The ultimate, classic zombie flick. Every time you see a remake or a video game use the shopping mall setting - well, this is where that idea came from. Honestly, there is a ton of black humor and social satire in this - it uses the basis of a horror film with flesh eating zombies as its foundation. There are almost no redeeming qualities concerning humanity or survival. This is hell on earth and what's left of the human race at its most selfish.
This story is simple - we open on a news room gone nuts, essentially the next morning after the original "Night of the living Dead" - four individuals - Stephen "Fly Boy" and his pregnant girlfriend Francine, and police soldiers Peter and Roger, escape in a helicopter. They find an abandoned shopping mall and set up shop, ridding it of zombies and fortifying it against other greedy humans. Tom Savini created all of the spectacular practical effects and gore...for its time, a groundbreaking body of work. Savini even gets to play a crazed Biker with a machete - you can guess how that all ends up!
A lot of this movie's charm is in its many memorable "zombie" characters - there are children zombies, one who gets his head sheared off by running helicopter blades, the one in the flannel, the baseball player, the nun, and there is even a Hare Krishna that is one of the creepiest of the entire movie. They even made an action figure of this guy! I'm kinda sad I missed out on one of these!
In the end, it's just the dead's world...and we are all living (and dying) in it.
