Page 8-Tuesday, May 8, 1979-The Michigan Daily Romero' ghouls knock 'em dead By CHRISTOPHER POTTER Nightmares are supposed to be personal, esoteric trips, wonderfully dependent upon individual predilec- tions. So how is it that George Romero knows my nightmares with the terrifying incisiveness of a cackle at three a.m.? In the lexicon of filmmakers Romero remains an unclassifiable, completely personalized animal. He revels in chaos amidst the ordinary, in the mutated dissolution of everything safe and familiar into monstrous perversity. A DECADE AGO Romero ripped the lid off the horror film genre with his now- messianic Night of the Living Dead. His dubious chronicle of dead bodies retur- ning to life to devour the living hit upon an ingenious methodology: Combine the most ghoulishly horrific events with the most mundane community surroundings (all the action took place in a rural community near Pittsburgh), and you are stuck face to face with the darkest vision of society sliding lop- sidedly into pandemonium. Ten years removed, Romero has launched a new assault on our vulnerable rationality. His sequel is Dawn of the Dead, and while one might regret his apparent lack of thematic progress one can only marvel at the degree of artistic sophistication with which the director has refined his grisly view of man's fate. Dawn of the Dead, like its forebear, is deceptively simplistic in plot, though TrnA lic* Budget Fsres Berlin/Munich .... $160 Brussels ..........190 Frankfurt/Hamburg . 150 Istanbul-,sc d.prtr. 275 London ...........193 Rome-Nyc deprtur ... 236 Warsaw .......... 275 EURAIL PASS Youth ............ 260 First Class ..... from 190 ORIENT BUDGET FARES Bangkok ......... $479 Hong Kong.........429 Kuala Lumpur ...... 514 Manila ........... 425 Singapore .........519 Taipei...........429 One way fares subject to change REGENCY TRAVEL Thehi.nd Tr Ste.e n th. r (o 665-6122 601 E. WIWAM (CORNER MAYNARO) - - ANN AROR, MIC garishly rich in texture and effect. Once again a horrible osmosis is taking place: Recently dead, bodies are rising up-instinctive, brainless automatons driven by a single-minded lust for living human flesh. They stalk the cities and countryside, turning every live victim into a ghoul like themselves. In Night of the Living Dead, organized humanity managed to put down the rebellion; this time the tables have turned-the zom- bies are irreversibly winning out. DAWN. OF THE DEAD'S opening sequence at a Philadelphia TV studio elucidates Romero's unique, brilliant talent for pulsating anarchy. We find television, the social Gibraltar of America, in a state of total derangement: Though ostensibly broadening a talk show, the studio's employees are fleeing left and right as panic grips the city. They trade insults, sabotage the cameras, throw objects at the talk host and his guest. As a Eventually they land on top on an enormous, isolated shopping mall. They find the building teeming with zombies, an All-American cross section from a nurse to a nun to a Hare Krishna devotee. ("Why do they come here?" Francine asks. "This was an important part of their lives," Stephen replies). The group first plans merely to take what they need, then to leave, but they soon realize the cornucopia they've stumbled onto. With civilization crum- bling outside, why not simply remain in the mall, where every human need and desire can be fulfilled? After several pitched battles in which they destroy the ghouls inside the cen- ter, our heroes claim the mall as their own and set up permanent living quar- ters in their monument to human con- sumerism. Yet their interior Eden soon unravels: In subsequent tussles with both zombies and a marauding motor- cycle gang (battles in which Romero ultimately more horrifying perspective of the madness which has destroyed his world. Romero's conception of the tribal existence of the remmants of humanity is frighteningly apt; in his world all society is reduced to the metaphor of the biker gang. Survival of the fittest is the only religion, complemented by more than a touch of macho imperative (Guns become the ultimate power-sex symbol; the S.W.A.T. duo contem- ptuously refers to Stephen as "Flyboy," and you keep anxiously wondering when they will make a move toward his woman). ~AiETS Yet the visual metaphor of the shopping center is Romero's crowning touch. A studied microcosm of the 29th Century, the gargantuan mall becomes a cathedral to all desires, a cloistered Xanadu where one can hide oneself away forever and always. Never has man's eternal longing for the womb been transferred to the screen in such seductive and terrifying fashion; even- tually and ironically, the immense caverns of the building turn almost as close and dense as the claustrophobic house in Living Dead-they comfort yet kill. BUT ALL SANCTUARIES are tran- sitory, and by film's end Romero's two surviving protagonists must move on. It's basically an ending more hopeful than its predecessor's: Though Living Dead's zombies were finally done in, human error and swinish excess did in the film's hero as well. This time around the ghouls may win out, but at least a couple of characters we've come to know and care about live to fight another day. Is Romero preaching salvation through purgatory? Dawn of the Dead is only the second part of a projected trilogy). Will human ingenuity prove resourceful enough; will the human soul turn pure enough to vindicate mankind? Could it be that beneath the whole bloody, shrieking apocalypse lurks a romantic's heart rather than a cynic's? If so, you can still rest assured Romero's road to redemption will prove the most hobgoblined route imaginable. Join the Arts Page It's that wacky, zippy crew of flesh-happy zombies, taking over a shopping mall in George A. Romero's new "Dawn of the Dead." Any resemblance between the flesh-eaters and Briarwood patrons is strictly intentional. technician says: "Our duty is done here." Romero cuts to a combined S.W.A.T.- National Guard assault on a low- income housing project whose residents refuse to give up their dead (who can only be destroyed by destroying their brains). In one ghastly, elongated sequence, ghouls dismember both police and familial residents, maniacal cops gun down zombies and humans alike, police and tenants commit suicide rather than face the horror. Clearly God is dead, and Hell has swallowed up the Earth. Out of this maelstrom emerge four protagonists: Stephen (David Emge) and Francine (Gaylen Ross), em- ployees of the TV station, along with Peter (Ken Foree) and Roger (Scott Reiniger), S.W.A.T. officers who decide to flee while they still can. Stephen and Francine are lovers; Roger is white and diminutive in stature, Peter is black and imposingly, menacingly large. THIS UNLIKELY quartet secures a helicopter and soars into the sky in search of any available sanctuary. marvelously mixed the comic with the horrific), first Roger then Stephen are killed. Resurrected as a zombie, Stephen leads his fellow ghouls to the humans' hiding place. Peter and Francine barely manage to escape in their helicopter, though their future seems obvious: They're low on fuel and lack sanctuary. In a shot reminiscent of the end of Hitchcock's The Birds, their machine ascends into the sky as the surrounding ghouls are left to inherit the mall and perhaps the Earth. - THOUGH DAWN OF THE DEAD lacks quite the innovative muse of Romero's recent, complex vampire ex- cursion, Marti, his film still represen- ts a quantum artistic leap from Night of the Living Dead. Romero's sense of pace and editing, always acute, is now honed to a razor's edge; though the film runs more than two hours it never loses its manic grip for a moment. The direc- tor's mastery over his medium has become so assured that he is able to rely far less on. his celebratedly gruesome, calculated "shock shots," opting instead for a more relaxed and