The Dead Will Walk

Dead Will Walk, The (2004)

**** (out of 4)

Terrific documentary covering the making of George Romero's DAWN OF THE DEAD features interviews with the man himself as well as Dario Argento, Tom Savini, Ken Foree, David Emge, Scott Reiniger, Gaylen Ross, Zilla Clinton (unit manager) and Chris Romero. The film starts off with Romero talking about his ideas for a sequel and this leads to him being invited to Rome by Argento where he would write the screenplay. From here we learn about the hiring of the cast, Tom Savini coming on board and what impact the film has had over the years. Fans of DAWN OF THE DEAD are going to love this film since it does contain the majority of the major cast members and of course the director and gore effects master. Just about everything you could possibly want to know is told here and we also get quite a bit of footage from behind-the-scenes of the actual shooting. Even better is that we get Dario and Claudio Argento and Claudio Simonetti of Goblin to discuss the European version of the film. It's interesting to hear Dario talk about why the film was too long and why they needed to edited the picture down. A few years later he would be outraged when American distributors would cut his films down so it's interesting to hear his feelings on cutting whenever he has money at stake in a project. Some of the best moments come from the cast members talking about what the film has done for their careers. Other great stuff comes from Savini talking about the various projects he was doing on the film. THE DEAD WILL WALK runs just 75-minutes but it contains a lot of great stories and of course it's great seeing the cast as they are today. Fans of the film won't want to miss this one.