Noiseless Chatter Archive

This is how the world ends, not with a bang but…actually, there are a lot of bangs, and they’re mainly fired by and at the few remaining survivors. But what else is new, eh? Continuing my tradition of not wanting to see these films, I ignored Day of the Dead for years on the grounds that it was “the bad one.” Okay, yes, we got three actual bad ones after this (though I do have a soft spot for Diary of the Dead , which I think has a lot of good ideas) but of the good ones, this is the bad one. I heard people complain about how it’s boring. About how it’s unnecessary. About how the acting is hammy and over the top. I didn’t actively avoid it, but whenever it came time to sit and watch a movie I hadn’t seen before, I kept picking other things. Why wouldn’t I? It seemed my time would be better spent elsewhere. This was absolutely my loss. When I finally got around to seeing it a few years ago, it immediately became my favorite in the series. No amount of rewatching this or a...

I spoke last week about how I didn’t want to watch Night of the Living Dead because I knew it would scare the hell out of me. Much later, when I learned about Dawn of the Dead , I didn’t want to watch that, either. This time, it was because I knew it couldn’t possibly live up to its potential. Across the entire series, this is the film I most often heard spoken about as “the best one,” but that in itself meant little to me. What made it seem to have so much potential in my mind was its setting; Dawn of the Dead is a zombie movie set in a shopping mall. From the moment I learned that fact, I braced myself for disappointment. It was such a perfect concept that any execution would have to be flawed. One hears “zombies in a shopping mall” and the mind races. The imagination goes wild. The movie that existed in my head, even if it were just a series of disconnected moments, would have to be better than anything one person with some cameras could actually achieve. I was wrong; ...