Romero. It was the third film in his zombie trilogy, The Day of the Dead.

To be honest, I thought that I had seen parts of this movie before, but after watching it this morning, I realized that I had never seen it at all. None of the film was recognizable for me.

The film follows a group of survivors, a combination of military and scientists, who have taken up refuge in a deserted missile silo to avoid the Living Dead. Meanwhile, one scientist tried to discover a way to domesticate the Dead.

The military men, in particular, were such horrendous people that it was clear that they were being set up to become zombie chow, and have the audience happy at their fate. There were very few of the survivors that were easy to root for.

Sarah (Lori Cardille) was one of the scientists who seemed to have the best head on her shoulders. John (Terry Alexander) was the helicopter pilot.

The worst of the military men was Captain Henry Rhodes (Joseph Pilato) and Private Walter Steel (Gary Howard Klar), both men were abusive and power mad. They were the characters in a slasher film that you want to see killed. And this film did not let us down. Rhodes’s death specifically was horrific.

We also came as close as we were going to get to a thinking zombie with Bub (Sherman Howard) who was being trained by scientist Dr. Matthew Logan (Richard Liberty).

There was a lot of screaming in the film, but I think that was meant to show the negatives of the humans, how the humans may actually be the monsters in this monster story.

One of the funniest part of the movie was seeing the oncoming zombie horde with the collection of zombie types in the mass. There was a zombie cowboy, a zombie football player, a zombie clown… makes one wonder why this group of one time people were together at all.

The Day of the Dead is a solid film with some amazing zombie gore, particularly for the time frame. I was very pleased with the kills of the film as the deaths of these unlikable humans were satisfactory.