November 18, 2024 • 60 mins
In this week's episode, we are returning to our Remakes series with Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Dawn of the Dead (2004).
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The Movies:
Directed by George A. Romero
Written by George A. Romero
iMDb Rating: 7.8
Directed by Zack Snyder
Written by James Gunn
iMDB Rating: 7.2
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Content Warning:
Mentions of death, violence, suicide, sexual acts, abortion, homophobia, sexism, sexual abuse, injury, war
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Hi everyone, I'm Lisa.
(00:21):
And I'm Nick.
And you're listening to It Takes Two, the podcast where two people take two movies with
the same plot or premise and watch and discuss them.
Even though it's November, we here at the It Takes Two studio decided, well it was actually
Strider's opinion, we're going to continue on with remakes, except we did some spooky
(00:44):
movies.
Yeah, we were supposed to do Solaris.
But there was a problem.
We couldn't get Solaris, basically, is the problem.
The problem was actually...
Solaris the original from what was it, 1950?
Is it that old?
I don't remember.
Yeah.
The problem is we didn't get Solaris in time to make Solaris episode.
(01:06):
So.
So Nick suggested a different remake that was on our list, but not until like 2032 or
something.
So in this episode, Sit Back and Scream for Dawn of the Dead, 1950...
Oh no, sorry, 1978 and 2004.
Yeah.
There's zombie movies.
(01:27):
Thanks for listening.
So I think there were zombies in these movies.
That's my thought.
Okay.
This was the first time watching both of them for you, correct?
Yep.
They were in my DVD collection.
It was very easy to find because it was like here's one and here's the other.
(01:48):
It was basically the decision was like, well, what do we have?
What do we have right now?
Yeah.
What do we have to go to our library for?
What do we not need to like get on Beema Film?
Or...
That is, by the way, if anyone wants films in New Zealand, Beema Film is your library
resource.
Get on, get yourself a library card and you can get on Beema Film.
(02:11):
Correct.
They do have the original Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, but not the remake.
Because that's another episode that we tried to do earlier this year.
If you or anyone you know has a copy of the remake of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari...
First question is why?
Second question is please can we have it?
(02:31):
Please send it to me.
Anyway, but the original is on Beema Film and it's a good resource.
There's a lot of stuff on there.
I recommend it.
Join your library.
Anyway, to the point.
This was the first time you'd seen both of these films.
Which one did you prefer?
Original.
(02:51):
Okay.
Did you enjoy the original?
I mean, I guess.
What do you mean?
Why did you say it like that?
I don't know.
I'm trying to engage conversation.
Is this how we normally do the podcast?
No, I think it's been a long week.
This is a weeknight.
Yeah.
Also, we also we watched them like a week ago.
(03:14):
Yeah.
A solid week ago we watched these movies.
I will say I had one thought about the remake.
Was it that Phil Dumphy's a dick?
No, the thought was that I suddenly understand why you like Zack Snyder and it's because you
and him are the only people on the planet who listen to Richard Cheese.
(03:36):
Shout out to my cheeseheads.
Cheeseheads!
I don't know if that's actually a fan group, but it is now a point.
Like other recent episodes you were like shout out to my something heads.
I don't even remember what it was, but it seems to just be what you do now.
(03:56):
Tesla Violet?
Were we talking about you like shout out to my violets or something?
I don't know.
Anyway.
Yeah.
When that song came out, I was like, oh, this is why he likes this movie.
Okay, so I'm going to get into the the grizzly details.
The special effects in the 2004 one are really good.
The obviously the 78 one, they are very cartoonish.
(04:21):
That's intentional.
Yeah.
It's supposed to be comic book style.
Yeah.
I think despite the fact that it was written by James Gunn and directed by Zack Schneider,
like there's some decent growth within the genre in this movie.
(04:42):
No.
No, you don't agree?
Here's my big gripe.
My number one gripe is.
Put that at the top of the list.
Why is a movie from the 70s a thousand times more progressive than a movie from the 2000s?
Why have they reverted back in time and made the black guys shitty?
(05:05):
And literally, like the original movie is like there's a bunch of black guys and they're
all cool.
And then in this one, they're like, oh, he's black and therefore he's a thief.
He steals cars.
That's what he does because he's black.
And that's what black guys do.
In the original, you've got a main female character who doesn't scream once in the movie,
is incredibly practical.
At one point is like, listen, I don't know about you guys.
(05:26):
I want to learn how to fly the helicopter because we have one guy here who can fly the
helicopter and if he dies, we're all screwed.
So I want to learn to do that so that I can take over if anything happens to him.
And in the remake, they have a woman who just constantly screams and then like every woman
is stupid and every woman is like dependent on the man and is real shitty.
(05:50):
And like literally, there's not a single female character who isn't a sexist trope.
Correct.
Zack Snyder is incredibly sexist.
I mean, this is the guy who made Sucker Punch.
He is known for it.
And this movie literally takes a film where they had a genuinely strong female protagonist
(06:14):
and like well written, well acted female protagonist in the original film and they turned it into
a sexist shit show.
And also they were like, oh, there's black guys in the original.
We'll put black guys in this one, but we'll make them shitty.
We'll make the instead of the really cool black protagonist, we're going to have this
(06:37):
guy who's like so stupid.
He's going to be driving people towards their death.
And we're going to put a secondary, be a black character in the main cast.
And he's a thief because that's I'm Zack Snyder.
I think that's what black people do.
You're very accurate, actually, on pretty much every point I was going to cover on the
(06:58):
difference between these movies.
So well done.
I love Georgia Romero.
Right.
There's it's so influential of the time.
Each movie that he's written and made is about like a period of time.
(07:20):
Dawn of the Dead from 1978 is very much about commercialism, capitalism and this consumeristic
ideal that America was turning into in the late 70s into the 80s.
And it was portrayed so very well in the original Dawn of the Dead and is literally a throwaway
(07:43):
line in the remake.
This whole concept of like the zombies, we don't know if they're alive, we don't know
if they're dead, the sort of mistrust of the media, the fact that racist cops were just
basically using the excuse of zombies to massacre poor people that were living in project areas.
(08:09):
The ideals of consumerism, consuming America from the internal core and this concept of
these mindless zombies just doing the same thing they always do.
And that's why the whole thing set in a mall.
You're right about the progressiveness of the characters not being just like damsel
(08:32):
in distress or piece of artwork on the wall.
All of the movies that he's done have been about the time that they were made in.
And it is absolutely fantastic watching that movie again and then seeing the comparison
(08:53):
and just being like wow these movies are in completely different tones.
And the fact that that was sort of progressive within the genre of zombie movies because
that's like fast zombies became a thing.
But like everything else is really tonally deaf.
(09:15):
And other than the all weird bits of trivia about the remake, it doesn't hold up to the
original.
No, we did another, I'm trying to think of what it was, we did another episode where
the remake just wasn't understanding what the original tried to say.
(09:35):
And if you're a super fan, tell us on our Discord what we're talking about.
I might think about it, but I felt like it's the same in this one where he was like, or
James Gunn and Zack Snyder looked at the original and oh zombies and blood, let's do that.
And never thought to think of what the movie was actually representing, what it was actually
(09:57):
supposed to mean.
And I mean it's a thing in sci-fi as a whole and in horror.
You do use these genres to take a look at society and what's going well and what's going
badly.
And especially criticizing governments or criticizing societal institutions and things.
(10:23):
And that is how science fiction has always been.
And to an extent how horror has always been.
Horror to me, what makes good horror is basically it just holds up a mirror to the society of
the people going to see it.
Yeah and I think it's lazy writing to just ignore all that and be like haha we're just
(10:52):
some stupid people and a zombie.
These spoilers for a lot of his other works, I'm just going to talk about the themes here.
You've got this capitalism that's rife with in Daughter of the Dead.
Jumping to the end of his career before he passed we have the three movies, I think I've
(11:14):
got them all on DVD out there actually.
We've got Land of the Dead, Diary of the Dead and Survival of the Dead.
And for all the negatives that Lisa said about the remake, he was still there at the end
of his life and the end of his career with those last three movies.
(11:36):
Land of the Dead is about classism and again following on the capitalistic line of every
time you do something they just move the bar and you stay in the same place.
You get paid more but the taxes go up.
How inflation is literally topically, inflation is now killing most of the western society.
(11:59):
And it's still fantastic that Eva knows that these themes are veiledly hidden within the
... you alright?
Yeah I remember what it was, it was Oldboy.
Ah yes of course.
God what a horrible remake.
These themes veiled behind all the scary zombie movies.
(12:23):
Land of the Dead is fantastic and you haven't seen Diary of the Dead?
I don't think I've seen any Romero films except this one.
I was trying to look through his filmography there and maybe I might have seen Monkey Shines
but that's it.
Land of the Dead and Diary of the Dead, Survival of the Dead is interesting, I'm not a huge
(12:45):
fan of that movie, maybe I'll have to revisit it.
It's so incredible that he was able to, like I said, place a mirror to society, show you
the problems but then hide it behind a genre.
And it's interesting because why I love zombie, what used to love a zombie apocalypse until
(13:06):
it was overdone by obviously the media, because it's the fear of humanity.
Because that's what humans are.
That's the whole, I've decrypted the entire genre to you folks if you didn't realise.
It's vampires, vampire original movies they were always like foreign men preying on young
(13:33):
women and they were lavish and had money and you get werewolves that are basically kind
of in a way a little racist-y towards foreigners again.
You get for the original work Night of the Living Dead it's very much borderline, the
(13:56):
Red Scare, that whole concept of foreign power.
There's definitely zombie movies that are about the AIDS epidemic.
Yeah 100%.
That's 28 Days Later is a perfect example of that.
I think is what Zack Snyder was trying to remake, even though he was remaking Day of
(14:17):
the Dead, I think he was really trying to do 28 Days Later.
Day of the Dead wasn't until 85.
Sorry.
I just combined 28 Days Later and Dawn of the Dead.
You know I completely agree with you.
I think the biggest problem, we didn't have this issue and anybody who's been a long time
(14:45):
listener will have heard me going on about Ripley multiple times in Sir Cornelius Weaver's
portrayal of how you write a good character is you write a good character.
Yeah and the gender is irrelevant.
And the gender is irrelevant.
The problem is with these days is it's the opposite way around and I feel that it betrays
(15:08):
women poorly, especially on film because if you make them useless it becomes a stereotype
of oh great you can't write women.
But then if you give them every super single, you know make them the most powerful and the
awesome and they can never fail, you're not watching a movie.
(15:29):
You're just watching weird fan fiction.
You have to have those peaks and valleys.
I think it's interesting because from a cinematic history point of view and I don't want to
give Zack Snyder an out here because he continued to do it and that's what you know he I think
he just is sexist but at that point in time in mainstream cinema it was quite common to
(15:55):
be sexist.
And it's interesting to what's most interesting to me about this is watching the 70s version
being like oh yeah in old movies they weren't hardly sexist.
So there's obviously like a bell curve or somewhere in that maybe in the late 90s into
the early 2000s because even like you know this comes up on National Treasure Hunt just
(16:15):
to promo another podcast about the original National Treasure movie.
It's like even though one of the main characters is a very accomplished intelligent woman,
the movie gets weirdly sexist about her like over and over again and that's not a movie
that's intended to be a sexist movie whereas this I think is.
