Hmmm... the night before dawn?

[MissJacksonCA]

We're always talking about what we thought was going on after Peter and Fran leave the mall... do they hook up? Does Fran in her infinite wisdom crash the copter? Maybe her baby is a zombie when it comes out?

But doesn't anyone want to know what was going on in the lives of the fab four just before they began filming? I know I do!

In the remake of Dawn it was like overnight the zombies began to attack. But in the origional it seems like it had been going on for a bit in the outskirts of town and that everyone was aware of it and that it had finally begun to spread into the city. I wonder what happened to the families of these kids. And how long were Fran and Steven in their news station building holed up before they began taping and people just decided to bail out to try to live. How was the building secured?

We need a prequel! Besides Night of the Living Dead of course...

[Danny]

Shhhhh!, uwe boll or eli roth might here you.

[Legion2213]

MissJacksonCA

But doesn't anyone want to know what was going on in the lives of the fab four just before they began filming? I know I do!

Not really.

What I would like to see is a lot more of the general breakdown that is going on whilst the fab four are holding up in the mall...it seems that when they first escape the city and land at the mall, the police and military are just about coping with the outbreak, by the end of the movie when the biker gang invades the mall, it looks like modern human civilisation is over.

[MissJacksonCA]

Okay okay... its about time I confess something... I like Eli Roth... I enjoyed Dawns remake as a zombie movie not as a remake... and I think Land of the Dead stinks worse than Neils old tin of cat food that reeks like dying cat.

With that said... I digress...

I'm sure no matter what any future remake of Dawns or NOTLD or Land or Day are going to be bloody awful... that's typically how remakes go ...

There's just so much that we imagine would happen in a zombie infested world that its odd how not enough movies actually explore that...

[SRP76]

I think they were just doing exactly what they were shown doing:

Going about their normal lives, doing their jobs. Fran at the TV station, Stephen doing the flyovers for the same station, and Roger and Peter going wherever S.W.A.T. was needed.

[sandrock74]

I agree.
I think it was a "business as normal" mentality for everyone involved as the outbreak or pandemic or plague or whatever you want to call it was in its earliest stages. People kept living life, going to work, maybe paying their bills all the while figuring it would end or be taken care of by the government or something.
Once people began to realize that things were getting a lot worse as opposed to any better, they began to leave their jobs or outright panic.
I, for one, always liked to listen to the radio and television reports in the background because it details the downfall of civilization. Thats more like I would like to see...

[rightwing401]

If you're looking for a half-way decent zombie flick that entails the gradual breakdown of society, then try 'Feeding the Masses'. It's not great, but it's not bad either. It certainly does give a kind of realistic protrayal of how the government would handle the mounting crisis.

[Wyldwraith]

Prequels suck, period.

I absolutely despise this 21st century phenomena that is the prequel. Know what a prequel really is? Its a studio deciding to create another derivative work of a previously successful "original" rather than taking another risk on original content. Every time we as moviegoers or book-purchasers embrace a prequel we reduce the chances that the suits will be forced to take a chance on a new original work.

Conversely, when we reject prequels, remakes and other derivative slop we leave them with no choice but to take that chance. Hollywood is primarily a business with the service of creativity and imagination a VERY distant secondary priority. Producers and publishers are like gamblers that only want to bet on sure things but will bet something riskier in the absence of a sure thing.

It isn't our job to make it easy for producers/publishers to make money. Its our job to force them to give license to original work deserving of the budgets given to slop like Terminator 3. To anyone that says this it too inflexible and unforgiving let me remind you of something. As a people we were all kinds of flexible and enthusiastic about sequels when they first went that route. More content and continuity of plotlines and characters we'd grown to really enjoy? Awesome. Then the big studios changed the rules. Sequels began to become title-recognition gimmicks lacking in many cases a 1/3 the quality of the original. They got away with it because of our hope that we'd be able to see more content related to a movie/book we'd greatly enjoyed.

