Dawn Of The Dead: The Extended Mall Hours Cut

February 6, 2009
*This rating was given before reviews were required*

January 13, 2010

Dawn Of The Dead was always a raw film in terms of direction, acting and most certainly, editing. Considering Romero is the credited editor, the opening of the theatrical version, with all that forced chaos inside a television studio, always struck me as being very poorly cut. It seems this resulted from shots being constantly removed from the film until we were left with the version I grew up with.

Where Dawn Of The Dead succeeds where most apocalyptic movies fail, is in creating an utterly convincing atmosphere of doom.

Having heard such great comments about Officially Unofficial’s Extended Mall Hours cut, I thought I would give it a try over the holiday season because as you know, this is the perfect festive movie for all the family.

The longer credit sequence is not any smoother than the original but with all the added material the reactions of the TV studio workers become far more plausible. This opening now works as intended. The newly added credits are noticeably more new/digital when compared to the original ones and some even repeat with two credits for the score by Goblin.

The added visuals work great but this throws up numerous audio issues. This is mainly because of integrating the new shots with the existing score, so every so often a bar of music repeats. As a result the soundtrack has become slightly awkward with repeated musical bars, poor syncopation and at times odd audio jumps. Editing this audio must have been a major nightmare, considering the source material but at times I did find it distracting.

Dawn of the Dead is a film that desires to be “fleshed out” because any new material simply adds to the overall chilling atmosphere. Officially Unofficial has improved the original theatrical cut with this Extended Edition. If the audio issues and some fine tuning or distressing to the opening credits could be fixed, this would be the best extended version ever FanEdited. 8/10

October 26, 2008

I had wished to see the complete edit of DOTD (and in english, unlike the german dvd) for a very long time, so thank you for your hard work! The concept is great, so is the edit technically – It’s indeed the BEST version of DOTD available anywhere. Fantastic stuff, 5/5 overall!

November 2, 2008

This is an amazing piece of work.

I tried to do this years ago on VHS but it was a headache, with all the different music scores on each version.

I have 23 different VHS copies, 6 laserdiscs and about 8 DVD’s and as far as I’m concerned this is the only way I’m gonna watch this film now.

I thank you so much for this, it’s something I’ve always wanted to see done but have never had the know-how to pull off.

I encourage everyone to check this one out.

November 4, 2008
*This rating was given before reviews were required*