(16:39):
You know it's but it just I think at that point in time in our society and reflected
in films there weirdly was a lot just a lot of sexism happening and I think we're coming
out of that to some extent and maybe some people are lagging behind and still putting
in their films.
Josh we're looking at you buddy.
(17:00):
You mean Joss?
Joss yeah look had you know turned one of the most powerful female characters in all
of media the Wonder Woman and turned her into a useless like weird bimbo thing.
That's bizarre to me as well because like Joss Whedon.
Oh that whole thing is super weird.
Which thing?
(17:23):
The Buffy the late end Buffy stuff going into like Dollhouse.
It's just that like the beginnings of Buffy didn't feel like that and then it's like what
happened to you?
But if you watch I mean I love Dr. Horrible's sing-along vlog but it is problematic AF when
(17:44):
you look at the female protagonist or you know the main female character and how she's
treated because she's literally barely treated as a person.
She's just like an object for them to fight over which is how Joss Whedon sees women so
it makes sense.
But like Zach Snyder said the same.
(18:06):
I don't know about James Gunn I do think because we talked about him when we did the super
episode and I feel like I had weird feelings about that movie re-watching it.
Yeah it was the whole one can be played for a comic relief and the other has to be played
(18:29):
both as in shit's getting real this is a serious moment but it's the same act.
Yeah yeah yeah that kind of stuff just doesn't sit well with me and I think so I think there
is and I mean this is early stuff as well I guess.
Ironically oh there was something I thought of when I was watching it that I thought was
(18:52):
funny but I can't remember what it was.
Which one?
With the remake but it was it was that like people people were not keen on on James Gunn
writing the movie when it was announced first because all he had done was the Scooby Doo
movies and they were worried he was going to make another Scooby Doo movie.
(19:13):
I actually liked the Scooby Doo movies.
I could literally talk about Scooby Doo for at least 45 minutes without taking a break.
The movies or just Scooby Doo as a whole?
Just Scooby Doo in general.
I love Scooby Doo.
It's very interesting it's a very interesting time and subject.
I remember what it was what I said so this is spoiler alert for the remake I know we
(19:40):
always say from 2004.
Spoiler spoiler spoiler because I am going to talk about the ending of the movie.
The funny thing I thought of was that they end up on an island full of zombies and I
was like oh Scooby Doo and zombie island couldn't get away from it.
It's interesting because I can't remember his name who's the guy who plays Phil Dumphy?
(20:05):
I should know his name.
I have no idea.
We probably see his name pop up we've been rewatching Modern Family at the moment.
Re-watching I've been watching it for the first time.
Okay well I've seen.
Ty Burrell.
Yeah it's very interesting because a lot of his portrayals are other than the because
I'd forgotten he was in it until you know we put the disc in.
(20:29):
The only other thing I can think of he's in is like.
National Treasure 2 Book of Secrets.
I was gonna say he plays a Nazi in Key and Peel.
Which is super weird.
I can't literally think of anything else.
Besides National Treasure 2 Book of Secrets?
Yes where he's playing the museum caretaker for the White House.
(20:52):
Yeah is he curator for the White House?
His name is Connor I remember that much.
I think he's a curator for the White House.
Anyway he also was in the sequel to the 2011 Muppets movie.
So Muppets Most Wanted.
I think he plays a villain in that as well if I remember correctly.
(21:15):
Yeah but like a comical Muppets villain not like sexist horrible monster man.
Yeah.
Who's just like constantly having sex for some reason in the zombie apocalypse.
It's the interesting part about the remake is they do bring back two of the main cast
(21:39):
members from the original which I thought was nice.
It's interesting because like it does feel like they were trying to make an homage but
then missed the entire point of the movie.
Yeah same with Oldboy.
It's just such a weird because we were like it was borderline obsession at one point.
(22:05):
What?
The zombies obviously with like the failures of the spin offs of The Walking Dead I think
we're like oversaturated and the weird Netflix heist movie that he made.
Who?
Zack Schneider.
I don't know what Zack Schneider has made.
(22:26):
He made a zombie heist movie where they have to break into like a casino in Vegas but the
casino in Vegas is overtaken by zombies.
Okay.
It was really and then they made a prequel to it which is just a heist movie.
What about that Korean zombie thing that we watched on Netflix that was cool.
(22:46):
Oh was that Last Kingdom?
Is that what it was called?
That was cool.
That was a cool ass thing.
Was it a show or a movie?
There was a show.
It was like several seasons.
Was it several seasons?
It was very cool.
I'm pretty sure.
This is when we first started dating I think was before we even lived together.
I don't think it was called.
Was it called Kingdom?
Maybe?
Anyway.
(23:06):
You talk like Google.
Just saying there are still good zombies.
Oh, Train to Busan?
Oh yeah, Train to Busan is incredible.
I also released the same week as this remake, Shaun of the Dead.
Shaun of the Dead is a much better homage to Dawn of the Dead than Dawn of the Dead.
(23:28):
You were right.
It was just called Kingdom.
Just called Kingdom.
Yeah, that was good.
If you haven't seen Kingdom folks, I highly recommend it.
It is like a feudal Korean zombie show.
Yeah, very cool.
And it is really well done.
And Train to Busan, if you haven't seen it, is just masterpieces of cinema.
Absolutely brilliant.
Genuinely masterpieces of cinema.
(23:49):
The acting is fantastic.
The setting is fantastic.
The special effects.
It makes you so angry because you're hoping for things to happen or you're dreading your
life.
You're hoping for horrible things to not happen.
And every time you're like, no, don't let that happen.
It's what happens.
(24:10):
And you're like, oh no.
But it's a zombie movie that is so incredibly emotional.
Fantastic.
And also, I know this isn't what we're talking about, but just the character growth.
Absolutely lacking from Dawn of the Dead.
(24:30):
Exactly.
None of it.
Train to Busan has one of the greatest character arcs.
And it's in real time.
I think the whole thing is in real time.
There's no time skips or anything.
It's so annoying going back to between the two, right?
Between the original and the remake.
(24:53):
We don't get a lot of character development in the original either.
Yeah.
But we at least get to learn about the characters and see them.
There is some development, you know what I mean?
And there's them learning how to cope in the world that they're in or whatever.
And that's entirely missing from the remake.
(25:14):
It's almost like James...
Who was writing it?
Both of them are very guilty of this.
They were like, cool.
Here's an original thought.
What are people doing in a mall?
And they try on clothes and they dick around and they drink coffee and they do all that.
(25:34):
And it's like, cool.
Did you watch the original?
Because that's the whole thing of like, oh, cool.
We've taken over the mall.
Now what do we do other than survive?
Let's go shopping.
And it's in the original.
It is cool.
No matter how far away you try and disconnect, we are in a capitalist society.
(25:56):
There is no barter.
There is no trade.
You just go and you buy things.
And it's for multiple reasons.
You want, you need the, you know, this whole industry of incremental growth within tech
causing so much e-waste.
You know, every year you have to go and get a new phone because it's got a slightly better
(26:19):
widget-y doodad in it.
Like I don't know if I've said this on the podcast before, but I'm literally never buying
a new generation phone that has a built-in AI in it.
Because I don't want that.
And in all these products, it's built in.
You can't take it out.
Yeah, it's funny because I haven't been using Google in quite a while.
(26:43):
And then I tried to Google something the other day.
I've been mainly using Doc.Go at work, at auto defaults to Bing.
So I've been using Bing sometimes.
That's a blast from the past.
I didn't even realize Bing still existed.
But I tried to Google something the other day and it just came up with AI results that
(27:03):
didn't even make any sense to what I can't remember exactly what it was.
But I was like, what?
What are you talking about?
It's very interesting that they've taken what used to work, which is it finds the keywords
in the whole internet that is on the right side of the wall and puts those words together.
(27:26):
And that's how you get the search engine function.
And now it's like, oh, we'll use AI to run it.
What's the most popular answer rather than what's the actual information you're looking
for?
And AI to help chat, GBT, that sort of thing is helping out.
But it's getting worse because the amount of information it's getting is not the information
(27:49):
you want.
And I was like, I was saying to you yesterday, was it yesterday?
We were walking home together.
And the fact that news website host ads on them and the ads of fake news.
And it's like, oh, you should respect us because of our journalistic integrity.
And it's like, where is it?
(28:11):
Is it hidden behind your paywall?
Or is it in the 10 doctors don't want you to know about this Barry thing?
And you're like, that's bullshit.
And because people doom scroll, because that's what we all want to do, because we all live
in a society of the dopamine must be tapped, tapped, tapped, tapped, tapped on forever
(28:33):
until we have a heart attack or your legs go numb.
The reality of it is it's so lost in the remake, it is absolutely lost.
It's just like, oh, cool.
Here's the thing they did in the original.
Let's do it with all of our extra characters that are all two dimensional.
(28:53):
Can I say I remembered here's the thing about what about what having watched the movies
and then gone a week before we've done the broadcast is that I forgot the things I was
really angry about.
And I remembered what I was really angry about.
Fantastic.
I don't know if any have it, not me, but you know.
So there is a quote in the original.
I don't know if I took down the full quote, but I thought it was fantastic.
(29:16):
It's probably the most famous quote.
I don't know anything about the movie, so it may or may not be the most famous quote,
but it was the quote about.
Sorry, I thought I had it there and then I lost it.
Where he's like, it's the brain works.
It's the about the dead walk the earth thing.
(29:37):
And it's like when there's no when there's no more room in hell and the dead walk the
earth.
Yeah.
And in the original, badass in the remake, they give that line to a televangelist who
instead of using it to be like, this is the dire situation we're in, uses that to be like,
(30:01):
hey, the gays caused this.
Yeah.
And this is all because gay people exist.
That's why the zombie boxes happens.
And the worst thing about it is that Zack Snyder validates it because in this universe,
that is fucking true.
(30:22):
That is the accurate state.
So in it, he blames it on three different things.
One is having sex at a wedlock, killing unborn children and man on man relationships.
And those are the characters that were given in this movie.
All three of those things.
Well, not really all three of them happened on screen, but the sex at a wedlock happens
(30:45):
on screen and those people get turned into zombies and die.
Killing unborn children is a weird one because it doesn't even make any sense because what
they do is there's a guy.
Spoilers.
Spoilers, spoilers, spoilers.
A guy keeps his pregnant wife tied to a bed when she starts running into a zombie and
(31:05):
hides her from everyone else.
In the typical zombie movie, I'm not telling people this person is bitten thing.
Unlike in the original where the guy's like, shit, I'm bitten.
We think this is how it spreads.
You know, I'm going to die.
I'm going to die.
But don't kill me until you're sure that I'm starting to come back as a zombie.
And then they do it.
You know, and it's like actually, you know, you see the relationship between people and
(31:27):
blah, blah, blah.
Anyway, in this one, it's stupid.
So then the guy, his wife is a zombie and then she gives birth to a zombie baby and
then someone comes in and sees him and he shoots her or she shoots the woman and he
shoots her and then everyone's dead and the baby's a zombie and then they have to shoot
(31:48):
the baby zombie and that's the killing unborn children.
But actually, the problem could have been solved by an abortion.
Actually, the whole zombie situation would have been better if the baby had died while
it was still in the womb.
So I don't know what point you were trying to make there, Zach or James, whichever of
(32:09):
you decided on that whole situation.