Then when that wasn't enough risk-removal for them the great Book-to-Movie surge began. Oh sure, that practice has always been with us to some extent since the silver screen silent pics. Today however on any given week we find more prequels, sequels, book-to-movie conversions and outright ripoff-spinoffs of good titles than Originals...all in the name of reducing the risk of a flop.

What they don't care about as an industry is whether or not their flop-reduction strategies ALSO reduce the # of blockbusters. So long as we continue to pay ever-increasing admission and movie-snack costs and soaring DVD prices THEY won't change, not unless we send the message that in order to get our dollar they must do so.

Lets look at whats happening to our own beloved survival horror genre in the last few years. We've gotten: Remakes of The Hills Have Eyes & HHE:2, Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave, Return of the Living Dead: Necropolis, Land of the Dead, Diary of the Dead, Undead, House of the Dead 1&2, RE2: Apocalypse, Dead Man Walking etc etc etc

How many *good* or even merely watchable flicks have we gotten? (Arguably) Dawn of the Dead remake, RE3: Extinction (good, but also a sequel), Severed...

I'm getting REALLY hard pressed to name anymore. How about you guys? Oh, automatically preclude any no-budge indy films...this isn't about the indy filmmakers, their creativity isn't in question.

My point is that ultimately we and not the studio owners with all their millions determine the quality of what we get. Build it and they will come, certainly. But: Continue to Build it Poorly and they will leave.

So what we need to do is by our actions concerning our dollar make them hear our chant: "Build it WELL and we shall come, and pay you"

You can surely argue with my position, but not with the fact that if something doesn't change there won't be any new Romeros yet the Legions of Uwe Bollites shall continue to swell.

<--- Guy who had a nerve hit by the prequel-straw that broke the back of his derivation tolerance.

[SymphonicX]

Well its a dodgy thing really because there's no timeframe but I have a small suspicion its a bit closer to Shaun of the Dead than anything else, ie: people keep going about their lives and so do the fab four, until their jobs start to dictate where they are - notice that Fran was sleeping in the TV studio at the beginning, this denotes she was there for a long time...days on end it seems....it looks as though they holed up in the TV station whilst the epidemic gets closer to them and no one feels its safe to go home...this denotes that whilst the crisis may be out of reach, its certainly close enough in the possible surrounding suburban areas to be a problem to travel home safely. The line "my turn for the coat" also denotes that they were on air, and in that building for a very very long shift. Steven of course is out and about reporting in the helicopter, so he can see first hand the crisis evolving and thusly makes sense that he is the one to suggest running.

Peter and Roger however had the crisis incorporated into their jobs....they were clearing the tenement building - now its debateable whether the people they were clearing were zombies themselves or criminals (they were there for Martinez...but for what reason?)- had someone tipped them off to the basement happenings and they were there to clear them out? Or were they just there to raid drug dealers and whatnot but found the zombies purely by chance...they seemed pretty unshocked by the zombies - notice when the black woman screams and the Swat guy says nonchalantly "come on, you don't wanna see that" - this denotes that they were expecting this, which may in turn mean they were clearing zombies from known locations where they were kept due to some religious beliefs.

So in closing I think that what possibly happened before we get there is that the crisis starts to get worse, travelling home and to family starts to become more and more impossible so the decision is taken by a lot of people to stay on the air/keep clearing the zombies out etc before they all realise that its a futile effort not just due to the crisis but people like those in the tenement who hoard the dead in basements.

I mean it could've been a matter of days afterNOTLD's events ocurred....so business as usual until things start to get noticed.

however we definitely don't need a prequel - way too late for that and unnecessary - the very reason we're having this conversation is that a prequel doesn't exist so we use the old imagination to debate possible events - and that's always been one of the most fun aspects of Romero's world.

[Wyldwraith]

I want to apologize all.

