Dawn Of The Dead: The Director's Cut DVD Review

The anamorphic 2.35:1 transfer
is home to all kinds of visual trickery
which mean that - while it is a technically impressive piece of encoding - it just
doesn't knock your socks off as a
particularly great-looking transfer. Going
for a very stylised look which aids the film
immensely, the picture has a green tinge
and purposefully over-pumped colours,
and there is evidence on several
occasions of artificial dirt and grain being
added to the image to give the film a
gritty feel.
Still, black levels are solid and
consistent, colours are well-rendered and
detail levels remain high throughout.
Given the amount of both darkness and
movement in the picture, it's also
refreshing to see that the transfer is
mostly free from compression artefacting
and smearing.

With no DTS mix on offer it's up
to the Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack to
impress the listener, and thankfully it really
delivers. This is a solid surround track,
with great use of positional audio, clear
dialogue reproduction and excellent
dynamic range. Indeed, there's so much
bass on offer that as the film's climax builds and gets ever more explosive
you could do with making sure that all
breakables are firmly fastened down,
as your subwoofer will soon have the
room shaking.

Where the disc really lets itself
down is with the extra features. Don't get
us wrong: there's a fair selection of stuff
on offer and some of it is genuinely
interesting, but there's nothing that really
documents the making of the film as a
whole - except for the rather enthusiastic
feature-length commentary by director
Zack Snyder and producer Eric Newman.
The remaining extras consist of a short
video intro to the Director's Cut by Snyder,
two spoof featurettes (a home video
account of Andy's final days in the gun
store entitled The Lost Tape, plus a rather
badly-acted and not particularly
convincing bogus news programme),
eleven deleted/extended scenes with
optional commentary, and a trio of
featurettes looking at various aspects of
the creation of the film's undead hordes
and how they were dispatched (Raising the Dead, Attack of the Living Dead and
Splitting Headaches: Anatomy of an
Exploding Head)As utterly pointless as the film is, this remake of
Dawn of the Dead is a whole heap of gory fun
and is well served by the DVD.