But you made the opposite of your point.
And then, oh yeah, and then there's Glenn who cross dresses and therefore deserves to
be a zombie.
And he's also dying.
Yeah.
What does he say?
I can't remember.
It's so awkward.
I do not know why it's in the movie.
(32:30):
I know why it's in the movie.
It's so they can prove that gay people caused the apocalypse.
The security guards who basically tried to arrest them and stop them from wandering around
the mall when they break in in the original get thrown in jail.
And then he's just like confessing his feelings to them, like unwillingly.
(32:51):
And it feels very much like it's so weird because it just feels like that's not a situation
that people do.
Yeah.
And I felt like also I thought it was weird that like the first time they tried to show
is just literally just him putting on women's clothes.
We're supposed to go, oh, he's gay.
That's not how that works.
And the fact that he's anti religious.
(33:13):
And it's like, oh, even though he works in a church, he plays the organ in a church.
It's like, oh, I don't actually give a shit about religion because I'm the gay character.
Yeah.
It's just like.
Because I'm the gay character.
That's what we're supposed to do.
And also I cause the apocalypse.
So yeah, so not only is this movie sexist, it's also homophobic and blames the apocalypse
on gay people and abortions.
(33:36):
What's the third one?
Having sex outside of wedlock.
You know, it's also, you know, it's also, I don't even know what else to say about that.
So the, I can't even remember the character's name and I'm sorry, cause it's the main point.
One of the characters in, in the movie is the flirt with everybody character.
(34:01):
She's like the hyper sexualized.
She's the one having sex with Phil Dunphy.
Right.
Cause he's like super rich.
This way he has a boat.
Was he a weatherman?
Monica?
Is it Monica?
Yeah.
The, do you, do you remember how Monica and Glenn die?
Uh, the chainsaw?
(34:21):
Yeah.
He stabs her with a chainsaw.
What is a chainsaw?
Like I was like, is the symbolism supposed to be there as like.
Is it supposed to be like a phallic thing?
Yeah.
That's like my entire, like when I was watching, I was like, is this like the, oh, he dies
because he penetrates a wall.
Like is that the like throw away thing or am I just reading too deep into like his hate
(34:43):
for it?
Like.
I don't know.
Um, it's just such a bad movie to be honest.
I, I, sorry.
I know you have a DVD, so you obviously do enjoy it.
I just.
I, looking through it from a lens of the original versus a remake, looking at the things that
(35:04):
I didn't used to look at when I was younger, cause this movie came out in 2004, I probably
bought it around, you know, or would I have been like 18 or whatever.
Well this is like me watching Super.
Cause I enjoyed Super first time I watched it.
And then when we rewatched it for the podcast, I was like, geez, like why?
Um.
But it also kind of shows how normalized that kind of stuff was in the 2000s.
(35:25):
Yeah.
Um, where was I going?
What was I saying before?
I was talking about when I bought the movie, when the movie came out.
You were talking about like looking at it from a different lens.
Oh yeah, yeah.
It's, it's awful now.
Um.
You know, there's a, there's.
It's so interesting that it's so far away from the pulse.
(35:46):
His fingers may like, might as well be up his ass or his head in this case.
Um, and the juxtaposition between that and how Romero stayed on brand, stayed on the
pulse and was just like trying to again show the.
And that's why I think, um, it's been being noted before with anybody who's on the discord
(36:08):
and my rant about scream.
Um, that's one we have to cover at some point, right?
Screen.
Doesn't they do like a soft reboot thing with general Tager?
Oh, I thought it was just sequels.
I think there's lots of sequels, but I think it's like a soft reboot.
I don't know.
Cause I think some of the, I think like Gail Weatherson stuff show up on it again and Sydney's
on it and it again.
So I don't think it's.
(36:29):
Reboot reboot.
I don't know.
I don't know enough about the, the reason.
I think I've only seen the first three.
It's that glorification of glorification.
Thank you.
Without you, I would be lost.
Um, and talking to myself instead of you at home or at work or wherever you are.
Um, that's what you meant me.
(36:49):
And I was like, I'm clearly right here.
He's lost his mind.
Um, it's yeah, I just never liked screen because it's just so like, at least I know what you
did last summer was like, Oh, you know, just because you're rich and you know, you go to
a private school and blah, blah, blah.
Cause you know, you trust fun kid.
(37:09):
Doesn't mean you get away with stuff being unpunished and scream is just the people for,
in my opinion, the people who watch a fight club and American psycho would take a wrong
and Joker, the original Joker and take away the, uh, not the remake cause we haven't done
on the remake, sorry, the sequel and take away the wrong point of those movies with
(37:35):
that character is the bad person.
Yeah.
Um, yeah, it's just, I feel like that like there was some use of people that had disabilities
or amputations as the zombies in both movies.
Um, the, like the way they filmed it was like pretty, pretty like, you know, using that
(38:02):
sort of thing.
Like I said earlier in the, in the, in the podcast, we were talking about like the, the
effects are in a fantastic and that was, they were all practical, um, versus where everything
these days is shitty CGI garbage to the point where they like CGI down an entire character.
You know about that for the, it's one of the characters, I think it was your, your, is
(38:26):
this in Stalin's campaign photos?
What?
This is what Stalin did.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
Stalin just like photo, literally like photoshopped out people he didn't like, but like manually
got people to photoshop out people he didn't like from his photos and make bigger crowds
and stuff.
(38:46):
That weird heist movie, they literally, they photoshopped out an entire character and photoshopped
another person in there, in their place.
I can't remember.
There was some controversy.
I'm going to have to find it now because I do not remember.
Um, this is the Zack Snyder.
Yeah, yeah, this is a Zack Snyder one.
There was someone too problematic to be in a Zack Snyder movie.
(39:07):
Stop pronouncing his name weirdly.
How am I pronouncing it?
Snyder?
Yes.
You're putting like an H in there or a C-H. It's just S-N-Y-D-E-R.
Is it Army of the Dead?
Zombie heist movie.
There we go.
That's what the zombie heist movie is?
Is it called Zombie Heist Movie?
No, it's called Army of the Dead.
(39:29):
Army of the Dead.
Is that not a, is that not the sequel to The Evil Dead?
Uh, no, that's...
Army of Darkness.
Army of Darkness, yeah.
Uh, where is it?
Too many, too many...
Too many things?
Dead movies.
Too many movies about dead people.
Financial crisis, blah blah blah blah blah.
(39:52):
Where the hell is the bit with the...
I don't know.
This is dead air on our pockets.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Um, keep, keep talking.
I'll start going into trivia.
Yeah, please go into trivia while I find the trivia about a movie that's not related to
this movie.
Yeah, it sounds good.
It sounds good.
(40:13):
Okay, so the original.
Um, so the extras who appeared in the original film were given one dollar in cash, a donut,
and a Donut of the Dead t-shirt as payment.
The extras were?
Yeah.
Nice curl.
One dollar cash, a donut, and a donut of the dead t-shirt.
The filming at the malls, it was a real mall, Monroeville Mall, took place in the winter
(40:38):
of 1977 into 1978 during a, oh, and they had a three week, they took three weeks off filming
during the Christmas shopping season because they couldn't, they wouldn't have been able
to shoot it.
So they knew, so this is, what I loved about this is the, they started filming the mall
(41:00):
from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. every day, right?
Yeah.
But the only reason they started at 6 a.m., so the mall didn't actually open until 10
or 11 a.m. or 13 in the morning, but at 6 a.m. the music came on and no one could figure
out how to turn it off.
Is that why it's in the movie?
I don't, I think they put in their own music in the movie, but like the music that played
(41:21):
automatically in the mall would come on at 6 a.m. every day and literally no one could
figure out how to turn it off, so they just stopped filming at 6 every day, which I think
is very funny.
And there was a bar, there was a few bars in the area, so apparently like the guy who
did all the special effects, like remembers doing makeup for zombies and then went off
(41:44):
and had a drink in the bar.
And they think, he thinks that that helps their performances, that they came back like
drunk and sweaty.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes sense.
Which is very funny.
But they did apparently also like steal a golf cart and crash it inside the mall, some
of the drunk zombie extras.
That's fantastic.
Yeah.
(42:05):
Um, the, I took the, literally took this note because it's something we were discussing
recently.
The fake blood used was a mixture of food coloring, peanut butter and cane sugar syrup.
We were, we were, for Halloween we were looking at doing fake blood and we did look at recipes
with peanut butter in them.
Yeah, it was very sticky.
So it's interesting to see.
Oh, I don't think the peanut butter is sticky.
(42:27):
It's the syrups, the syrups are sticky.
So it's funny to see that that's what they used for their chunky blood in this movie.
So Tom Sabini is the name of the guy who did the special makeup effects.
And he seems to just be like a genius.
George A. Romero.
That's the trivia.
(42:47):
He just seems to be a genius.
Oh, it's just like, I'm just like, his name comes up a lot and he like, he like single
handedly did everything in these movies.
He seems to be incredible.
I think he also is in it.
I don't remember as who.
But they, so George, so this is a sequel, which I didn't realize till we started watching
it.
It's a sequel to Night of the Living Dead.
And George A. Romero had wanted Tom Sabini to do the makeup effects for Night of the
(43:11):
Living Dead.
But he couldn't commit to it because he had to go on a tour of Vietnam.
So he had served, so he is a combat photographer in the US army.
And that was how he is so good at doing gore because he has seen so much of it up close
and in person and documented it and looked at, you know, how it's, how it looks on film.
(43:37):
You should have seen my face because it's very accurate of why it would have been looked
good on screen.
Yeah, yeah.
So he's, and then, and then he obviously came back from Vietnam and did Dawn of the Dead.
So that's a lot of the graphic gore effects.
I think possibly a reason why they have people who have our amputees in it is because of
(44:00):
his experience in Vietnam and what he saw there.
So he largely was recreating what he had seen in real life.
They, oh yeah, so that was what he did.
He was a, he was a, he did stunts as well.
These guys have been like just the best, the best guy to have on your film because they
(44:22):
had like no budget.
They had a shoestring budget.
They couldn't afford professional stunt people.
So Tom Savini, the makeup artist, and I don't know if it was his assistant or Giorgio Romero's
assistant, a guy named Tasso Stavrakis volunteered to be the stunt double.
So they did almost every stunt in the film, just these two guys.
(44:43):
So almost every stunt that you see in the entire original Dawn of the Dead is the makeup
artist and an assistant doing all the stunts.
And Savini at one point when he did the, he did a dive over the rail of the mall and he
almost missed the cardboard boxes he was supposed to land in and his, his legs and his back
landed on the ground.
(45:05):
So he had to work from the golf cart for several days.
Couldn't work from the golf cart.
He had to work from the golf cart.
But mind me folks, I'm just crippled.
And then there's also, there's a shot where someone swings down from a banner and that's
the other guy.
And he wound up slamming into the ceiling.
So not, not a, you can tell they were professional stunt guys, but I mean, what a job.
(45:32):
Like they did fantastic.
And I've definitely did fantastic with the gore.
So this guy was just doing all of it.
So he had, oh, he had a crew of eight people.
He got a crew of eight people to help him apply makeup to 200 extras.
Jesus.
So this one guy, and then he got a crew of eight to help him.
To make up two.
It's like a one man army.
Yeah.
(45:52):
And then he was, while they were in makeup, he was doing the stunts.
