Dawn of the Dead (unrated)
AFI Catalog; Badmovies.org; IMDb; Rotten Tomatoes; TV Tropes; Wikia; Wikipedia; Zombiepedia
streaming sites: none that I know of

Caution: spoilers.

This came out in 1978, ten years after Night of the Living Dead, but I first saw it in 2021. I'm not 100% certain if it's an actual sequel or a standalone zombie film. Oh, and unlike the first film, the word "zombies" is actually used in this one.

It starts out in a TV news studio in absolute chaos. There's not much I can say about that, except that the only important characters we meet there are a producer named Fran and her boyfriend Stephen, who is a traffic helicopter pilot. The scene then shifts to a building where a SWAT team is having a shootout with some of the people in the building, which really didn't make any sense to me. We soon find out that there are zombies in the building, and the police start shooting at them, but I still have no idea why anyone in the building was shooting at the police. I would have thought they'd welcome the help in dealing with the zombie problem. But whatever. (Okay, I read why on Wikipedia: they didn't want to deliver their dead to the authorities to have them destroyed rather than come back as zombies. That's something we occasionally see people arguing about on TV throughout the movie, whether or not to do the logical thing and destroy dead bodies before they can be reanimated. I'm on the side of the authorities and the scientists on this one. It just seems crazy to me that anyone would be against doing the sensible thing, but watching the movie in the midst of a real world pandemic when lots of people refuse to be vaccinated helps make it believable, I guess.) Anyway, during that whole situation, we meet a couple of SWAT team members, Roger and Peter. Eventually, Fran, Stephen, Roger, and Peter all take off in Stephen's helicopter. (Well, technically it belongs to the TV station, so they're really stealing it. But I can't blame them for that.)

They stop once to refuel, at which point they have to deal with a number of zombies. Later they land on top of a shopping mall, and break in through the skylights. There are lots of zombies in the mall, but the four protagonists manage to deal with them, and then the mall's stores provides everything they need to survive, even though they're trapped in there. The mall is surrounded by an ever-increasing number of zombies trying to get in, but Roger and Peter had blocked all the entrances. I've read that the movie is supposed to be some kind of allegory for excessive consumerism, or something, because the zombies all had this desire to go to the mall, I guess. Personally, I don't feel like that aspect of the movie really worked, but that's just my opinion. Anyway, the mall is eventually invaded by a biker gang who want to do some looting, but once they get in, there's an entrance for all the zombies to enter, too. So there's a fight between the bikers and the zombies, as well as between the bikers and the people who were already living in the mall. And... I don't want to say how it all ends.

Well, it was an interesting film, I suppose, and it had a bit of humor. I didn't find the zombies all that scary, since most of the time the humans were well-armed and much faster than them. It's only when zombies get you pinned with nowhere to run that they become a real problem. (And then there's some serious gore.) Also, I didn't manage to care that much about any of the characters. I mean, of course I empathized with their situation and hoped they'd all survive, but I wasn't super invested in them as individuals. So I didn't like it as much as the original film, but it was still okay; I'm definitely glad to have seen it. And Fran was a somewhat better character than the women in the original. And I don't know what else to say.