For two decades, Day of the Dead was considered the final installment of George A Romero’s seminal zombie series, and talk of the film has always carried with it the faintest sense of anticlimax. As has been well documented over the years, it’s not exactly the film Romero set out to make – his planned epic featuring, amongst other things, a war between several zombie factions, had to be drastically scaled back for budgetary reasons – but he’s since labelled it his favourite of the original trilogy, and twenty years later there’s a strong case to be made for Day as the best in the series.
After the comic book excesses of Dawn, Day is in many ways a return to the premise of the original Night of the Living Dead, in which a bunch of mutually antagonistic people are holed up in a claustrophobic environment while a bad situation gets steadily worse. This time, however, the protagonists are the surviving members of a military research team – scientists as well as soldiers – while the setting is a missile silo in Florida. The domination of the world by zombies continues apace – they now outnumber the humans 400,000 to 1. The more pressing problem, however, is the internal factions arising within the silo: Captain Rhodes (Joseph Pilato) is intent on ensuring the survival of himself and his thuggish bunch of soldiers, while the eccentric Dr Logan (Richard Liberty) is conducting increasingly repugnant experiments in attempt to find out what makes the zombies tick. Caught in the middle is scient Sarah (Lori Cardille) who tries to keep both parties from destroying each other. It’s another situation where, despite the flesh-hungry zombies, everyone’s screwed because of their inability to band together. It’s the most blatantly allegorical of the Dead films, with its not-so-subtle commentary on Regan-era politics, but it also offers the most direct commentary: unlike the other films, these characters are not meant to be a cross-section of society, but are instead very real representatives of a contemporary ideological divide. Romero doesn’t so much represent the battle between scientific advancement and military muscle as show it, with the zombies once again merely adding to the pressure-cooker situation. It’s been commented that there isn’t a single truly likeable character in the entire film (which is really only a half-truth), but it’s the first of the Dead series to really delve into the ideological stances of its characters, rather than simply defining them by their actions.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of the film is how emotionally wraught it is. Romero’s superb script has to take some of the credit for this, but it works so well thanks to the note-perfect performances given by its three central characters. Joe Pilato goes way over the top as Rhodes, but imbues him with enough genuine bile and menace to avoid him merely becoming a cipher. Sarah suffers slightly from the lack of background given to her by the script – as well as her rather ambiguous relationship with Miguel – but Lori Cardille makes her a sympathetic figure, struggling to hold everything together, and letting it all out after Miguel becomes infected. But the highlight is Richard Liberty’s brilliant portrayal of Logan; the initial affection we have for this eccentric man rather dissipates when it appears how far he is prepared to go to understand the zombies, but Liberty plays it subtly – the slight quiver in his voice as he implores Rhodes to stay rational just hinting that this is a man about to lose all his marbles quite spectacularly.
The film’s opening scenes are monumentally tense, but the introduction of Bub – the zombie with a soul – sends the film spiralling in a totally unexpected direction. His reaction to being presented mementoes of his past life is surprisingly moving, and the Walkman scene (and Bub’s subsequent first encounter with Logan) is probably the single most magical sequence Romero has directed. As John Harrison’s effective music score washes behind him, this zombie’s unexpectedly tender rediscovery of his humanity is an oasis of calm amidst the aggressive confrontation that surrounds it. The Dead films track a gradual change in Romero’s sympathies towards his zombies; in Night they’re a threat, but in Dawn they’re rather more comically inept, and in Day and Land he starts to portray them as simple creatures of habit and even victims. Land of the Dead in many ways picks up where Day ends, but Romero would never again treat his human characters with such open contempt.
If the film has a flaw, it’s that after a while it starts to get a bit too talky, but the final reel delivers in spades, with Romero and makeup guru Tom Savini offering up their most ambitious bloodbath yet. The scenes of dismemberment and consumption are utterly gruelling, but they also provide a welcome – and necessary – release after the preceding tension, bringing it to a close with almost complete finality. Day of the Dead is Romero’s most low-key zombie movie, but it’s probably his best written. A genre classic, by any standards, but also a film deserving of much wider critical praise, Day marks an artistic high for Romero and is the best zombie film of the 1980s.