Just incredible.
So the, the shot, there's a shot near the beginning.
But it actually kind of sets up the violence for the rest of the movie, but it wasn't supposed
to be in it originally, which is the guy whose head explodes in the, in the tenement buildings.
(46:18):
They shoot a guy's head and it explodes.
So the head was not made for that purpose.
And then, but the reason it was made, the scene ended up not happening how it was, how
they wanted to happen.
So they were like, let's use it somewhere else.
So the original, do you know about the original ending of the movie?
No.
Okay.
So massive spoilers for the original Daughter of the Dead.
(46:42):
So the end of the movie, how it actually plays out in the film is, I've forgotten the characters
names because it's been a week since we watched it.
The, the, there's two of them left at the end.
The, the black cop and the woman.
I should know their names, but I am blanking.
I was going to say Peter.
(47:02):
I don't think his name is Peter.
Is it?
I think the guy who died was Peter.
And Fran and Peter.
Oh, it is Peter.
So Peter, so Fran, so everyone else has died.
Fran who has learned to use the helicopter goes up and gets into the helicopter.
And she's pregnant, right?
Yeah, she's pregnant.
(47:24):
And Peter decides he's not going with her and he goes into a room and he puts a gun
against his head and then he has a change of heart and he comes out and he gets up and
he gets into the helicopter and they go away together.
Yeah.
So in the original, he does kill himself.
Right.
And she, when the zombies are coming towards her, stands up out of the helicopter and gets
(47:45):
her head chopped off by the blades.
And that's the end of the movie.
And then, and then, uh, Georgia Romero basically said like throughout filming the movie, he
kind of fell in love with the characters and he didn't want to do that to them anymore.
So we changed it so that Peter has a change of heart and comes out and also that she doesn't
(48:06):
stand up too high getting away from the zombies.
But they had made her head, they made a fake version of her head for the decapitation by
helicopter scene.
So instead of that, when they decided to change the ending, they, Tom Savini then made it
look like an African American man and filled it with food scraps and then they shot it
(48:28):
with an actual shotgun to explode the head.
That's how that, that scene ended up in the movie.
Um, uh, and then the only other, the only other bit of trivia I had taken down about
the original was that it was banned in Queensland, Australia until 1986.
You know, it's Peter who plays the televangelist on the remake, eh?
(48:50):
Oh, not Peter, but Ken, Ken Ford.
Right.
Yeah.
Can't believe he let them make him say that horrible line.
Yeah.
Like the line on its own is badass, but then why'd they turn it into this whole other thing?
Okay.
Do you want trivia on the remake?
Yeah.
Um, so Ving Rhames heard that they were making a remake and he tracked down the producers
(49:17):
to be like, I want to be in this film.
The main reason why was because he knew the original, was familiar with the original and
he knew that it was a movie where it was a horror movie where the black guy lives up
to the end.
Makes sense.
Yep.
And he was like, I want to be in the movie where the black guy lives.
Um, and that was literally it.
(49:38):
And they, he, so he tracked them down and got them to put them in the movie.
Um, the, oh yeah.
For the scenes where Anna is stitching up Ken and his wounds, um, they hired a real
nurse for the closeup shots.
I do know this thing.
Yeah.
She misunderstood directions, say to go deeper and she punctured Ving Rhames' skin, um, and
(50:02):
stitched the prosthesis to his arm.
And he literally didn't flinch, didn't say anything until after filming was done and
the director thought that the blood was a really good effect until Ving Rhames was like,
cool, we've cut.
Um, she sewed this in my arm.
Which is nuts.
The dedication to just sit there like, okay.
Okay.
I guess this is happening.
(50:24):
Um, oh yeah.
Zach, here we go.
So you, so, you know, you and your buddy, Zach, Zack Snyder did personally choose the
music to be in the film.
So he did choose Richard Cheese and also, um, the Johnny Cash, um, man comes to man
comes around.
(50:45):
Cause you know, the rest of us done by, oh, it's Tyler Bates.
Okay.
I don't know who that is.
Um, Zack Snyder was the only person who thought these songs made any sense in the movie and
everyone else hated it.
All the producers wanted him to take that.
And he was like, no, these are my songs and putting them in the movie.
So rest assured you and Zack Snyder really are the only Richard Cheese fans.
(51:06):
That's not true.
There's dozens of us.
Um, he also, Zack Snyder has said that the reason the zombies run at full speed is, um,
cause he wanted to avoid the, the comic compression, given my slow shuffling, but it was directly
inspired by 28 Days Later.
(51:27):
He did just steal that.
The camera crew would wear plastic sheeting during filming of the gory scenes, uh, cause
there was a lot of fake blood flying around.
They weren't basically like ponchos.
Um, the shot where they throw a body off the mall's roof, which is quite early in the movie,
(51:49):
uh, was filmed directly across the street from a church where there was a funeral service
ongoing.
So that's just, that's horrible to me.
Why would you not like wait?
Yeah.
Um, it was due to be released on the same week as Shaun of the Dead, but the producers of
Shaun of the Dead pushed their movie back by two weeks cause they didn't want them to
(52:10):
clash.
Yeah.
So you're saying that Dawn of the Dead and Shaun of the Dead are twin films?
Yeah.
Unfortunately.
Um, we could shoot for Shaun of the Dead cause I've watched it a dozen times.
I saw that in the movie theater.
Did you?
I think I was too young.
I think I was still a baby.
I was just like told to get in a van and I was like, all right.
And then we were like at the movie and I was like, this is awesome.
I did have it on DVD.
(52:30):
I remember watching it a bunch of times.
I was a big fan of Spaced.
Yeah.
I was like, I'm gonna watch it.
I was like, I'm gonna watch it.
I was like, I'm gonna watch it.
I was like, I'm gonna watch it.
I was like, I'm gonna watch it.
I was a big fan of Spaced.
Pretty Shaun of the Dead.
Which I probably also shouldn't have watched at that age, but I was really into Spaced
and then Shaun of the Dead came out and I was all excited about it.
Anyway, um, there's, I think I've covered all the trivia except that there was one bit
(52:53):
that I literally would just, just like, I read this and I was like, I'm so confused
by what this even means.
And then I just took it down.
So I'm just gonna read this word for word.
It says, Snyder isn't sure what to think about the shot of Nicole checking out Terry's ass
as he walks away from her.
It kind of makes me uncomfortable.
(53:15):
She's looking at it and smirking.
What's that mean?
So he's an idiot.
Yeah.
So first of all, okay, let's break this down.
One, Zack Snyder is an idiot.
Two, he makes these incredibly sexist movies and has like women doing degrading acts in
this and then is like, it makes me uncomfortable to see a woman look at a man's ass.
(53:38):
I don't like that.
That makes me uncomfortable.
Zack, honey, what have you been doing to women in these movies?
Yeah.
But it makes you uncomfortable to see a woman look at a man's ass?
That's where the line is drawn.
It's almost like women can't do the things that he thinks men should be allowed to do.
(54:02):
It's almost like women are property to him and not people.
And it's almost like he doesn't like it when a man is seen as an object.
I wonder what's going on there.
I think he might need to go to therapy.
I think that's the moral of the story is Zack Snyder should get some professional help and
(54:28):
get over his sexism issues.
Did you find what you were looking for?
I can't even remember what you were looking for.
Yeah, there was a guy, his name was Chris something, Chris, I can't pronounce this,
D-E-L, so D-E-L-I-A.
Delia?
Delia, yeah.
I thought that was what I was going to say.
(54:48):
It was stupid.
Just a basic sex abuse thing to the point where it was like even though the original
was reported in like 2011, no one did anything about it until...
Wait, who is this?
What are we talking about?
The person who was removed from the army.
(55:09):
Oh right, yeah, I had literally forgotten what we were talking about.
The guy who was too controversial to be in a Zack Snyder movie.
Do you want to talk budget and box office at all?
I'm assuming because of inflation, one cost more than the other and then made more money?
I mean, true, I guess.
(55:31):
Comparatively, I mean, comparatively it's garbage.
Comparatively the original was a flop, an incredible flop because the budget was 650,000
and the box office was 160,000.
So that's a loss of money.
(55:52):
And the remake, the budget was 26 million and box office 102 million.
So actually quite successful.
Probably off the back of the original being recognized in the interim period as a good
movie and then people being like, oh, what's the remake of this?
And then who knows what they thought when they saw it.
(56:13):
So you liked it back then, right?
Yeah, but then I liked a lot of things back then that I don't like now.
Yeah, but I would say that people who went to see it in cinema at the time probably enjoyed
it.
Yeah, it made money.
Yeah, it is very much like an of the era kind of movie.
Where the apocalypse is brought on by being gay and having abortions.
(56:37):
Yeah.
On that note, you stay safe out there, don't let anybody bite you.
Fun fact, the reason that vets will probably survive the apocalypse is they're being used
to their patients trying to bite them.
That's why you never see doctors in the apocalypse and they're always vets.
And people are like, wait, you're a vert?
(56:59):
It's like, yeah, literally you try and deal with like Alsatian that's...
Also they've got catamine.
All right, I didn't know that about them.
Is it not like for horses?
I don't know.
I think it's originally for horses, right?
If you want catamine...
You keep asking me like I know about this is a list of drugs.
(57:21):
You know, I'm a small country boy from New Zealand.
You had small country boys grow up around horses.
That's where the horses are in the country.
The horses are in the country.
Maybe in your country.
I mean, rich people own horses in New Zealand.
You have to import the things.
They're rather large.
We export them in Ireland.
(57:42):
Like the Amantive, I think there's like a lot of like showjumpers, especially.
I don't know racehorses as much, but definitely showjumping horses globally that are bred
in Ireland and then exported.
So cabels in Australia, they're a major export.
Are they really?
Yeah, because it's breed uncontrollably in the wilderness.
(58:03):
Yeah, yeah.
I didn't think they exported them.
I thought they just like hung around in the desert.
Yeah, no, they export them.
Like the emus?
No, that was the army tried to destroy them and lost a war against them.
Yeah, and they learned from the emus and they're not going to try and fight the camels.
Yeah.
Well, they'll team up together.
They like the access of evil again, except instead of the Italy and Germany, it'll be
(58:29):
the emus and the camels.
And the kangaroos will remain neutral and take everybody's gold.
We've got Christmas episodes coming up next.
Yeah, they're the fun time of year.
This year, this year, there's three December episodes.
That's crazy.
So look forward to three Christmas episodes.
(58:53):
And they are weird.
Spoiler alert.
They're weird.
Are they?
Yes.
What are you talking about?
I know what they are and I normally don't do that.
The prebys is enough to go on.
Don't try and placate me with this stuff.
Everybody knows that this is when the podcast is popular, is when Nick goes on a rant about
(59:16):
the stupidity that's happening in the Hallmark movie.
If you like what you heard or if you've listened to us before, call to action.
Join our Discord.
You can find it somewhere.
If you want to go to our website, it's somewhere here.
It's up, down, left, right, circle, circle, square.
It takes to.co.nz and the Discord link is in our show notes.
(59:38):
It's also on our website.
Lisa made the website.
I did make the website.
She wrote everything.
I wrote everything.
Yeah, you wrote the things.
You write all the things.
I do write all the things.
You're the producer.
I'm just the man with the face.
I'm the marketing department and the production department and the research department.
