Dawn of the Dead (2004)

Now this was a Halloween movie. A remake of 1978's Dawn of the Dead, this movie of the same name is one that many friends of mine have raved about for some time. But I had never seen it until tonight. I didn't have many expectations going into it, but I did want a few things: at least a little humor, at least a little over-the-top gore, and plenty of zombie headshots. I got all three. I was on board with this movie almost from the get-go. There was literally maybe a minute of the movie in which the zombie apocalypse had not yet begun. At the very beginning, the chief heroine comes home from work and falls asleep next to her boyfriend. She awakens with a fright as a zombie child knocks heartily on her door. A struggle ensues. Child bites boyfriend. Boyfriend attempts to bit heroine. Heroine flees in her car. All around her, suburbia is succumbing to the zombie plague. Enter the opening credits, interspersed with mock footage of news stations around the world portending the end of the earth, all set to Johnny Cash's "The Man Comes Around." Easily one of the top five opening credits I've ever seen. At any rate, the rest of the movie wasn't so bad either. Typically, a "survivalist" movie follows one of two death patterns. Either everyone dies (with maybe one survivor or a surviving couple), or nobody does. And rarely do we ever see an influx of survivors. I won't ruin the ending by giving away the final survivor count, but what struck me was how new survivors would merge with the group in waves. Two met up with three, then that group of five found three more, and so on. And the deaths didn't follow a pattern of any sort. Sometimes two will eat it concurrently, and sometimes we'll go a full twenty minutes or so with no deaths at all. In short, it's very unpredictable. And pretty darn good. Well, I'm done here. It's time to cap off the night with my one remaining horror movie. Onward!