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That’s right, Bub. Say hello to Aunt Behind the Scenes Pic of the Day. Say “Hello, Aunt Behind The Scenes Pic of the Day.”
Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with today’s Behind the Scenes Pic!
I never got the hate for Day of the Dead. I bet all the snarky video guys and horror nerds from the late ‘80s and early ’90s are singing a different tune now that there’s been countless fuck-awful zombie movies and some genuinely horrid Romero movies since.
Both Night and Dawn focus on the immediacy of the zombie outbreak… as do 90% of the zombie movie rip-offs. What’s interesting to me about Day is that the zombies have won from frame one. I believe Dr. Logan even says that living humans are outnumbered 400,000 to 1 in the flick.
This isn’t about the chaos of the outbreak, but what to do now that zombies have overrun the earth. The central conflict is about militarism vs. science, cold logic vs. knee-jerk reactionaryism. And both sides have their points by the end of things, both are led by lunatics.
Unlike some of Romero’s more recent zombie flicks the film is also really well made on top of having something on its mind. Joseph Pilato’s Captain Rhodes is a great despicable villain and his comeuppance is absolutely deserved.
So, today we’re going to look at a nice shot of George Romero, his daughter and a family friend… I’ll call him Uncle Bub.
Thanks to K. Todoulakis for sending this one along. Enjoy!
Tomorrow’s Behind the Scenes Pic features one of the greats at work on what has become a lost artform!
-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com
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hopefully anyway
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great opening scene
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Definitely better than his latest offerings by a long shot
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such a great scene, Rhodes being pulled apart. great pic, Quint.
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Another one I saw in the theater and I remember I had to drive far to see it. The theater is still there but it's some nasty church now.
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I had just discovered "NOTLD" and "DOTD" on video and then "Day" came out in theaters, so of course I went and saw it immediately! I think I was the only person in the theater! But I loved it and never got the hate for the film. For me, it's a great capper to a perfect zombie trilogy!
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Or get behind any of the characters in a sense you could with Dawn, but it has grown on me when I catch it every so often. The opening 'hellllllloooooo' and city seen is fantastically chilling. It's take on 'zombie intelligence' is definitely one of the better ones, certainly of romeros efforts in that area.
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Damn iPod autocorrect
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but 'Day' is my favorite of his original trilogy. I just love the hopelessness of it, how the only people who have managed to survive are either scummy, no-limits soldiers, or intelligent people with vital skills. The "everyman" and likeable heroes are all dead. I just love everything about Day. They all rock...I even like 'Land'. But Day is my favorite.
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sure, they should have known there'd be NO survivors in a metropolitan area like that, but it was a great showcase of a large horde, great use of vacant streets and effects. that whole movie had great effects, which saved it from much shitty acting, though i thought the lead female did a fine job.
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Can anyone else say the same??
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I rank Romero's zombie flicks thus: <br> Dawn <br> Night <br> Day <br> Diary <br> Survival <br> Land <br> Heck, I would throw the NOTLD remake in there above Land also. <br> I don't get the hate for Survival either. He had some good visuals in that one. The banshee zombie riding the horse was creepy. I only ranked Land last because of Leguizamo, for sone reason he is like fingernails on a chalkboard for me. (sorry if this post is f'd up, posting from a phone)
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It worked!
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it must have something to do with being black and white.
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-- also from best to worst: Night Day Dawn Survival Land Diary Also, it is not a "wake up from a dream" ending in DAY OF THE DEAD. Sarah just wakes up while dreaming about the past events of the movie.
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Zombie movies are like blowjobs. When they're good they're very good, and when they're bad, they're still pretty good. There was definitely something special about Day of the Dead though. It was definitely not you're typical zombie flick.
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fucker :-) Beat me to it.
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I feel the need to point that out in every Romero related Talkback.
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...after I saw this BTS. Very glad I did.
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is better than the other two Romero zombie films, and I didn't even like Land. Romero needs to retire.
