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Synopsis: The world appears to be coming to an end. The dead have risen and are overrunning the world, chowing down on the living in the process. In the cities, it's bad. Tenements are breeding grounds for zombies and swat teams have all they can handle keeping the lid on things. Everywhere, things are in chaos. A quartet of survivors--a television news producer, a helicopter pilot, and two swat-team cops sense the change in the wind. They high-tail it out of the city with no thought of destination. During their flight through the countryside, they witness the breakdown of civil order and cultural norms: the National Guard has opened the season on zombies and every redneck with a rifle has joined the hunt. Roving bands of bandits are looting the towns and cities. Our heroes realize that they themselves have become bandits. "We're thieves and we're bad guys," says Peter, one of the swat team cops. "That's exactly what we are." They eventually come to rest on the roof of a shopping mall. Recognizing it as a defensible position that's well stocked with provisions, they wall themselves up in the mall and cleanse the place of the zombies. Unfortunately for the, life in the mall is a kind of living death from which they are reluctant to awaken. It takes the shock of an invasion to rouse them from their lethargy. The mall is invaded by a gang of bikers intent on looting the place. They let in the zombies like the dragons storming Eden. The jig is up for our surviving heroes and they fly off into a dawn sky.

Shoot 'Em in the Head: This sprawling sequel/remake of Romero's own Night of the Living Dead transforms the caustic social allegory of the original into a broad satire of American consumerism, played so straight that it still manages to maintain its fever pitch as a horror movie. The zombies are stand-ins for the American shopper ("This place was important to them once," one character speculates when asked why they keep coming back), and their cannibalism hints that we are devouring ourselves with our own consumerism. The four heroes aren't immune to this, even though they aren't dead. Over the course of the long middle part of the movie, walled up in a monument to the American consumer, they slip into a half-zombie existence themselves, which is, of course, the point of the movie. While this is obvious on reflection, Romero has done something interesting to disguise his theme: he overloads the movie with some of the most repulsive grue ever to surface in an American horror movie (grue of the sort that is common in Spain, Italy, and other barbarian countries). Make-up man Tom Savini recalls receiving a phone call from Romero when the film was green-lit, asking Savini to think of as many ways as he could to kill people on film. "The point was to numb people," Savini points out. There is a point to this. By bombarding the audience with the ferocious violence that has made the film notorious, the fairly obvious satirical subtext heads underground. It becomes almost subliminal amid the various zombie cannibal feasts and shotgun decapitations. This is a clever way to make a social commentary that will stick with the audience after the last reel finishes. Meanwhile, Romero is also playing around with the audience's expectations. As in the first film, Dawn's most effective protagonist is a black man. Having seen the first film, the audience expects him to be killed at the end of the movie. Not only does he survive, he escapes with the blonde heroine. This was still a subversive idea in the 1970s.

This points out the film's biggest flaw: Night of the Living Dead was timeless. Dawn of the Dead is very much of its time. But even though some elements of Dawn of the Dead have dated badly, the brute force of its approach still packs a hell of a wollop.