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Dawn of the Dead
For years, I'd been telling Vera this was the best of the "Living Dead" movies, in the hopes that I could eventually convince her to watch it with me again. Of course, I had only seen it as a teenager, and my memory was foggy, so it's quite possible I was deluding myself. But eventually she relented and we finally got the chance to see it a couple weeks ago.
As horror movies go, Dawn of the Dead is pretty good. It picks up from where Night of the Living Dead left off, with the dead beginning to become a serious threat across the country. This movie focuses on a group of four people who take off in a helicopter in search of someplace to survive. Eventually they come across a shopping mall and decide to hole up there.
Most of the movie takes place inside the mall, and it is filled with ironic moments of muzak playing the background with the dead wandering the mall. (Kind of like real life.) Of course, in the mall there are lots of supplies that would be very useful for surviving, and this causes the protagonists to brave the onslaught of walking dead to get to various shops inside the mall. For a while it seems like a perfect place to hole up, but the relentlessness of the dead combined with outside forces eventually opens up just enough space to cause them some serious grief.
One thing that's unusual about this movie compared to a lot of other horror films is that the main characters are actually pretty smart in general. The movie doesn't rely on the people doing insanely dumb things in order to get themselves into trouble. Yes, some mistakes are made, but they are not universally fatal, and the smarter folks are pretty good at keeping the others out of trouble for the most part.
In the end, I have to say this was really a pretty good horror movie, and holds up well in spite of the 70s hairdos. It definitely made me curious to see the recent remake, just to see how it compares. For the original, I give it 3/4 stars.