Tom Watches Movies is Columnist and Film Critic Thomas O’Connor’s twice-a-week odyssey through the world of cinema. A man of strange and varied tastes, you can never quite tell what he’ll be watching next. The latest blockbuster? Something weird and obscure? Whatever it is, he’ll have something to say about it.
George A. Romero’s Day of the Dead begins, appropriately, with walls. In a dream, our hero Sarah (Lori Cardille) sits in a tiny room with walls of whitewashed cinder block. No doors, no windows, no ornamentation save a wall calendar showing a field of pumpkins and an open sky. She approaches the calendar, a look of unmistakable longing and reminiscence on her face. But the moment is short lived, as the hands of the dead erupt from the wall and the dream abruptly ends. The tone is immediately set for Romero’s third film in the Dead trilogy; a bleak and oppressive film haunted by claustrophobia, malaise and fear. The dead are outside, as dangerous as ever. But inside, all we have are walls.