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For me NIGHT 68 is the standout, for all its history and influence, its success in spite of its budget, production, and distribution (and the backlash). -Its rooted in the 50s/60s, with relative criticism transcending that period confine into timelessness (that inspite of its formal "antiquity"). DAWN and DAY I love for different reasons (and know DAY could've been a great trilogy cap if the original budget was there - one of the reasons I'm sympathetic to LAND). DIARY and SURVIVAL I've had trouble getting through, but with the luxury of having to own the dvds or Blu Rays just to see 'em (we do have lots of cows around here though, and a big NEW casino to entertain us), I can simply re-attempt things at my own convenience. (end transmission)
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This film is so special to me. I fell in love with it to a ridiculous degree in college. It's one of the funniest movies I've ever seen and the gore is amazing. Fucking brilliant.
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The scene where the soldier gets his throat ripped out by the old lady zombie (replete with visible bones) still gets me. The two horror genres CGI has ruined the most have been zombie movies and werewolf movies. Give me practical squibs and latex appliances any day of the week.
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I agree. The phone scene is priceless. The end is so fucking good. May it continue to be obscure, and never ever remade!
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March 7, 2011, 12:08 a.m. CST
Hope DW offers Mr. Romero a chance to direct an Episode of TWD
by TheJudger
and if the Goblins signed on to score it and Basil Gogos did a limited run poster just for that episode signed by the Himself and Mr G, and Rob Zombie was somehow convinced to played a cameo Zombie role in it. Oh man, oh man.. It will never happen. Still it's nice to imagine.
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I really detest when monsters and characters are overexposed or twisted by the need to "keep it fresh"... in some cases it's a creative like Romero feeling the need to try new things.... in others it's marketing hacks and stuffed shirts sending down design mandates to sell toys (like the new designs in Alien 4). Zombies are zombies you don't need to explore their fucking character or potential. They're background... they're a tool to create a setting and atmosphere.
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After the awful Diary it was going to be hard to disappoint me. Happily I found Survival to be a very interesting little flick... aside from the implausibility of having the internet still work well enough to allow new Youtube uploads and you can still get them on your iPhone... the internet's robust on the hardware infrastructure side, but without constant tending by thousands of people around the world, viruses at DNS centres and spam bots on still connected but now unmonitored systems will effectively take it down on the software side within days. And again it was not scary. I hope Romero makes at least a couple more zombie movies. I agree with the previous poster who said he should have made another zombie movie in the 90s in order to have an ongoing cultural commentary. The first 3 Dead movies hold up okay despite Day losing a bit of the rhythm. For the record I didn't think Land was terrible, but it wasn't scary and that disappointed me. Some good concepts though. Diary is fucking terrible... just an awful movie filled with awful writing and acting.
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The final image before the credits in Survival is so completely bad-ass... two zombies standing atop a grassy hill trying to fire empty guns at each other. All Romero zombie movies have had a few key images like this that really stick in your mind (the other one from this being the zombie girl riding a zombie horse)
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... no key imagery in that piece of shit.
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1. Night 2. Dawn 3. Day 4. Land 5. Survival 6. Diary I really prefer the 90 remake of NOTLD though... it's a true remake in the sense that the exact same events play out with different actors. And didn't Romero finally start to make some real money off Night based on the remake, given the copyright screw-up with the original made it hard for them to profit from it?
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March 7, 2011, 2:59 a.m. CST
My favorite gore in Any movie ever --makes it my favorite DEAD movie
by George Newman
I love love love the special effects in this film and some of the characters are fantastic lunatics to watch. Loved seeing the drunk William in TRUE GRIT this year!
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Actually this is my favorite Romero movie against the popular choice of Dawn. This was also the 1st Romero movie I saw and I saw it in the movie theater :)
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March 7, 2011, 7:44 a.m. CST
I remember this not playing in many theaters due to being released unrated.
by SAILOR_RIPLEY
Pretty good movie though. Probably the best gore/makeup effects of the series. The CGI bullshit has really diminished the effect of the newer movies for me, added to the fact that they are not that good of films. 1. Dawn(Epic) 2. Night(almost a tie with Dawn) 3. Day(Solid) 4. Land(Average) 5. Survival(Pretty bad) 6. Diary(absolute shit)
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Especially the make-up effects. Most modern zombie films can trace the look of their zombies directly back to this movie. And some fun small parts by some of the crew, including Greg Nicotero.
