"Why didn't they...?" #2 (Dawn of the Dead)

[axlish]

Why didn't they do a better job of securing the mall doors? For starters, un-hotwiring the trucks would have been nice. How about moving some of those kiosk's down there. Actually, why didn't they open up the loading docks and bring a truck inside as well?

[Mister Chrome]

Yes, Axlish...they should have done all of those things. I would also add that they could have screwed sheets of wood over the entrances, completing block off the glass doors. This might have sent zombies away since they would have no means of seeing into the mall anymore. Also, the heroes could have dumped gasoline or kerosene down onto the crowds of zombies below, thus thinning out the herd quite a bit and reducing future horde populations. They could also have done their target practice on zombies inside of inside the ice rink on mannequins.

Foolish, foolish heroes.


M.C.

[MaximusIncredulous]

Maybe they thought was was done was enough. They may have considered the human threat to the mall but never seriously entertained it other than erecting a fake wall. The heavy trucks, doors with hard to break glass, and alarms would be fine for the dead threat and that's all that really mattered to them.

Maybe they were just lazy.

What I always wondered about was why they didn't install blinds or wallpaper on the doors to block out the sight of decaying corpses trying to get in. After all they did want to make the place like home.

Then again, laziness.

[axlish]

If they were serious enough to risk their lives to secure the mall, it seems that they would have thought of securing from the inside as well. The docks would be the most vital. Heck, the first time the docks are even mentioned in the film is by the bikers.

Flyboy should have been tossing molotov's at the bikers while Peter picked them off with the Sniper rifle. The bikers would have had to regroup at the top of the hill and come back later, at best.

[CivilDefense]

and why did the guy stick his arm in that blood pressure machine... because the movie would have been alot less fun that way.. or it would have been 8 hours long. And since when did the CD put spam in its emergency rations? Also in that machine handling room, I am pretty sure they just dymo taped "MUSIC" on to some pump switch and only PRETENDED to use it to turn on the music.

Also, where did they get those fresh cream pies fro:rockbrow: m?

[Svengoolie]

One thing I liked about Dawn 04 (from the deleted scenes) is that they made an effort to block the entrances off from the inside with furniture and boxes and other stuff....

[axlish]

Oh yeah, and the obvious, flatten the tires to the trucks. Fran could have done it with a bb gun in her spare time.

[Svengoolie]

AND...instead of doing target practice on mannequins in the Ice Rink, why not go up on the roof and learn to shoot zombies by shooting zombies?:D

[Chakobsa]

Oh yeah, and the obvious, flatten the tires to the trucks. Fran could have done it with a bb gun in her spare time.

Improvised explosive booby traps in the drivers cabs of the trucks would have made the bikers think twice, i'm thinking homemade claymore mines...:evil: .

[MaximusIncredulous]

If they were serious enough to risk their lives to secure the mall, it seems that they would have thought of securing from the inside as well. The docks would be the most vital. Heck, the first time the docks are even mentioned in the film is by the bikers.

Flyboy should have been tossing molotov's at the bikers while Peter picked them off with the Sniper rifle. The bikers would have had to regroup at the top of the hill and come back later, at best.

... or just smear black shoepolish on themselves as improvised camoflauge, slap on some dark overalls, and kill the lights to make the bikers raid just a teenie bit harder.

[TheWalkingDude]

Ok really stupid idea here lol Why not just join up with them from the first contact. Might of been more safety in numbers and they might of not come in like a bunch of idiots into the mall. They could of cleared out most of the zombies from outside first then after they was low on ammo then Peter and the rest could of picked them off.:rolleyes:

[Danny]

i thought it was part of the social commentary thing, they wrere all grim and stone faced as they ran but once they discovered the mall they were all wide eyed ,cept fran...if that was her name im allways forgetting em, and they were as drawn into the consumerism as the zombies and becuase of that they forgot to do all the logical stuff, yknow greed is the folly of man and all that.

[CivilDefense]

Improvised explosive booby traps in the drivers cabs of the trucks would have made the bikers think twice, i'm thinking homemade claymore mines...:evil: .'

you can also hide a cat turd under the door handle. that always worked for me.