(59:59):
I just have the movies on TVD.
This time you've actually looked at what we're doing for a next episode.
That's a shocker.
I know.
I'll forget by the time you put them on.
Thank you for joining us.
Don't let anyone bite you.
Goodbye.
Hi everyone, I'm Lisa.
(00:21):
And I'm Nick.
And you're listening to It Takes Two, the podcast where two people take two movies with
the same plot or premise and watch and discuss them.
Even though it's November, we here at the It Takes Two studio decided, well it was actually
Strider's opinion, we're going to continue on with remakes, except we did some spooky
(00:44):
movies.
Yeah, we were supposed to do Solaris.
But there was a problem.
We couldn't get Solaris, basically, is the problem.
The problem was actually...
Solaris the original from what was it, 1950?
Is it that old?
I don't remember.
Yeah.
The problem is we didn't get Solaris in time to make Solaris episode.
(01:06):
So.
So Nick suggested a different remake that was on our list, but not until like 2032 or
something.
So in this episode, Sit Back and Scream for Dawn of the Dead, 1950...
Oh no, sorry, 1978 and 2004.
Yeah.
There's zombie movies.
(01:27):
Thanks for listening.
So I think there were zombies in these movies.
That's my thought.
Okay.
This was the first time watching both of them for you, correct?
Yep.
They were in my DVD collection.
It was very easy to find because it was like here's one and here's the other.
(01:48):
It was basically the decision was like, well, what do we have?
What do we have right now?
Yeah.
What do we have to go to our library for?
What do we not need to like get on Beema Film?
Or...
That is, by the way, if anyone wants films in New Zealand, Beema Film is your library
resource.
Get on, get yourself a library card and you can get on Beema Film.
(02:11):
Correct.
They do have the original Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, but not the remake.
Because that's another episode that we tried to do earlier this year.
If you or anyone you know has a copy of the remake of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari...
First question is why?
Second question is please can we have it?
(02:31):
Please send it to me.
Anyway, but the original is on Beema Film and it's a good resource.
There's a lot of stuff on there.
I recommend it.
Join your library.
Anyway, to the point.
This was the first time you'd seen both of these films.
Which one did you prefer?
Original.
(02:51):
Okay.
Did you enjoy the original?
I mean, I guess.
What do you mean?
Why did you say it like that?
I don't know.
I'm trying to engage conversation.
Is this how we normally do the podcast?
No, I think it's been a long week.
This is a weeknight.
Yeah.
Also, we also we watched them like a week ago.
(03:14):
Yeah.
A solid week ago we watched these movies.
I will say I had one thought about the remake.
Was it that Phil Dumphy's a dick?
No, the thought was that I suddenly understand why you like Zack Snyder and it's because you
and him are the only people on the planet who listen to Richard Cheese.
(03:36):
Shout out to my cheeseheads.
Cheeseheads!
I don't know if that's actually a fan group, but it is now a point.
Like other recent episodes you were like shout out to my something heads.
I don't even remember what it was, but it seems to just be what you do now.
(03:56):
Tesla Violet?
Were we talking about you like shout out to my violets or something?
I don't know.
Anyway.
Yeah.
When that song came out, I was like, oh, this is why he likes this movie.
Okay, so I'm going to get into the the grizzly details.
The special effects in the 2004 one are really good.
The obviously the 78 one, they are very cartoonish.
(04:21):
That's intentional.
Yeah.
It's supposed to be comic book style.
Yeah.
I think despite the fact that it was written by James Gunn and directed by Zack Schneider,
like there's some decent growth within the genre in this movie.
(04:42):
No.
No, you don't agree?
Here's my big gripe.
My number one gripe is.
Put that at the top of the list.
Why is a movie from the 70s a thousand times more progressive than a movie from the 2000s?
Why have they reverted back in time and made the black guys shitty?
(05:05):
And literally, like the original movie is like there's a bunch of black guys and they're
all cool.
And then in this one, they're like, oh, he's black and therefore he's a thief.
He steals cars.
That's what he does because he's black.
And that's what black guys do.
In the original, you've got a main female character who doesn't scream once in the movie,
is incredibly practical.
At one point is like, listen, I don't know about you guys.
(05:26):
I want to learn how to fly the helicopter because we have one guy here who can fly the
helicopter and if he dies, we're all screwed.
So I want to learn to do that so that I can take over if anything happens to him.
And in the remake, they have a woman who just constantly screams and then like every woman
is stupid and every woman is like dependent on the man and is real shitty.
(05:50):
And like literally, there's not a single female character who isn't a sexist trope.
Correct.
Zack Snyder is incredibly sexist.
I mean, this is the guy who made Sucker Punch.
He is known for it.
And this movie literally takes a film where they had a genuinely strong female protagonist
(06:14):
and like well written, well acted female protagonist in the original film and they turned it into
a sexist shit show.
And also they were like, oh, there's black guys in the original.
We'll put black guys in this one, but we'll make them shitty.
We'll make the instead of the really cool black protagonist, we're going to have this
(06:37):
guy who's like so stupid.
He's going to be driving people towards their death.
And we're going to put a secondary, be a black character in the main cast.
And he's a thief because that's I'm Zack Snyder.
I think that's what black people do.
You're very accurate, actually, on pretty much every point I was going to cover on the
(06:58):
difference between these movies.
So well done.
I love Georgia Romero.
Right.
There's it's so influential of the time.
Each movie that he's written and made is about like a period of time.
(07:20):
Dawn of the Dead from 1978 is very much about commercialism, capitalism and this consumeristic
ideal that America was turning into in the late 70s into the 80s.
And it was portrayed so very well in the original Dawn of the Dead and is literally a throwaway
(07:43):
line in the remake.
This whole concept of like the zombies, we don't know if they're alive, we don't know
if they're dead, the sort of mistrust of the media, the fact that racist cops were just
basically using the excuse of zombies to massacre poor people that were living in project areas.
(08:09):
The ideals of consumerism, consuming America from the internal core and this concept of
these mindless zombies just doing the same thing they always do.
And that's why the whole thing set in a mall.
You're right about the progressiveness of the characters not being just like damsel
(08:32):
in distress or piece of artwork on the wall.
All of the movies that he's done have been about the time that they were made in.
And it is absolutely fantastic watching that movie again and then seeing the comparison
(08:53):
and just being like wow these movies are in completely different tones.
And the fact that that was sort of progressive within the genre of zombie movies because
that's like fast zombies became a thing.
But like everything else is really tonally deaf.
(09:15):
And other than the all weird bits of trivia about the remake, it doesn't hold up to the
original.
No, we did another, I'm trying to think of what it was, we did another episode where
the remake just wasn't understanding what the original tried to say.
(09:35):
And if you're a super fan, tell us on our Discord what we're talking about.
I might think about it, but I felt like it's the same in this one where he was like, or
James Gunn and Zack Snyder looked at the original and oh zombies and blood, let's do that.
And never thought to think of what the movie was actually representing, what it was actually
(09:57):
supposed to mean.
And I mean it's a thing in sci-fi as a whole and in horror.
You do use these genres to take a look at society and what's going well and what's going
badly.
And especially criticizing governments or criticizing societal institutions and things.
(10:23):
And that is how science fiction has always been.
And to an extent how horror has always been.
Horror to me, what makes good horror is basically it just holds up a mirror to the society of
the people going to see it.
Yeah and I think it's lazy writing to just ignore all that and be like haha we're just
(10:52):
some stupid people and a zombie.
These spoilers for a lot of his other works, I'm just going to talk about the themes here.
You've got this capitalism that's rife with in Daughter of the Dead.
Jumping to the end of his career before he passed we have the three movies, I think I've
(11:14):
got them all on DVD out there actually.
We've got Land of the Dead, Diary of the Dead and Survival of the Dead.
And for all the negatives that Lisa said about the remake, he was still there at the end
of his life and the end of his career with those last three movies.
(11:36):
Land of the Dead is about classism and again following on the capitalistic line of every
time you do something they just move the bar and you stay in the same place.
You get paid more but the taxes go up.
How inflation is literally topically, inflation is now killing most of the western society.
(11:59):
And it's still fantastic that Eva knows that these themes are veiledly hidden within the
... you alright?
Yeah I remember what it was, it was Oldboy.
Ah yes of course.
God what a horrible remake.
These themes veiled behind all the scary zombie movies.
(12:23):
Land of the Dead is fantastic and you haven't seen Diary of the Dead?
I don't think I've seen any Romero films except this one.
I was trying to look through his filmography there and maybe I might have seen Monkey Shines
but that's it.
Land of the Dead and Diary of the Dead, Survival of the Dead is interesting, I'm not a huge
(12:45):
fan of that movie, maybe I'll have to revisit it.
It's so incredible that he was able to, like I said, place a mirror to society, show you
the problems but then hide it behind a genre.
And it's interesting because why I love zombie, what used to love a zombie apocalypse until
(13:06):
it was overdone by obviously the media, because it's the fear of humanity.
Because that's what humans are.
That's the whole, I've decrypted the entire genre to you folks if you didn't realise.
It's vampires, vampire original movies they were always like foreign men preying on young
(13:33):
women and they were lavish and had money and you get werewolves that are basically kind
of in a way a little racist-y towards foreigners again.
You get for the original work Night of the Living Dead it's very much borderline, the
(13:56):
Red Scare, that whole concept of foreign power.
There's definitely zombie movies that are about the AIDS epidemic.
Yeah 100%.
That's 28 Days Later is a perfect example of that.
I think is what Zack Snyder was trying to remake, even though he was remaking Day of
(14:17):
the Dead, I think he was really trying to do 28 Days Later.
Day of the Dead wasn't until 85.
Sorry.
I just combined 28 Days Later and Dawn of the Dead.
You know I completely agree with you.
I think the biggest problem, we didn't have this issue and anybody who's been a long time
(14:45):
listener will have heard me going on about Ripley multiple times in Sir Cornelius Weaver's
portrayal of how you write a good character is you write a good character.
Yeah and the gender is irrelevant.
And the gender is irrelevant.
The problem is with these days is it's the opposite way around and I feel that it betrays
(15:08):
women poorly, especially on film because if you make them useless it becomes a stereotype
of oh great you can't write women.
But then if you give them every super single, you know make them the most powerful and the
awesome and they can never fail, you're not watching a movie.
(15:29):
You're just watching weird fan fiction.
You have to have those peaks and valleys.
I think it's interesting because from a cinematic history point of view and I don't want to
give Zack Snyder an out here because he continued to do it and that's what you know he I think
he just is sexist but at that point in time in mainstream cinema it was quite common to
(15:55):
be sexist.
And it's interesting to what's most interesting to me about this is watching the 70s version
being like oh yeah in old movies they weren't hardly sexist.
So there's obviously like a bell curve or somewhere in that maybe in the late 90s into
the early 2000s because even like you know this comes up on National Treasure Hunt just
(16:15):
to promo another podcast about the original National Treasure movie.
It's like even though one of the main characters is a very accomplished intelligent woman,
the movie gets weirdly sexist about her like over and over again and that's not a movie
that's intended to be a sexist movie whereas this I think is.
(16:39):
You know it's but it just I think at that point in time in our society and reflected
in films there weirdly was a lot just a lot of sexism happening and I think we're coming
out of that to some extent and maybe some people are lagging behind and still putting
in their films.
