Yes, the excellent Night of the Living Dead started it all and is one of the greatest horror/zombie/classics of all time. But it's sequel, Dawn of Dead, is the pinnacle of the genre. It is the height other zombie films try to reach and few come close. It is a film that proves that classic originals can have superior sequels (along with Aliens, The Empire Strikes Back, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom... in my opinion, and The Road Warrior). This film has everything a zombie film fan could hope for: flesh chomping, gut ripping, head chopping, brain shooting... in other words, true zombie mayhem.
But to only credit this film with the excellent Tom Savini gore effects would overlook the fact that it is an expertly made film. I mean, this is a ZOMBIE film over 2 HOURS LONG!!! If this film were made by someone who didn't know what they were doing it would have gotten old real quick! Romero knows how to frighten us, disgust us, thrill us, disturb us, and even make us laugh occasionally.
The film basically shows the world after becoming more and more infested with the zombies that were introduced in the original. It seems as if the world is about half zombies and half human. It follows a mixed bag of humans searching for a safer place to live in a helicopter. They come upon an abandoned shopping mall and land on the roof. The mall proves to have everything they need to be happy so they proceed to exterminate the zombies that inhabit it and clean them out. All goes pretty well for a while until a motorcycle gang wants the kind of goodies the mall can provide.
I don't want to give too much away for the people who haven't seen this EXCELLENT classic... but I will hint at some of my favorite scenes:
- The entire opening SWAT sequence in the housing project building (very suspenseful... very gory). - The zombie children attack. - The zombie vs. helicopter blade scene. - The mall shopping spree & zombie clean up scene. - The semi-truck moving scene. - The motorcycle gang vs. protagonists vs. zombies climax.
There are many more reasons to watch this film but the best reason is that it is totally entertaining. Also don't forget to check out part three of the Romero "Dead" films, Day of the Dead (another excellent film) and let's all hope that he is able to make the fourth... Twilight of the Dead (a title I think is much better than the updated title Dead Reckoning)! Also, for more excellent Zombie carnage I would recommend Lucio Fulci's Zombie (aka Zombi 2, semi-sequel to Dawn, which was released in Italy as Zombi), Return of the Living Dead, and Peter Jackson's Dead Alive. I've also got my hopes up for 28 Days Later to be the return of the true zombie movie... and let's keep our fingers crossed that the Dawn remake next year is not a piece of garbage.