Amidst the desperate events, we watch the story of four individuals – two policemen, and two news workers – who together, steal a television station’s weather helicopter, and make a bid to escape the carnage. With limited fuel and resources, the quartet is forced to take refuge in an out of town shopping mall. The centre promises them everything they could need to survive a relatively normal life – but they must first find a way to overcome the throngs of undead killers stalking the aisles – and it’s not just the zombies they have to be frightened of……

I will be upsetting a lot of people when I say this, but I’m afraid Dawn of the Dead bored me senseless. At just over two hours and twenty minutes’ running time (I watched the Director’s Cut) I was left feeling rather disappointed. The plot is singularly threadbare – I could see no point or purpose to what we were being shown, and whilst I would never expect a happy ending to such a story line, I felt that the film’s climax was rushed and clumsy.

One of the more unpleasant aspects of the film is the way in which the zombies try and eat people. Right from the start, there are occasional scenes of zombies getting hold of live people and taking a chunk out of one part of their body or another. The make up and effects used are rather basic – the zombies manage to bite enormous chunks of bloody flesh away, as though they were eating a piece of cake. Nonetheless, the scenes are genuinely quite sickening – the climax of the film ends up with the most unbelievable feasting sequences that will leave only those with an extremely strong disposition unaffected.

To make matters worse, most of the film is set to a bizarre “supermarket muzak” soundtrack, which means that many of the most violent and serious scenes are played out to childish, jolly music, which simply doesn’t work at all. At some points, I was expecting Benny Hill to come tottering across the set – and unlike The Evil Dead, I don’t think this was intended to be tongue in cheek. The film is quite clumsily edited, with dialogue often inaudible as one scene clumsily switches to the next, and the opening scenes in the newsroom are so ridiculously chaotic that you long for them to go away.

So is the movie all bad? To be fair, I suppose it isn’t. The apocalyptic theme of the movie is relatively interesting, and as an overall concept, the film is realistically harrowing. The sequences set in the shopping mall are all quite bizarre. All scenes were filmed overnight in a real shopping mall that the filmmakers hired for a period of four months. I have read with some amusement tales of senior citizens that arrived at the shops early, only to receive the shock of their lives as zombies were apparently eating people inside. The film also draws a very pertinent observation between the zombies in the film – and the real-life “zombies” that stalk American shopping malls. The film is strangely appealing in that you feel as though you are watching a slice of cinematic history – many films have tried to emulate the success of Dawn of the Dead, but few have succeeded. Dawn is actually one part of a trilogy, set between Night of the Living Dead (released in 1968) and Day of the Dead (released in 1985) and is generally regarded as the best of the three.