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The third installment of Romero's zombie opus finds the director hobbled by budgetary considerations and by a failure of imagination in the face of the resources he actually had available. The original plan for this flick had civilization rebuilding itself after the plague of zombies, using the walking dead as armies vying for supremacy in the ruins. Romero had to settle, instead, on an intermediate step. We have a larger cast of survivors here than in the previous films, including representatives of the military and the scientific establishment, holed up in a missile base and conducting experiments on how to control the living dead. Romero casts the military in the role as villains (shades of The Crazies) and pits his anti-establishment civilians against the us-or-them philosophy of the Vietnam-era military mindset.

Unfortunately for Romero, Day of the Dead was made too late in the game to profit from this sort of noodling, and lacking a solid basis in social criticism, he is left with only his characters to buoy the film. This, too, is a big problem, because the characters he has are all pretty loathsome. Even his civilian stand-ins for the remains of the Woodstock nation lack any kind of personality to involve the audience. The most sympathetic character in the movie is a zombie named "Bud." Romero is too talented to make a totally uninteresting movie when he is working in his own self-invented sub-genre, and there is actually material here that holds one's attention, but most of the film's best moments are provided by Tom Savini's thoroughly repulsive grue. Given that the principal aesthetic virtues of Night and Dawn of the Dead are not provided by their grue would indicate that Romero is using his effects as a holding action until he can make the movie he really wants to make.