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March 7, 2011, 8:22 a.m. CST
All I remember is the zombie...
by HarryKnowlesNonExistentInceptionReview
...that got the top of his head cut off, then later, one of the human tripped over the head top and the eyes were still blinking. Creepy as hell when you're 13 years old.
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Dawn is my favorite film, but Day is very close. The claustrophobic and hopeless situation is extremely chilling.
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I do wish Romero had gotten the money to do his epic "Day," but this is still a worthy entry in the Dead cycle. And that is one awesome Pic Of The Dead, I mean, Day.
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I'm frigging sick to death of the trendy revisionists saying how great Day of the Dead was. It was fucking BORING! Yes, there was some admittedly great gore scenes and superior makeup to Dawn, but you had to wade through endless, heavy handed dialogue scenes to get there. Even Romero back in the Day didn't like it because he had to shoot it on a shoestring. Cute photo though.
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re: "killdeer1" above; George Romero said himself that this was actually his personal favourite of all his movies. I know this because I saw him say so in the flesh, at a cinema-hosted talk here in Edinburgh a few years ago. Sherman Howard clearly studied the behaviour of babies and young toddlers, when researching the mannerisms of his "learning zombie", Bub. It is an incredibly charming performance that would have won awards in an alternate universe where genre movies even stand a chance of awards. (And it didn't surprise me to learn years later that he is a very highly respected stage actor). I would put his performance here up as one of the greatest monster performances ever, alongside the great Frankenstein and Dracula performances of the classics. Of course, the real monster of the movie is actually the human shit-head Captain Rhodes. As gloriously over-the-top as this performance is, it really pulls the movie along by making the audience crave his inevitably disgusting demise. The fact that Day of the Dead has some of the most disturbing, graphic effects work ever achieved in the genre to this day (up alongside Carpenter's "The Thing") is not actually the real reason it is a great horror film. The reason I consider this to be the greatest horror film ever made is because it achieves a truly believably bleak, terrifying end-of-the-world scenario, despite its restricted budget at the time. Today, "The Walking Dead" has done admirably well in scaling up the "zombie apocalypse" spectacle, but the one fundamental problem I have with that show is the general lack of devastating emotional trauma that you would expect among a group of humans who are experiencing regular atrocities and horrible violent encounters. The characters simply seem to take all the dismemberment and gore as if it's just another day at the office. In Romero's "Day of the Dead", the characters actually lose their minds in a completely believable way, as the mounting violence around them reaches a spectacular and horribly disturbing climax.
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Day is also my favorite, mainly because of the cool-as-fuck characters. Joe Pilato as Rhodes is mesmerizing as is the doctor. Pretty much all the performances are top notch and the effects are stupendous. It's a very good mix of horror, drama, action and comedy.
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later in life.
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March 7, 2011, 2:36 p.m. CST
I like the idea of the underground compound, and Bub is well acted by the actor under all that latex,
by openthepodbaydoorshal
but the acting in general...whoa. I guess Romero told everyone to dial it to 11 since the whole cast plays each of their roles not just over the top, but down the next hill. One character could be replaced by Willie The Groundskeeper, and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference. But directing unknown actors was never Romero's strong suit (aside from Ed Harris, but Harris had the goods). The concept of the military versus the scientists goes back to the original Thing (though flipping sides), so Romero's not really telling us anything new. It's good in a pulpy way, but not GREAT.
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And ROTLD kicked it's ass!!! Although Day had it's creepy moments with the underground complex. I absolutely could not stand Bub. Look everyone!, a zombie who is mildly intelligent. Oh! He's on a leash! Isn't that cute! He didn't have any menace, and the social commentary was really heavy handed. The Tar Man from ROTLD is THE BEST Zombie Ever! Wish they could make more zombies like him. But he's one of a kind. Dan O'Bannon + Bill Stout=(Genius) Romero has just gone through the motions with the last couple. Diary was horrendous!
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