I am not a great fan of film remakes as they rarely live up to the original but when I heard that George Romero’s cult classic “Zombies - Dawn of the Dead” (or better, Zombies at Woolworth’s) was to be remade then my ears pricked up a little.

I first tried to see the original in a cinema in Sunderland in the NE of England many years ago. I only managed to see about twenty minutes of it before my then-girlfriend decided that she could stomach no more and we had to leave. The sight of a zombie having the top of his head sliced off by a helicopter blade and the shooting of two young child zombies just about finished her off. I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about (only kidding).

I eventually got to see it one video several years later. For the late 1970s this was graphic, gut churning stuff and extremely scary in a very creepy way.   The special effects make-up was great, pieces of flesh hanging off faces. Zombies blindly following the smell of live humans around. The rigor mortis-type walks. And the all-important eating of limbs with relish.

Any one could out run one of Romero’s zombies but they just kept on coming at you. Just wait till you run out of bullets.It was a case of how long could you postpone the inevitable. It created a siege mentality in the audience particularly in the scenes within the shopping mall. Could they escape? If so, which ones? Would there be a happy ending? (I don’t think we knew at the time that this was the second in a trilogy). It delivered quite a punch at the time and, although time has dulled its effect a tad, it can still shock and disgust in equal measure.

I was never one to invest much time in the notion that it was a hidden swipe at the consumer society (mindless morons going shopping?). It’s just a superb working piece of horror history.

In the intervening period the boundaries of horror have been pushed ever further outwards and our expectations have been raised. Indeed our constitutions have been lined with steel. It takes a lot to shock people any more.

So when I saw the remake I was a little trepidatious. I needn’t have been anxious though. The story was remarkably similar to the original but the realization was very, very different. It works more as a superior Hollywood action thriller with a few twists and turns and is all the better for it. Rather than creeping up on you, it slaps you in the first right from the get go.

The first twenty minutes of the film is absolutely fantastic. The threat and peril to the heroine is cranked up so highly that you are holding your breath to see if she can survive. And all set in a middle class housing area that any one can recognize. But in this case the zombies are like world class sprinters. There is a clear, present and immediate danger from these suckers. Which makes for a much faster pace of film (with much faster editing). The scenes in the shopping mall are a time to catch your breath before the final action sequences.

I think this is a case of a film and a remake being able to happily co-exist with detriment to one another. It is interesting to see the difference in the endings though. Remarkably, Romero’s Dawn of the Dead has the happier ending with the survivors managing to land their helicopter on a deserted island. The remake has no such happy ending as, over the credits, you see that their escape by boat in an effort to try and reach an island haven is short-lived.

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