Bring Out Your Dead

How do you beat a film about the son of God, who dies for the people's sins and, a few days later, rises from the grave? The answer, it would seem, is stage a resurrection event of your own - but on a much larger scale. Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ reigned for three consecutive weeks but was finally laid to rest on the weekend when Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead remake shuffled and moaned its way to the top of the US box office. The surprisingly good horror remake whipped up $27.3 million over the weekend, surpassing The Passion's $19.2 million and relegating it to second place with Angelina Jolie-starring thriller Taking Lives taking third with $11.4 million. The surprisingly good 're-imagining' of George A Romero's seventies hit is a surprisingly good effort, born from what could have been a disaster of Resident Evil proportions. The film is released in the UK this Friday and, while we didn't see it in time to get the review in the new issue of Empire, you can read Chris Hewitt's erudite review here.