Actually in reality, Im not seeing any armed group clashing with another entrenched armed troops anywhere, there are just too many more other "easy pickings" to bother.

Honestly with all the lumber, I am sure you could find a concrete nailer to pretty much make the doors not work. In "reality" I would have painted the windows black, torn out the distributor cap and fortified the doors, built bunkers on the roof, made monkey love to Francine Parker.. all sorts of stuff.

But to be honest, holing yourself away anywhere just isnt going to work, all it would take is one guy to sneak up into some unlit quiet part of a mall and start a nice big fire. The mall was just too big for four people to guard.

and as far as tampering with the trucks, remember, they lost 25% troop strength just doing the little they did! :lol:

personally I would have just rigged some sort of corn harvester/combine with the chopping blades at head level.. just drive around mowing zombies down with it.

[Philly_SWAT]

Couple of thoughts here.....it would have made more sense to take target practice on the zombies outside, rather than manequins on the skating rink. Perhaps, to use a line from Day, they felt that the "activity excites them", and didnt want the zombies outside anymore riled up than they already were.

As for "un-hotwiring" the trucks, flattening the tires, etc., this would make sense in order to keep them in place better. But they may have thought that they may need to use them/move them in the future, and didnt want to disable them. Remember earlier, Peter said of the control panel "Hit em all. Might as well have power to everything. We may need it". They may have used that same logic here. Also, they may have thought that if "raiders" came to the mall, they would do whatever it takes to get in. The more difficult they made it for potential raiders to get in, the more damage to the mall entrances the raiders would have to make in order to gain entrance, and by extention, make repairs that much more difficult for our heros after the raiders left. Remember, the original plan was for the raiders to never discover that they were in there.

As far as opening the docks and bringing a truck inside, the benefit of this would be minimal, and more time consuming, (read: more dangerous). Once the truck was inside the mall, Roger would have to exit the truck from inside the mall, make his way outside to where Peter would be waiting, all without being attacked. There wouldnt be room in the docks to bring two trucks in side by side. I had always thought that in the relative safety of the truck yard, they should have cut holes in the roofs of the trucks in order to enter/exit that way. Would have been much safer, and Roger wouldnt have gotten bit.

[AcesandEights]

Philly strikes, again. Excellent thoughts, especially on reasoning out the forethought of the survivors in some respects. I too assumed they wouldn't want to cut off the possibility of moving the trucks completely; it makes sense in some respects to disable the trucks, but also could hamstring them in further, future efforts.

[hseiken]

I agree with the holes in the truck roofs,but it doesn't seem as if any tools capable of creating such an 'escape hatch' was in their inventory. Would it require something quite industrial strenght, say, a welding torch?

At any rate, it didn't seem like they prepared much as far as organization for any kind of invasion of their utopia. Steven was just a news traffic report pilot, fran also a non-combat type (program director?)...hell, they probably didn't even have a plan for escaping a fire either. The biker invasion wouldve been handled a lot better, reguardless of their resource setups, had they had some kind of plan other than Peter telling everyone what to do when he thought of something or saw something.

Of course, then there's Steven, who ended up being the wild card anyway, to which no planning would've helped them against the bikers.

[jim102016]

I'll have to sit down and re-visit the original Dawn, it's been a while. But, as I recall, when Roger gets bit, only two of the trucks had been delivered to two of the four entrances. And, as I recall, was there even a truck blocking the loading dock doors when the bikers arrived? Remember the bikers were going to move the truck, when one guy said something to the effect of "Forget the truck, Mouse can open the doors with the machine gun" (the mexican biker. My point is....did they even finish getting all the entrances blocked after Roger was bit? There is no further proof, verbal from the characters or seen in the movie that the entrances were all blocked up. I think those loading docks must have been locked before the helicopter landed...probably only used to bring cars in for displays anyhow? Someone help me on this one...

