Dawn of the Dead (1978)

This is one of the finest sequels ever, in that it's both of comparable quality with the original, yet is fundamentally different from it at the same time. Marvelous stuff, with aspects copied thousands of times over the past two generations, with no end in sight.
This and 'Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom', from about the same time frame, would make one of the best double-bills ever on the evils of consumerism gone rampant...

**This must be some kind of joke, right?**
Firstly, allow me to clarify: I am not a fan of “zombie” films, although I understand very well the interest that, in recent years, there has been for this material. I totally respect those who enjoy it. But let's be honest: a film has to have some aesthetic quality and some good taste to become “digestible”. And, well, I just finished watching this film, and I honestly can't understand how it has survived without ending up in the vault of oblivion. There are incredibly better films that have been forgotten as the years pass, but a certain type of crap, purely and simply because it's bad, lives on.
The plot is essentially based on a moment of chaos in which the USA (the rest of the world does not exist) is taken over by zombies and no one knows what to do or where to go. Everyone thinks of themselves, saves their own skin and that's it. In the meantime, the usual opportunists take advantage of the situation as they see fit, and a small group of “surviving heroes” look for somewhere to take shelter. It's the plot of this film and a dozen other disaster films (zombies, volcanoes, wars, earthquakes, alien invasions, you name it). The level of originality is below zero, and the situations are all predictable and highly cliché. We know who is going to die and who is going to be saved by a whisker, and the fact that the film starts without any kind of introduction is just confusing and a little stupid.
Directed by George A. Romero, a man who must have suffered from some bizarre sexual fetish with dead people and zombies (look at his filmography!), the film is absolutely trash and could compete in poor quality and bad taste with all of Ed's films Wood and with the historical rigor of Ridley Scott's period films. I lost count of the script problems, continuity errors and gross editing errors. The cinematography is ugly, there is a blatant exaggeration of the sets and the zombies' makeup is so obviously fake that they look like what we did at fifteen in school plays. And we'd better not even talk about the cast: I have doubts whether those people were actors.