Cinema Report: A Mouthful of Greek Salad

And another Romero down, Day of the Dead this time, from 1985. It's late on a Sunday night (or early on a Monday morning), so just a couple of notes to jot, to maybe come back to later.

First, the vitals:

Average shot length: 4.8 seconds
Length of the film: 97 minutes 41.1 seconds
Number of shots: 1233
Minimum SL: 0.4 seconds
Maximum SL: 39.3 seconds
Range: 38.9 seconds
Standard deviation: 4.7 seconds

Which should be about right, give or take reaction time and the odd missed shot.

And it looks like this:


Details here.

The ASL wound up being smaller than I'd expected after a trial run, partway through, last week. I was expecting something closer to 6 seconds. Still, definitely a touch slower than the Romero films from the seventies, and much slower than Dawn

Couple of brief notes:

1. Editing this time by Pasquale Buba, who edited Romero's films from Knightriders through The Dark Half. Cinematography by Michael Gornick, Romero's DP from Martin through this film. (Gornick also did a great job as the radio talk show host in Martin.)

2. Relatively flat lighting in a lot of the shots inside the compound, especially before things go crazy.

3. Not a lot of close ups til the one hour mark.

4. Most of the singles and over the shoulders tend to be off the line by a bit. 30 degrees, maybe? It's pretty consistent.

5. Most of the singles tend to range from medium shot to medium close up, again until closer shots start appearing more frequently about 60 minutes in. Here's a typical shot-reverse shot to show what I mean:



6. Combine that with the centered compositions used for most singles, and you tend (or I tend) to feel a little removed from the action. One of the reasons why, despite the setting, this film often feels like the least claustrophobic of the Dead films, again for me.

7. A lot of the shots, particularly shots of characters, seem to be framed for later cropping down to 1.33. I don't think a lot of the compositions would suffer that much if they were cropped down for VHS release (as it would have been in the mid-80s).

8. A couple examples to demonstrate notes 5, 6 and 7. And by a couple, I mean a bunch.
A. The opening:




B. Daily routine:






C. Steel Under Fire



(That first one is a relatively rare shot that's more or less on the line.)

D. Run Through the Tunnels





9. Lateral movements of zombies past the camera also lend themselves to later cropping, as they shuffle past the camera in turn:

(Always dug this zombie.)


(This one too - the long-haired zombie in orange.)


(And everyone's favorite, the clown zombie. Yay.)

10. Compositions that depend on the edges of the frame are rare, but do pop up from time to time, again especially once things start getting bad:




(In the above, Rhodes keeps going to exit from frame right.)

11. Nevertheless, the centering tendency still applies to a lot of the gore shots:



(Note that in this last shot, the head is pulled more or less directly back, keeping the whole gory affair in frame regardless of aspect ratio.)

12. To some extent, I guess, this seems a little odd for a horror film, given the utility of having monsters lurk and lunge from frame's edge. When they do come in, it's usually a ton of them rather than a single, specific attack (I think). And even on those where occasions where the edge of the frame is used this way, as when Rickles gets it:





The very next shot places him back in the middle again:



Okay, all of that took longer than planned, to demonstrate a few minor points. Again, maybe I'll come back to this film later. In the meantime, here's one of the best moments of the film, featuring the greatest zombie in any zombie movie ever made - Bub, in a brilliant performance by Howard Sherman:


(And for the few who don't know, that's Lori Cardille reacting to him, daughter of Chilly Bill Cardille, the reporter from Night.)

Okay, that's it for the moment.