DRIVE-IN SATURDAY
Heads chopped off. Eyeballs gouged out. Intestines devoured. A screwdriver in the throat. If these aren't your idea of fun and games, you're probably too chickenshit to last ten minutes at Dawn Of The Dead, a new screen puker that will. have Charles Manson and Son Of Sam saying "Enough already."
The CREEM Archive presents the magazine as originally created. Digital text has been scanned from its original print format and may contain formatting quirks and inconsistencies.
Flesh, Feast!
by Edouard Dauphin_
Heads chopped off. Eyeballs gouged out. Intestines devoured. A screwdriver in the throat.
If these aren't your idea of fun and games, you're probably too chickenshit to last ten minutes at Dawn Of The Dead, a new screen puker that will. have Charles Manson and Son Of Sam saying "Enough already."
Dawn is director George Romero's sequel to his revolting Night Of The Living Dead, an inspired screen classic of the late 60's which is now considered tame enough for late night television, provided you can stand the horror of public service spots, sermonettes and used car commercials.
Night, if you can remember back that far, was a black and white cheapie shot in Pittsburgh about a houseful of people fending off thousands of zombies determined totear them limb from limb before devouring them. Some people will do anything when their local Kentucky Fried Chicken closes forthe night.
— The sequel is in blood-spattering color, with a considerably higher budget, though still filmed in the Iron City. Someone oughta tell this Romero geek that dead folks will work for scale in other places, too: Detroit, Akron, any city in Canada...
Dawn isolates three men and a woman in an indoor shopping mall. They are besieged by cannibalistic corpses who stare straight ahead, grin stupidly and move with leaden feet. Sort of your basic CBGB's audience on any given night.
The zombies are an unrelenting lot. They're chalk-white, hideously scarred, incapable of speaking and all newly-dead. I kept lookin' for Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen but I didh't see 'em.
"When there's no more room in hell, the dead I will walk the earth." So goes the movie's ad copy. Which kin da makes you wonder if this population explosion stuff hasn't gone too far.
But in Dawn the dead don't have it so bad and you may even wish you could join them. (Not while your CREEM subscriptions are still good though—why waste your hard earned cash?)
The zombies at the shopping mall get to ride escalators, listen to piped-in Muzak, ice skate and bangtheir heads against the plate glass windows of J. C. Penney. A pretty good deal, right? But are they happy? Nah. Their charge privileges have been revoked and no one will accept their personal checks. I
Best part of the flick is when the living dead get down to some honest to goodness eating sessions. These creeps like their meat raw and nothing pleases them more than chomping down on a human leg or arm. Unless it's sinking their teeth into someone's lung. One scene has the whole sick crew of them munching on what looks like baby shrimp smothered in tomato sauce. Mmmmm, boy, Ronzoni sono buoni.
There's only one way to stop these ravenous creatures—blow their brains out. Which is what this picture is really about. Until I saw Dawn Of The Dead, I had no idea how many interesting things you could do to people's heads. Bullets are employed mostly but a scene involving some Hell's Angels makes imaginative use of decapitation techniques. Let it not be said that George Romero doesn't give good head.
See Dawn Of The Dead and bring along an air sickness bag. You'll need it.
"A fiendish vampire from a strange world in outer space drains his victims' blood and turns them into weird corpses."
How can you resist a movie with a come-on like that? Weird corpses? Tell me, have you ever seen a corpse that wasn't just a little bit, you know .. .weird?
Body Snatcher From Hell, the film which makes use of this sales pitch, is a badly-dubbed Japanese schlocker with high pretensionsof being a B movie. But, if the truth were known, it's maybe a C minus.
But thaf s all right. Especially since the fiendish vampire turns out to be a cross-eyed nipper who bites men and women alike in file neck and leaves intergalactic hickeys.
Not onlythat... He likes to let his forehead open up and out of it pours a sickening oozy glop that looks like Vaseline mixed with guacamole. Talk about secret sauce—I mean really!
Somewhere along the way there's a plane crash and the survivors are threatened by this space-traveling vampire. It's never clear why they aren't rescued and the dialogue is full of lines like "I have a feeling something very unlikely is about to occur." (It never does.) As forthe special effects, they're strictly Close Encounters Of The Cheap Kind.
Skip Body Snatcher From Hell and suck your own blood.
