United Film Distribution CompanyOnce rejected by fans because it wasn't as garish or outrageous as 1979's Dawn of the Dead, George A. Romero’s Day of the Dead was the hungover morning after Dawn's wildly over-the-top party. Released 40 years ago today after being filmed smack in the middle of the Reagan era, budget issues forced Romero to downsize his concept considerably, resulting in a claustrophobic, bleak vision of the last scraps of humanity still squabbling over things that didn't even matter anymore. In its own way, Day could well be the best — and now most relevant — of Romero's original trilogy.Night of the Living Dead (1968) was the first film in Romero’s groundbreaking horror cycle, while 1978’s Dawn of the Dead was an audacious game-changer both artistically and commercially (the producers took the risk of releasing it unrated rather than trim its plentiful gore) that tapped into the era’s zeitgeist. Its images of zombies wandering around a shopping mall made the film more than just a gut-munching shock show, and its satirical edge found purchase not just with fans, but with critics too.By the early ’80s, Romero had written a follow-up that was every bit as ambitious as Dawn, but in different ways. The original script for Day of the Dead was an epic set off the coast of Florida. The island’s lower classes lived above ground in horrific conditions, while scientists and military personnel in an underground bunker below were molding zombies into an army at the behest of the island’s dictatorial ruler, who lived lavishly with his cronies and sycophants.Romero envisioned a final battle in which the regime is overthrown in the most gruesome bloodbath imaginable, and with the zombie plague ending as well. But his plans were shattered when the film’s backers cut his budget in half, forcing the filmmaker to resize and reimagine the story. In its finished version, Day of the Dead is set in an underground storage facility where a much smaller band of scientists and soldiers are at each other’s throats, even as the scientists are trying to find a way to tame the zombies and teach them the basics of human behavior again.Never mind the zombies; even the humans in Romero’s threequel have forgotten the fundamentals of civil conduct. The soldiers, ostensibly assigned to facilitate the scientific work before the chain of command collapsed, are little more than barbarians. The vicious Captain Rhodes ( a scenery-devouring Joe Pilato) threatens scientist Sarah Bowman (Lori Cardille, who plays her as tough as contemporaries like Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor) with sexual assault and execution, while the mentally crumbling surgeon Dr. Logan (Richard Liberty) tries to domesticate the walking corpses but must use hideous means to reward them.You can probably take an educated guess as to the specifics. | United Film Distribution Company“We’re all pulling in different directions,” says an exasperated Sarah, words that sound just as prescient now as they did 40 years ago. Romero, who passed away in 2017, later said that Day was his favorite of the original Dead trilogy, and it's easy to see why. In boiling his original script (elements of which eventually found their way into his 2005 return to the genre, Land of the Dead) down to its essence, he created an oppressive pressure cooker in which a handful of surviving humans, rather than finding common cause, lay the groundwork for their doom.Stripped of Dawn’s comedic aspects yet far more polished than Night, Day of the Dead is arguably the most tightly scripted and directed of the three. The trilogy’s trademark gore and zombie effects are superb, with Romero and makeup wizard Tom Savini opting for a more muted, putrefied look over the comic-book colors of Dawn. The tone is one of resignation and sorrow, with stalwart helicopter pilot John (Terry Alexander) making the case for simply starting over. “What you're doing is a waste of time, Sarah,” he says, bemoaning the pointlessness of trying to reverse the zombie plague. “And time is all we got left.”Neither critics nor fans embraced Day of the Dead as enthusiastically as they’d welcomed Dawn and Night, and the movie’s limited release sabotaged it at the box office. But over the years, aficionados and film historians have come around to respecting Romero for not taking the easy route of recycling his previous work. That respect is well-earned. While it has its flaws (lots of over-acting, primarily) and ends on a slightly more optimistic note than its predecessors, Day of the Dead is a somber meditation on humanity’s unwavering ability to tear itself, both literally and figuratively, to pieces. Even today — especially today — that makes it hit the hardest of the three.