Also, by painting the glass or wall papering it, I think I would be worried about not being able to see what the dead were up to. What if there was a crack forming in the glass? Were those old 70s alarms designed to go off with smashed glass or just when the doors were opened? Still, I would have rather had something capable of blocking out both the dead and the living, at least temporarlily to buy myself some time. Brick walls? Some sort of steel walls made from scavenged materials? I suppose it would come down how much time they were willing to spend on it, materials available and skill levels.

I think day after day of shooting the dead in the parking lot would attract a lot of unwanted attention. Might even get something worse than bikers or zombies. Its bad enough they have a helicopter on the roof, 18 wheelers in front of JCPenny's doors, and hundreds (later thousand) of the undead waiting for the mall to reopen its doors so they can continue their shopping.
Perhaps they can start shooting them in the head with arrows?

[Philly_SWAT]

I think that you have to assume that they did block all the entrances. Regardless of the actual layout of the mall, we have to go by what was said in the movie. They say that there are "four entrances" that need to be blocked off. Yes, we only see two blocked when Roger gets bit, but he says "there's a lot to get done before you can afford to lose me!" I think we have to assume that they went back and got two other trucks and blocked the other two entrances. Also, Peter mentions how the plan is not foolproof, but that he thought the zombies couldnt get any leverage with the amount of space there was between the trucks and the zeds. You can see the zeds still against the glass trying to get in. At the loading docks, there may have been more space between the truck and the doors than the other entrances, and the zombies had left that space to try to eat the bikers, therefore they just shot the door and, opened it and started driving in.

[Monrozombi]

Their plan was good, flawed but good. Reading some of the suggestions of barricading the door from the inside, to me, is counterproductive. What if some other group of four, non threating survivors needed to get in, and fast, how would they have done without letting the horde back inside the mall. I'm using the argument that they dont' want to use the chopper because its low on fuel. also if something happens to the chopper, mechanically i mean, they might need to use the trucks to escape.

[Angry312]

1.) Use the trucks as improvised weapons on the zeds in the parking lot. Its cheaper than using the finite ammo, does the job in one hit and you can do crowd control with almost no effort.

2.) Chain the doors. With a little work, those doors could have at least been sealed with chains and padlocks -- put the keys on a lanyard hanging from a wall inside and anyone outside is out of luck, and those inside can always access the keys.

3.) Give Fran a damned radio. When she was on the roof playing Lee Harvey Oswald on the zeds downstairs, she probably could have benefited from a communications device. Ditto for Flyboy, while we're at it. How was he supposed to communicate "Hey, Roger, you got a friend" to him? Apparently, by gesturing with his face/head to Peter in the truck, fifty feet off the ground. Huh?

4.) Drag the heavier shelves not being used into the primary corridors, to add weight to the doors, preventing the barricades from falling under biker-related pressures, like gunfire from Squeak's Thompson.

5.) Throw out the old produce in the supermarket. You know that place had to stink to high heaven when that stuff started expiring. Maybe use it as a basis for fertilizer in the gardening section, I dunno. I got nothing.

6.) Keep the trucks *really* close to each other when they were out getting them in the first place. With Peter on Neptune and poor dumb Roger a full hundred feet away for reasons best left unexplored, it does kind of make sense to have Peter be the lookout, but with no way to communicate with his partner, you don't gain anything from distance from fire support.

:evil: Angry312; "... and I'd also make hot monkey love to Fran." :evil:

[axlish]

I agree with the holes in the truck roofs,but it doesn't seem as if any tools capable of creating such an 'escape hatch' was in their inventory. Would it require something quite industrial strenght, say, a welding torch?

Wasn't that a welding torch that Stephen was using when they blocked the entrances from the inside? "One of those propane jobs"

[Danny]

yeah i think so...:confused:

[Angry312]

They don't get hot enough to weld with; the model shown is a fairly basic model, which while it can melt lead, so could a couple of matches, if the lead is in small enough increments.

But, they could probably rig something up; they are, after all, SWAT troopers, right?

:evil:Angry312; "Look around. Can you form some sort of rudimentary lathe?" :evil:

[hseiken]

that was a welding torch? Looked more like something someone might use to get a bbq pit ignited.

[Danny]

yeah that one was the one were i was knda "okay that would never work...too spoofy man!"