Josh we're looking at you buddy.
(17:00):
You mean Joss?
Joss yeah look had you know turned one of the most powerful female characters in all
of media the Wonder Woman and turned her into a useless like weird bimbo thing.
That's bizarre to me as well because like Joss Whedon.
Oh that whole thing is super weird.
Which thing?
(17:23):
The Buffy the late end Buffy stuff going into like Dollhouse.
It's just that like the beginnings of Buffy didn't feel like that and then it's like what
happened to you?
But if you watch I mean I love Dr. Horrible's sing-along vlog but it is problematic AF when
(17:44):
you look at the female protagonist or you know the main female character and how she's
treated because she's literally barely treated as a person.
She's just like an object for them to fight over which is how Joss Whedon sees women so
it makes sense.
But like Zach Snyder said the same.
(18:06):
I don't know about James Gunn I do think because we talked about him when we did the super
episode and I feel like I had weird feelings about that movie re-watching it.
Yeah it was the whole one can be played for a comic relief and the other has to be played
(18:29):
both as in shit's getting real this is a serious moment but it's the same act.
Yeah yeah yeah that kind of stuff just doesn't sit well with me and I think so I think there
is and I mean this is early stuff as well I guess.
Ironically oh there was something I thought of when I was watching it that I thought was
(18:52):
funny but I can't remember what it was.
Which one?
With the remake but it was it was that like people people were not keen on on James Gunn
writing the movie when it was announced first because all he had done was the Scooby Doo
movies and they were worried he was going to make another Scooby Doo movie.
(19:13):
I actually liked the Scooby Doo movies.
I could literally talk about Scooby Doo for at least 45 minutes without taking a break.
The movies or just Scooby Doo as a whole?
Just Scooby Doo in general.
I love Scooby Doo.
It's very interesting it's a very interesting time and subject.
I remember what it was what I said so this is spoiler alert for the remake I know we
(19:40):
always say from 2004.
Spoiler spoiler spoiler because I am going to talk about the ending of the movie.
The funny thing I thought of was that they end up on an island full of zombies and I
was like oh Scooby Doo and zombie island couldn't get away from it.
It's interesting because I can't remember his name who's the guy who plays Phil Dumphy?
(20:05):
I should know his name.
I have no idea.
We probably see his name pop up we've been rewatching Modern Family at the moment.
Re-watching I've been watching it for the first time.
Okay well I've seen.
Ty Burrell.
Yeah it's very interesting because a lot of his portrayals are other than the because
I'd forgotten he was in it until you know we put the disc in.
(20:29):
The only other thing I can think of he's in is like.
National Treasure 2 Book of Secrets.
I was gonna say he plays a Nazi in Key and Peel.
Which is super weird.
I can't literally think of anything else.
Besides National Treasure 2 Book of Secrets?
Yes where he's playing the museum caretaker for the White House.
(20:52):
Yeah is he curator for the White House?
His name is Connor I remember that much.
I think he's a curator for the White House.
Anyway he also was in the sequel to the 2011 Muppets movie.
So Muppets Most Wanted.
I think he plays a villain in that as well if I remember correctly.
(21:15):
Yeah but like a comical Muppets villain not like sexist horrible monster man.
Yeah.
Who's just like constantly having sex for some reason in the zombie apocalypse.
It's the interesting part about the remake is they do bring back two of the main cast
(21:39):
members from the original which I thought was nice.
It's interesting because like it does feel like they were trying to make an homage but
then missed the entire point of the movie.
Yeah same with Oldboy.
It's just such a weird because we were like it was borderline obsession at one point.
(22:05):
What?
The zombies obviously with like the failures of the spin offs of The Walking Dead I think
we're like oversaturated and the weird Netflix heist movie that he made.
Who?
Zack Schneider.
I don't know what Zack Schneider has made.
(22:26):
He made a zombie heist movie where they have to break into like a casino in Vegas but the
casino in Vegas is overtaken by zombies.
Okay.
It was really and then they made a prequel to it which is just a heist movie.
What about that Korean zombie thing that we watched on Netflix that was cool.
(22:46):
Oh was that Last Kingdom?
Is that what it was called?
That was cool.
That was a cool ass thing.
Was it a show or a movie?
There was a show.
It was like several seasons.
Was it several seasons?
It was very cool.
I'm pretty sure.
This is when we first started dating I think was before we even lived together.
I don't think it was called.
Was it called Kingdom?
Maybe?
Anyway.
(23:06):
You talk like Google.
Just saying there are still good zombies.
Oh, Train to Busan?
Oh yeah, Train to Busan is incredible.
I also released the same week as this remake, Shaun of the Dead.
Shaun of the Dead is a much better homage to Dawn of the Dead than Dawn of the Dead.
(23:28):
You were right.
It was just called Kingdom.
Just called Kingdom.
Yeah, that was good.
If you haven't seen Kingdom folks, I highly recommend it.
It is like a feudal Korean zombie show.
Yeah, very cool.
And it is really well done.
And Train to Busan, if you haven't seen it, is just masterpieces of cinema.
Absolutely brilliant.
Genuinely masterpieces of cinema.
(23:49):
The acting is fantastic.
The setting is fantastic.
The special effects.
It makes you so angry because you're hoping for things to happen or you're dreading your
life.
You're hoping for horrible things to not happen.
And every time you're like, no, don't let that happen.
It's what happens.
(24:10):
And you're like, oh no.
But it's a zombie movie that is so incredibly emotional.
Fantastic.
And also, I know this isn't what we're talking about, but just the character growth.
Absolutely lacking from Dawn of the Dead.
(24:30):
Exactly.
None of it.
Train to Busan has one of the greatest character arcs.
And it's in real time.
I think the whole thing is in real time.
There's no time skips or anything.
It's so annoying going back to between the two, right?
Between the original and the remake.
(24:53):
We don't get a lot of character development in the original either.
Yeah.
But we at least get to learn about the characters and see them.
There is some development, you know what I mean?
And there's them learning how to cope in the world that they're in or whatever.
And that's entirely missing from the remake.
(25:14):
It's almost like James...
Who was writing it?
Both of them are very guilty of this.
They were like, cool.
Here's an original thought.
What are people doing in a mall?
And they try on clothes and they dick around and they drink coffee and they do all that.
(25:34):
And it's like, cool.
Did you watch the original?
Because that's the whole thing of like, oh, cool.
We've taken over the mall.
Now what do we do other than survive?
Let's go shopping.
And it's in the original.
It is cool.
No matter how far away you try and disconnect, we are in a capitalist society.
(25:56):
There is no barter.
There is no trade.
You just go and you buy things.
And it's for multiple reasons.
You want, you need the, you know, this whole industry of incremental growth within tech
causing so much e-waste.
You know, every year you have to go and get a new phone because it's got a slightly better
(26:19):
widget-y doodad in it.
Like I don't know if I've said this on the podcast before, but I'm literally never buying
a new generation phone that has a built-in AI in it.
Because I don't want that.
And in all these products, it's built in.
You can't take it out.
Yeah, it's funny because I haven't been using Google in quite a while.
(26:43):
And then I tried to Google something the other day.
I've been mainly using Doc.Go at work, at auto defaults to Bing.
So I've been using Bing sometimes.
That's a blast from the past.
I didn't even realize Bing still existed.
But I tried to Google something the other day and it just came up with AI results that
(27:03):
didn't even make any sense to what I can't remember exactly what it was.
But I was like, what?
What are you talking about?
It's very interesting that they've taken what used to work, which is it finds the keywords
in the whole internet that is on the right side of the wall and puts those words together.
(27:26):
And that's how you get the search engine function.
And now it's like, oh, we'll use AI to run it.
What's the most popular answer rather than what's the actual information you're looking
for?
And AI to help chat, GBT, that sort of thing is helping out.
But it's getting worse because the amount of information it's getting is not the information
(27:49):
you want.
And I was like, I was saying to you yesterday, was it yesterday?
We were walking home together.
And the fact that news website host ads on them and the ads of fake news.
And it's like, oh, you should respect us because of our journalistic integrity.
And it's like, where is it?
(28:11):
Is it hidden behind your paywall?
Or is it in the 10 doctors don't want you to know about this Barry thing?
And you're like, that's bullshit.
And because people doom scroll, because that's what we all want to do, because we all live
in a society of the dopamine must be tapped, tapped, tapped, tapped, tapped on forever
(28:33):
until we have a heart attack or your legs go numb.
The reality of it is it's so lost in the remake, it is absolutely lost.
It's just like, oh, cool.
Here's the thing they did in the original.
Let's do it with all of our extra characters that are all two dimensional.
(28:53):
Can I say I remembered here's the thing about what about what having watched the movies
and then gone a week before we've done the broadcast is that I forgot the things I was
really angry about.
And I remembered what I was really angry about.
Fantastic.
I don't know if any have it, not me, but you know.
So there is a quote in the original.
I don't know if I took down the full quote, but I thought it was fantastic.
(29:16):
It's probably the most famous quote.
I don't know anything about the movie, so it may or may not be the most famous quote,
but it was the quote about.
Sorry, I thought I had it there and then I lost it.
Where he's like, it's the brain works.
It's the about the dead walk the earth thing.
(29:37):
And it's like when there's no when there's no more room in hell and the dead walk the
earth.
Yeah.
And in the original, badass in the remake, they give that line to a televangelist who
instead of using it to be like, this is the dire situation we're in, uses that to be like,
(30:01):
hey, the gays caused this.
Yeah.
And this is all because gay people exist.
That's why the zombie boxes happens.
And the worst thing about it is that Zack Snyder validates it because in this universe,
that is fucking true.
(30:22):
That is the accurate state.
So in it, he blames it on three different things.
One is having sex at a wedlock, killing unborn children and man on man relationships.
And those are the characters that were given in this movie.
All three of those things.
Well, not really all three of them happened on screen, but the sex at a wedlock happens
(30:45):
on screen and those people get turned into zombies and die.
Killing unborn children is a weird one because it doesn't even make any sense because what
they do is there's a guy.
Spoilers.
Spoilers, spoilers, spoilers.
A guy keeps his pregnant wife tied to a bed when she starts running into a zombie and
(31:05):
hides her from everyone else.
In the typical zombie movie, I'm not telling people this person is bitten thing.
Unlike in the original where the guy's like, shit, I'm bitten.
We think this is how it spreads.
You know, I'm going to die.
I'm going to die.
But don't kill me until you're sure that I'm starting to come back as a zombie.
And then they do it.
You know, and it's like actually, you know, you see the relationship between people and
(31:27):
blah, blah, blah.
Anyway, in this one, it's stupid.
So then the guy, his wife is a zombie and then she gives birth to a zombie baby and
then someone comes in and sees him and he shoots her or she shoots the woman and he
shoots her and then everyone's dead and the baby's a zombie and then they have to shoot
(31:48):
the baby zombie and that's the killing unborn children.
But actually, the problem could have been solved by an abortion.
Actually, the whole zombie situation would have been better if the baby had died while
it was still in the womb.
So I don't know what point you were trying to make there, Zach or James, whichever of
(32:09):
you decided on that whole situation.
But you made the opposite of your point.
And then, oh yeah, and then there's Glenn who cross dresses and therefore deserves to
be a zombie.
And he's also dying.
Yeah.
What does he say?
I can't remember.
It's so awkward.
I do not know why it's in the movie.
