It doesn’t happen all that often in Hollywood, but occasionally a horror remake can be respectful to the original while still driving its own course, often armed with a wicked sense of humor. It happened with John Carpenter’s The Thing, David Cronenberg’s The Fly and Chuck Russell’s The Blob. Heck, it even happened with Tom Savini’s underrated remake of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, so it’s only fitting that a remake of that original film’s sequel join the club.

Hardcore Romero fans and uptight horror traditionalists may not want to agree, but Dawn of the Dead is an unqualified success – a gory, nerve-racking and often hilarious reimagining of the 1978 zombies-at-the-mall classic. The original is arguably Romero’s best film, but the 2004 version is its own blood-spilling beast, taking little more than the basic premise of its source material and running – and we do mean running – with it.

Go’s funky-teethed beauty Sarah Polley stars an overworked nurse and simple suburban housewife who awakes one morning just in time to see her husband gnawed to death by the neighbor girl. And then miraculously, he comes back to life, albeit a changed man who wants to eat her. She quickly escapes her home, only to find the outside world a living nightmare, erupted in chaos. Buildings are on fire, bodies are everywhere, cars are colliding with one another and – oh, yes – there are flesh-hungry zombies sprinting about the streets as if at a track meet. And this is just the first10 minutes.

After running off the road, Polley finds comfort and help with armed cop Ving Rhames and a few other hangers-on, and together they hightail it to the nearby mall. Unoccupied (well, mostly), it serves as a safe haven from the teeming swarms of the undead while they await rescue. More survivors appear, but the bloodthirsty crowd outside threatens to penetrate the retail mecca’s doors and tear them all to shreds, so they start to take matters into their own hands, some more successfully than others.

If you’re the kind of moviegoer who appreciates fireplace-poker impalings, accidental chainsaw dismemberment and zombie newborn babies, this is the movie for you. I’m surprised at how much bloodletting they were able to get away with in the constraints of an R rating, and yet, despite all the violence, I never got the bad-taste feeling of nihilism that I did with last year’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake.

Part of that has to be due to the humor. Romero’s version is well-known for its satirical look at consumerism. Satire is here, too, but not as a social statement; it functions on a more pop-culture level, which is a nice dose of levity given the film’s end-times backdrop. I’ve got to give credit to screenwriter James Gunn – here he’s working on full-throttle (like he did on The Specials) and not watered-down (like he did on Scooby-Doo). His constant use of the mall’s Muzak system to provide ironic comment – via tunes like “Don’t Worry Be Happy” and “Alone Again” – is a nice device.

First-time director Zak Snyder comes from commercial land, but refreshingly, isn’t as much of a fan of the rapid-fire, quick-cut show-off school as his peers. At the start, he gets right down to business, establishing a pervading sense of dread and spends the next hour and half paying it off.

Polley, Rhames and company all do fine in their thinly drawn roles as human bait; you feel empathy for the nice guys and loathing for the bad ones. And then there’s the zombies – as in 28 Days Later, they run. Fast. Which certainly will ***censored*** off the purists, who prefer their zombies to move at a snail’s pace. The decision to have them run only heightens the tension, in my estimation; the fact that they are your physical equal simply raises the stakes.

And Dawn does that as a remake, too. There are nods to the fans – with cameos from Savini and ’78 Dead star Ken Foree – but the movie is different enough that it can’t rightly be accused of laziness or as a cheap cash-in. It’s pure fun from start to finish. And be sure to stick around for the end credits.

Review by Rod Lott.