My rant was completely uncalled for and more than a bit trollish. I hate when people behave like that yet lacked a clue *I* was acting like that until I went back and read what I'd written after getting some sleep for the first time in several days.

Not that I don't believe what I said, it was just an idiotic thing to hop a podium here and foam at the mouth about it. So, I'm sorry. No more rants in inappropriate places.

SymphonicX hit on something too, if every facet of the Romero universe was fleshed out for us we couldn't have all the cool debates and theory sessions.

Kinda paradoxical, we hunger for more good flicks in the Romero universe yet the more there are the less is left to the imagination.

Tradeoffs suck :P

[rightwing401]

Not that this has any real relevance to the thread, the scientist in the beginning of dawn states almost hysterically that the public hasn't listened for some three weeks. One of the reasons it got out of control was indeed because people like joe six pack and sally soccer mom couldn't bring it upon themselves to drag old granny's corpse out into the back and bash its head in with a shovel.
But I do agree that there's no need for a prequel to this. In a way, Romero's already doing that with Diary.

[Wyldwraith]

I disagree,
As poor a showing as Land was I'd still prefer to see more of what happened Post-Land than early-outbreak era content. The haze and mystique, the leaving open of the question "How could this happen? How could it all be...gone?" is central to the genre. If you showed it happen blow-by-blow it would (to me at least) be like a magician doing a magic trick then showing you how it's done.

There just isn't enough quality Dead-dominated earth era films out there. RE: Extinction was a nice step in that direction, but not being very Romero-esque it was plot-focused on other things besides the classic survivor struggle.

Its not like a script is impossible under those conditions. Just on this site and in Rise of the Dead are literally hundreds of well-written concepts from the Land and post-Land era that would arguably be quality movies with talented people working them to their fullest potential.

Honestly, which would you prefer...a Dawn prequel or to see more of what happens as humanity struggles to adapt and survive in a zombie dominated world?

[MontagMOI]

I'm sure no matter what any future remake of Dawns or NOTLD or Land or Day are going to be bloody awful... that's typically how remakes go ...

I think NOTLD 90 is a very good remake and there is no reason why someone can't make a decent Dawn or Day remake. Having said that, they do both have remakes already (yes i know that never stopped Invasion Of the Body Snatchers :D)

[DubiousComforts]

Honestly, which would you prefer...a Dawn prequel or to see more of what happens as humanity struggles to adapt and survive in a zombie dominated world?
The latter and more specifically, a movie that speaks about modern times just as NIGHT, DAWN and DAY did for those respective eras.

LAND didn't live up to that precedent set in the first three films, and DAWN '04 is an absolute joke which basically assumes its audience is a bunch of zombies. Romero never treated his audience that way even if his message is "they're us and we're them."

Unfortunately, SHAUN and 28 DAYS LATER are the best examples that speak for this era. Perhaps DIARY will surprise us.

[Andy]

You know what i always thought would be a good film, a zombie movie where the whole movie is filmed like a news report.. you get the Dawn 2004 DVD? kinda like the special feature news report on that but not as cheesy, more realistic.. i once saw a film like that about a meteorite heading for earth, only it wasn't a meteorite it was a alien invasion, the whole movie was set up like a news report but i cant remember for the life of me what it was called.

Something like a sky news report starting out reporting on some rioting and mass murder going on, but then learning more as the situation develops and then ending when the reporter or crew leave the building in a panic later on.

i just think that would be awesome :D

[Danny]

i saw something like that about a nuke going off in london and some people in the west midlands heading west to avoid radiation whils soem stayed in there hosues and built a shelter out of doors and wahtnot, it was cool.

bit like those what if?, survivor ones, that also ahd plague and worldwide EMP and stuff and how to survive, taht show rocked for GAR fan viewing.

[Legion2213]

You mean "Threads"?

If so, the nuke went off over Shefield (airburst stylie!)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threads

Pretty grim drama actually, I was only about 10 when I watched it.