(32:30):
I know why it's in the movie.
It's so they can prove that gay people caused the apocalypse.
The security guards who basically tried to arrest them and stop them from wandering around
the mall when they break in in the original get thrown in jail.
And then he's just like confessing his feelings to them, like unwillingly.
(32:51):
And it feels very much like it's so weird because it just feels like that's not a situation
that people do.
Yeah.
And I felt like also I thought it was weird that like the first time they tried to show
is just literally just him putting on women's clothes.
We're supposed to go, oh, he's gay.
That's not how that works.
And the fact that he's anti religious.
(33:13):
And it's like, oh, even though he works in a church, he plays the organ in a church.
It's like, oh, I don't actually give a shit about religion because I'm the gay character.
Yeah.
It's just like.
Because I'm the gay character.
That's what we're supposed to do.
And also I cause the apocalypse.
So yeah, so not only is this movie sexist, it's also homophobic and blames the apocalypse
on gay people and abortions.
(33:36):
What's the third one?
Having sex outside of wedlock.
You know, it's also, you know, it's also, I don't even know what else to say about that.
So the, I can't even remember the character's name and I'm sorry, cause it's the main point.
One of the characters in, in the movie is the flirt with everybody character.
(34:01):
She's like the hyper sexualized.
She's the one having sex with Phil Dunphy.
Right.
Cause he's like super rich.
This way he has a boat.
Was he a weatherman?
Monica?
Is it Monica?
Yeah.
The, do you, do you remember how Monica and Glenn die?
Uh, the chainsaw?
(34:21):
Yeah.
He stabs her with a chainsaw.
What is a chainsaw?
Like I was like, is the symbolism supposed to be there as like.
Is it supposed to be like a phallic thing?
Yeah.
That's like my entire, like when I was watching, I was like, is this like the, oh, he dies
because he penetrates a wall.
Like is that the like throw away thing or am I just reading too deep into like his hate
(34:43):
for it?
Like.
I don't know.
Um, it's just such a bad movie to be honest.
I, I, sorry.
I know you have a DVD, so you obviously do enjoy it.
I just.
I, looking through it from a lens of the original versus a remake, looking at the things that
(35:04):
I didn't used to look at when I was younger, cause this movie came out in 2004, I probably
bought it around, you know, or would I have been like 18 or whatever.
Well this is like me watching Super.
Cause I enjoyed Super first time I watched it.
And then when we rewatched it for the podcast, I was like, geez, like why?
Um.
But it also kind of shows how normalized that kind of stuff was in the 2000s.
(35:25):
Yeah.
Um, where was I going?
What was I saying before?
I was talking about when I bought the movie, when the movie came out.
You were talking about like looking at it from a different lens.
Oh yeah, yeah.
It's, it's awful now.
Um.
You know, there's a, there's.
It's so interesting that it's so far away from the pulse.
(35:46):
His fingers may like, might as well be up his ass or his head in this case.
Um, and the juxtaposition between that and how Romero stayed on brand, stayed on the
pulse and was just like trying to again show the.
And that's why I think, um, it's been being noted before with anybody who's on the discord
(36:08):
and my rant about scream.
Um, that's one we have to cover at some point, right?
Screen.
Doesn't they do like a soft reboot thing with general Tager?
Oh, I thought it was just sequels.
I think there's lots of sequels, but I think it's like a soft reboot.
I don't know.
Cause I think some of the, I think like Gail Weatherson stuff show up on it again and Sydney's
on it and it again.
So I don't think it's.
(36:29):
Reboot reboot.
I don't know.
I don't know enough about the, the reason.
I think I've only seen the first three.
It's that glorification of glorification.
Thank you.
Without you, I would be lost.
Um, and talking to myself instead of you at home or at work or wherever you are.
Um, that's what you meant me.
(36:49):
And I was like, I'm clearly right here.
He's lost his mind.
Um, it's yeah, I just never liked screen because it's just so like, at least I know what you
did last summer was like, Oh, you know, just because you're rich and you know, you go to
a private school and blah, blah, blah.
Cause you know, you trust fun kid.
(37:09):
Doesn't mean you get away with stuff being unpunished and scream is just the people for,
in my opinion, the people who watch a fight club and American psycho would take a wrong
and Joker, the original Joker and take away the, uh, not the remake cause we haven't done
on the remake, sorry, the sequel and take away the wrong point of those movies with
(37:35):
that character is the bad person.
Yeah.
Um, yeah, it's just, I feel like that like there was some use of people that had disabilities
or amputations as the zombies in both movies.
Um, the, like the way they filmed it was like pretty, pretty like, you know, using that
(38:02):
sort of thing.
Like I said earlier in the, in the, in the podcast, we were talking about like the, the
effects are in a fantastic and that was, they were all practical, um, versus where everything
these days is shitty CGI garbage to the point where they like CGI down an entire character.
You know about that for the, it's one of the characters, I think it was your, your, is
(38:26):
this in Stalin's campaign photos?
What?
This is what Stalin did.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
Stalin just like photo, literally like photoshopped out people he didn't like, but like manually
got people to photoshop out people he didn't like from his photos and make bigger crowds
and stuff.
(38:46):
That weird heist movie, they literally, they photoshopped out an entire character and photoshopped
another person in there, in their place.
I can't remember.
There was some controversy.
I'm going to have to find it now because I do not remember.
Um, this is the Zack Snyder.
Yeah, yeah, this is a Zack Snyder one.
There was someone too problematic to be in a Zack Snyder movie.
(39:07):
Stop pronouncing his name weirdly.
How am I pronouncing it?
Snyder?
Yes.
You're putting like an H in there or a C-H. It's just S-N-Y-D-E-R.
Is it Army of the Dead?
Zombie heist movie.
There we go.
That's what the zombie heist movie is?
Is it called Zombie Heist Movie?
No, it's called Army of the Dead.
(39:29):
Army of the Dead.
Is that not a, is that not the sequel to The Evil Dead?
Uh, no, that's...
Army of Darkness.
Army of Darkness, yeah.
Uh, where is it?
Too many, too many...
Too many things?
Dead movies.
Too many movies about dead people.
Financial crisis, blah blah blah blah blah.
(39:52):
Where the hell is the bit with the...
I don't know.
This is dead air on our pockets.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Um, keep, keep talking.
I'll start going into trivia.
Yeah, please go into trivia while I find the trivia about a movie that's not related to
this movie.
Yeah, it sounds good.
It sounds good.
(40:13):
Okay, so the original.
Um, so the extras who appeared in the original film were given one dollar in cash, a donut,
and a Donut of the Dead t-shirt as payment.
The extras were?
Yeah.
Nice curl.
One dollar cash, a donut, and a donut of the dead t-shirt.
The filming at the malls, it was a real mall, Monroeville Mall, took place in the winter
(40:38):
of 1977 into 1978 during a, oh, and they had a three week, they took three weeks off filming
during the Christmas shopping season because they couldn't, they wouldn't have been able
to shoot it.
So they knew, so this is, what I loved about this is the, they started filming the mall
(41:00):
from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. every day, right?
Yeah.
But the only reason they started at 6 a.m., so the mall didn't actually open until 10
or 11 a.m. or 13 in the morning, but at 6 a.m. the music came on and no one could figure
out how to turn it off.
Is that why it's in the movie?
I don't, I think they put in their own music in the movie, but like the music that played
(41:21):
automatically in the mall would come on at 6 a.m. every day and literally no one could
figure out how to turn it off, so they just stopped filming at 6 every day, which I think
is very funny.
And there was a bar, there was a few bars in the area, so apparently like the guy who
did all the special effects, like remembers doing makeup for zombies and then went off
(41:44):
and had a drink in the bar.
And they think, he thinks that that helps their performances, that they came back like
drunk and sweaty.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes sense.
Which is very funny.
But they did apparently also like steal a golf cart and crash it inside the mall, some
of the drunk zombie extras.
That's fantastic.
Yeah.
(42:05):
Um, the, I took the, literally took this note because it's something we were discussing
recently.
The fake blood used was a mixture of food coloring, peanut butter and cane sugar syrup.
We were, we were, for Halloween we were looking at doing fake blood and we did look at recipes
with peanut butter in them.
Yeah, it was very sticky.
So it's interesting to see.
Oh, I don't think the peanut butter is sticky.
(42:27):
It's the syrups, the syrups are sticky.
So it's funny to see that that's what they used for their chunky blood in this movie.
So Tom Sabini is the name of the guy who did the special makeup effects.
And he seems to just be like a genius.
George A. Romero.
That's the trivia.
(42:47):
He just seems to be a genius.
Oh, it's just like, I'm just like, his name comes up a lot and he like, he like single
handedly did everything in these movies.
He seems to be incredible.
I think he also is in it.
I don't remember as who.
But they, so George, so this is a sequel, which I didn't realize till we started watching
it.
It's a sequel to Night of the Living Dead.
And George A. Romero had wanted Tom Sabini to do the makeup effects for Night of the
(43:11):
Living Dead.
But he couldn't commit to it because he had to go on a tour of Vietnam.
So he had served, so he is a combat photographer in the US army.
And that was how he is so good at doing gore because he has seen so much of it up close
and in person and documented it and looked at, you know, how it's, how it looks on film.
(43:37):
You should have seen my face because it's very accurate of why it would have been looked
good on screen.
Yeah, yeah.
So he's, and then, and then he obviously came back from Vietnam and did Dawn of the Dead.
So that's a lot of the graphic gore effects.
I think possibly a reason why they have people who have our amputees in it is because of
(44:00):
his experience in Vietnam and what he saw there.
So he largely was recreating what he had seen in real life.
They, oh yeah, so that was what he did.
He was a, he was a, he did stunts as well.
These guys have been like just the best, the best guy to have on your film because they
(44:22):
had like no budget.
They had a shoestring budget.
They couldn't afford professional stunt people.
So Tom Savini, the makeup artist, and I don't know if it was his assistant or Giorgio Romero's
assistant, a guy named Tasso Stavrakis volunteered to be the stunt double.
So they did almost every stunt in the film, just these two guys.
(44:43):
So almost every stunt that you see in the entire original Dawn of the Dead is the makeup
artist and an assistant doing all the stunts.
And Savini at one point when he did the, he did a dive over the rail of the mall and he
almost missed the cardboard boxes he was supposed to land in and his, his legs and his back
landed on the ground.
(45:05):
So he had to work from the golf cart for several days.
Couldn't work from the golf cart.
He had to work from the golf cart.
But mind me folks, I'm just crippled.
And then there's also, there's a shot where someone swings down from a banner and that's
the other guy.
And he wound up slamming into the ceiling.
So not, not a, you can tell they were professional stunt guys, but I mean, what a job.
(45:32):
Like they did fantastic.
And I've definitely did fantastic with the gore.
So this guy was just doing all of it.
So he had, oh, he had a crew of eight people.
He got a crew of eight people to help him apply makeup to 200 extras.
Jesus.
So this one guy, and then he got a crew of eight to help him.
To make up two.
It's like a one man army.
Yeah.
(45:52):
And then he was, while they were in makeup, he was doing the stunts.
Just incredible.
So the, the shot, there's a shot near the beginning.
But it actually kind of sets up the violence for the rest of the movie, but it wasn't supposed
to be in it originally, which is the guy whose head explodes in the, in the tenement buildings.
