One wonders how last night passed off in Venezuela after Hugo Chavez had exhorted his nation's young not to dress up as brujas in slavish imitation of yankee customs. Trick-or-treating may not be the Latin way, but today and tomorrow will see quite a lot of fancy dress skeletons clanking around streets south of the border.
A bit further down in Guatemala, All Saints Day is a more sedate affair, but no less syncretic. Mayan villagers across the country gather to fly barriletes, massive multicoloured tissue-paper kites said to be able to soar high enough to catch the attention of the dearly departed. Elsewhere the traditional dish of the day, fiambre is consumed.
Anyway, November 1 is an approprate date within this insistently apocalyptic year to serve up a review of Zack Snyder's remake of Dawn of the Dead. Gone are the malcos from the Romero classics, replaced by high-velocity guided mastication missiles, similar to the ones seen in 28 Days Later. The movie kicks off at a similarly frenetic pace to its chorus of unrestful dead, but then starts to shamble up the down escalator.
At one point midway through you suspect that Snyder has died and returned as a comedy zombie, which spends the last third of the movie lurching around jerkily. This unevenness of pace and loss of coordination is especially compromising during the build-up and execution of the mall dwellers' final break for freedom.
Critics that have seen the original (not me) point to a lack of irony in the remake. The unbitten few are still holed up in a mall, but there's little satire on modern consumerism and after a few tense moments, these survivors avoid the deadly internal strife that debilitated their predecessors. Yet there's undoubtedly a nostalgic feel to proceedings, as if they are being gently animated by the ghost of a long lost 70s formula. Along the way I was reminded of Yul Brynner in The Ultimate Warrior, John Mills in Quatermass, Charlton Heston in Omega Man and other such unmitigated visions of the end of days.
