Dreamlike


The film has a very unique atmosphere to it. It's an early zombie film and probably one of the last to treat zombies as supernatural living corpses rather than a product of disease or radiation. These zombies are the undead guardians of a sunken cache of diamonds who are adorned with sea weed, immune to physical attacks, and held at bay by the presence of flames. Over the course of the film, a beautiful and adulterous woman joins their ranks. And the film's opening and closing credits feature the silhouettes of the underwater zombies as they themselves were welcoming the audience and bidding them farewell.

Yet, it's mostly dreamlike because it's all just so forgettable and an audience member has about as much a chance at vividly recalling a dream which they had as they do of remembering the characters or events of this picture. I've seen it twice now and I've left both viewings remembering very little. It was only in reading an in-depth critique in another topic that the events of the film all came running back to me. I'm sure I'll see it again next October and have the same memories come pouring back in only to lose them again within minutes of the film's end; a passing return to a dream.

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Rather eloquently put, FH. Perhaps more so than this film merits.

Still, while I take your point, I wonder whether "dreamlike", as it's commonly understood, is the proper title for this thread. Ordinarily this connotes something positive or desirable -- qualities not normally associated with ZOMT. After all, the '53 Invaders From Mars turned out to be an actual dream, but scarcely one its young protagonist would care to repeat...let alone discover had become real!

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Thanks, hobnob.

The title does fit with some definitions, but I will admit that it was intentionally misleading. The film isn't like a dream in that it's great. It's like a dream in that it leaves behind only vague memories. It actually does have a unique atmosphere to it, but there are still far more enjoyable films in the genre.

If anything, I guess it receives points for being one of the last films to use supernatural zombies, but it could just as easily be argued that this film was the burnout point for that style of zombie. Other zombie films of the 1950s had a science fiction element to them and I don't need to say what became of the genre after Romero's film came out.

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Yes, I fear real zombies have become too much of a commercial commodity today to return to their modest, but creepier, beginnings.

I've never been much of a zombie fan (either the dead or the drink), but to me the best zombie film is unquestionably Val Lewton's 1943 mini-masterpiece, I Walked with a Zombie.

But about your use of the term "dream" as it pertains to this movie (i.e., something fleeting and ephemeral): when I first read it I was immediately reminded of an exchange in the Cary Grant film The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer. A brassy lady (Veda Ann Borg) who knows artist Grant is dancing with her glumph of a male friend (Don Beddoe) at a nightclub and, seeing Grant, sighs over him. "Now he's the kind of man who stays in a girl's mind, like a heavy meal," she purrs. "What does that make me?" her companion scowls. "Orange juice!" she snarls back.

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