(46:18):
They shoot a guy's head and it explodes.
So the head was not made for that purpose.
And then, but the reason it was made, the scene ended up not happening how it was, how
they wanted to happen.
So they were like, let's use it somewhere else.
So the original, do you know about the original ending of the movie?
No.
Okay.
So massive spoilers for the original Daughter of the Dead.
(46:42):
So the end of the movie, how it actually plays out in the film is, I've forgotten the characters
names because it's been a week since we watched it.
The, the, there's two of them left at the end.
The, the black cop and the woman.
I should know their names, but I am blanking.
I was going to say Peter.
(47:02):
I don't think his name is Peter.
Is it?
I think the guy who died was Peter.
And Fran and Peter.
Oh, it is Peter.
So Peter, so Fran, so everyone else has died.
Fran who has learned to use the helicopter goes up and gets into the helicopter.
And she's pregnant, right?
Yeah, she's pregnant.
(47:24):
And Peter decides he's not going with her and he goes into a room and he puts a gun
against his head and then he has a change of heart and he comes out and he gets up and
he gets into the helicopter and they go away together.
Yeah.
So in the original, he does kill himself.
Right.
And she, when the zombies are coming towards her, stands up out of the helicopter and gets
(47:45):
her head chopped off by the blades.
And that's the end of the movie.
And then, and then, uh, Georgia Romero basically said like throughout filming the movie, he
kind of fell in love with the characters and he didn't want to do that to them anymore.
So we changed it so that Peter has a change of heart and comes out and also that she doesn't
(48:06):
stand up too high getting away from the zombies.
But they had made her head, they made a fake version of her head for the decapitation by
helicopter scene.
So instead of that, when they decided to change the ending, they, Tom Savini then made it
look like an African American man and filled it with food scraps and then they shot it
(48:28):
with an actual shotgun to explode the head.
That's how that, that scene ended up in the movie.
Um, uh, and then the only other, the only other bit of trivia I had taken down about
the original was that it was banned in Queensland, Australia until 1986.
You know, it's Peter who plays the televangelist on the remake, eh?
(48:50):
Oh, not Peter, but Ken, Ken Ford.
Right.
Yeah.
Can't believe he let them make him say that horrible line.
Yeah.
Like the line on its own is badass, but then why'd they turn it into this whole other thing?
Okay.
Do you want trivia on the remake?
Yeah.
Um, so Ving Rhames heard that they were making a remake and he tracked down the producers
(49:17):
to be like, I want to be in this film.
The main reason why was because he knew the original, was familiar with the original and
he knew that it was a movie where it was a horror movie where the black guy lives up
to the end.
Makes sense.
Yep.
And he was like, I want to be in the movie where the black guy lives.
Um, and that was literally it.
(49:38):
And they, he, so he tracked them down and got them to put them in the movie.
Um, the, oh yeah.
For the scenes where Anna is stitching up Ken and his wounds, um, they hired a real
nurse for the closeup shots.
I do know this thing.
Yeah.
She misunderstood directions, say to go deeper and she punctured Ving Rhames' skin, um, and
(50:02):
stitched the prosthesis to his arm.
And he literally didn't flinch, didn't say anything until after filming was done and
the director thought that the blood was a really good effect until Ving Rhames was like,
cool, we've cut.
Um, she sewed this in my arm.
Which is nuts.
The dedication to just sit there like, okay.
Okay.
I guess this is happening.
(50:24):
Um, oh yeah.
Zach, here we go.
So you, so, you know, you and your buddy, Zach, Zack Snyder did personally choose the
music to be in the film.
So he did choose Richard Cheese and also, um, the Johnny Cash, um, man comes to man
comes around.
(50:45):
Cause you know, the rest of us done by, oh, it's Tyler Bates.
Okay.
I don't know who that is.
Um, Zack Snyder was the only person who thought these songs made any sense in the movie and
everyone else hated it.
All the producers wanted him to take that.
And he was like, no, these are my songs and putting them in the movie.
So rest assured you and Zack Snyder really are the only Richard Cheese fans.
(51:06):
That's not true.
There's dozens of us.
Um, he also, Zack Snyder has said that the reason the zombies run at full speed is, um,
cause he wanted to avoid the, the comic compression, given my slow shuffling, but it was directly
inspired by 28 Days Later.
(51:27):
He did just steal that.
The camera crew would wear plastic sheeting during filming of the gory scenes, uh, cause
there was a lot of fake blood flying around.
They weren't basically like ponchos.
Um, the shot where they throw a body off the mall's roof, which is quite early in the movie,
(51:49):
uh, was filmed directly across the street from a church where there was a funeral service
ongoing.
So that's just, that's horrible to me.
Why would you not like wait?
Yeah.
Um, it was due to be released on the same week as Shaun of the Dead, but the producers of
Shaun of the Dead pushed their movie back by two weeks cause they didn't want them to
(52:10):
clash.
Yeah.
So you're saying that Dawn of the Dead and Shaun of the Dead are twin films?
Yeah.
Unfortunately.
Um, we could shoot for Shaun of the Dead cause I've watched it a dozen times.
I saw that in the movie theater.
Did you?
I think I was too young.
I think I was still a baby.
I was just like told to get in a van and I was like, all right.
And then we were like at the movie and I was like, this is awesome.
I did have it on DVD.
(52:30):
I remember watching it a bunch of times.
I was a big fan of Spaced.
Yeah.
I was like, I'm gonna watch it.
I was like, I'm gonna watch it.
I was like, I'm gonna watch it.
I was like, I'm gonna watch it.
I was like, I'm gonna watch it.
I was a big fan of Spaced.
Pretty Shaun of the Dead.
Which I probably also shouldn't have watched at that age, but I was really into Spaced
and then Shaun of the Dead came out and I was all excited about it.
Anyway, um, there's, I think I've covered all the trivia except that there was one bit
(52:53):
that I literally would just, just like, I read this and I was like, I'm so confused
by what this even means.
And then I just took it down.
So I'm just gonna read this word for word.
It says, Snyder isn't sure what to think about the shot of Nicole checking out Terry's ass
as he walks away from her.
It kind of makes me uncomfortable.
(53:15):
She's looking at it and smirking.
What's that mean?
So he's an idiot.
Yeah.
So first of all, okay, let's break this down.
One, Zack Snyder is an idiot.
Two, he makes these incredibly sexist movies and has like women doing degrading acts in
this and then is like, it makes me uncomfortable to see a woman look at a man's ass.
(53:38):
I don't like that.
That makes me uncomfortable.
Zack, honey, what have you been doing to women in these movies?
Yeah.
But it makes you uncomfortable to see a woman look at a man's ass?
That's where the line is drawn.
It's almost like women can't do the things that he thinks men should be allowed to do.
(54:02):
It's almost like women are property to him and not people.
And it's almost like he doesn't like it when a man is seen as an object.
I wonder what's going on there.
I think he might need to go to therapy.
I think that's the moral of the story is Zack Snyder should get some professional help and
(54:28):
get over his sexism issues.
Did you find what you were looking for?
I can't even remember what you were looking for.
Yeah, there was a guy, his name was Chris something, Chris, I can't pronounce this,
D-E-L, so D-E-L-I-A.
Delia?
Delia, yeah.
I thought that was what I was going to say.
(54:48):
It was stupid.
Just a basic sex abuse thing to the point where it was like even though the original
was reported in like 2011, no one did anything about it until...
Wait, who is this?
What are we talking about?
The person who was removed from the army.
(55:09):
Oh right, yeah, I had literally forgotten what we were talking about.
The guy who was too controversial to be in a Zack Snyder movie.
Do you want to talk budget and box office at all?
I'm assuming because of inflation, one cost more than the other and then made more money?
I mean, true, I guess.
(55:31):
Comparatively, I mean, comparatively it's garbage.
Comparatively the original was a flop, an incredible flop because the budget was 650,000
and the box office was 160,000.
So that's a loss of money.
(55:52):
And the remake, the budget was 26 million and box office 102 million.
So actually quite successful.
Probably off the back of the original being recognized in the interim period as a good
movie and then people being like, oh, what's the remake of this?
And then who knows what they thought when they saw it.
(56:13):
So you liked it back then, right?
Yeah, but then I liked a lot of things back then that I don't like now.
Yeah, but I would say that people who went to see it in cinema at the time probably enjoyed
it.
Yeah, it made money.
Yeah, it is very much like an of the era kind of movie.
Where the apocalypse is brought on by being gay and having abortions.
(56:37):
Yeah.
On that note, you stay safe out there, don't let anybody bite you.
Fun fact, the reason that vets will probably survive the apocalypse is they're being used
to their patients trying to bite them.
That's why you never see doctors in the apocalypse and they're always vets.
And people are like, wait, you're a vert?
(56:59):
It's like, yeah, literally you try and deal with like Alsatian that's...
Also they've got catamine.
All right, I didn't know that about them.
Is it not like for horses?
I don't know.
I think it's originally for horses, right?
If you want catamine...
You keep asking me like I know about this is a list of drugs.
(57:21):
You know, I'm a small country boy from New Zealand.
You had small country boys grow up around horses.
That's where the horses are in the country.
The horses are in the country.
Maybe in your country.
I mean, rich people own horses in New Zealand.
You have to import the things.
They're rather large.
We export them in Ireland.
(57:42):
Like the Amantive, I think there's like a lot of like showjumpers, especially.
I don't know racehorses as much, but definitely showjumping horses globally that are bred
in Ireland and then exported.
So cabels in Australia, they're a major export.
Are they really?
Yeah, because it's breed uncontrollably in the wilderness.
(58:03):
Yeah, yeah.
I didn't think they exported them.
I thought they just like hung around in the desert.
Yeah, no, they export them.
Like the emus?
No, that was the army tried to destroy them and lost a war against them.
Yeah, and they learned from the emus and they're not going to try and fight the camels.
Yeah.
Well, they'll team up together.
They like the access of evil again, except instead of the Italy and Germany, it'll be
(58:29):
the emus and the camels.
And the kangaroos will remain neutral and take everybody's gold.
We've got Christmas episodes coming up next.
Yeah, they're the fun time of year.
This year, this year, there's three December episodes.
That's crazy.
So look forward to three Christmas episodes.
(58:53):
And they are weird.
Spoiler alert.
They're weird.
Are they?
Yes.
What are you talking about?
I know what they are and I normally don't do that.
The prebys is enough to go on.
Don't try and placate me with this stuff.
Everybody knows that this is when the podcast is popular, is when Nick goes on a rant about
(59:16):
the stupidity that's happening in the Hallmark movie.
If you like what you heard or if you've listened to us before, call to action.
Join our Discord.
You can find it somewhere.
If you want to go to our website, it's somewhere here.
It's up, down, left, right, circle, circle, square.
It takes to.co.nz and the Discord link is in our show notes.
(59:38):
It's also on our website.
Lisa made the website.
I did make the website.
She wrote everything.
I wrote everything.
Yeah, you wrote the things.
You write all the things.
I do write all the things.
You're the producer.
I'm just the man with the face.
I'm the marketing department and the production department and the research department.
(59:59):
I just have the movies on TVD.
This time you've actually looked at what we're doing for a next episode.
That's a shocker.
I know.
I'll forget by the time you put them on.
Thank you for joining us.
Don't let anyone bite you.
Goodbye.
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