And so it is that, after over a century of film history, the medium has finally reached its zenith in this, unquestionably the greatest film ever made. No small feat you might say, and you'd be right to do so. Why, such classics such as 1983's seminal movie, Krull, or even that masterpiece of cinema Dungeons and Dragons (2000) must represent the peak of film-making! But even these pale in comparison when held up to The Dead of Night. There. I said it. In fact, such is the sheer genius of this film that Krull and Dungeons and Dragons barely deserve to be mentioned within the same review.
Alas, however, for I must confess that I have not seen The Dead of Night in its entirety; the tears of sheer joy that it drew from me blurred my vision, and such was its power that I could hardly stand to be in the same room as the film for more than five minutes at a time. This is not a fault of the movie, rather it is a fault in me, and in all humanity, for truly this film is astonishingly ahead of its time, and at present it is quite impossible to take in the truths that it reveals to us. That we have been blessed with such a film is remarkable. Every aspect of it has changed my life; the depiction of the zombies; the chaotic yet hypnotic editing; the purposely bad music with its varying degrees of ironic usage; the mumbled, incomprehensible dialogue (for the filmmakers knew that if we were to have heard what was being said, our heads would quite literally have exploded from the sheer beauty of the speech); the script! My God, you have never heard anything like this script before! ... This, surely, is a film for the ages.
No life is complete without a viewing of The Dead of Night, no review for an almost unbelievably, spectacularly awful film complete without a *lot* of sarcasm =P
