Bub remembers.
That’s the problem.
Or maybe it’s the only hopeful thing left in Day of the Dead.
George Romero’s third zombie film strips almost everything away. The mall is gone. The crowds are gone. Society isn’t collapsing anymore.
It already collapsed.
What’s left of humanity is buried underground, arguing about what comes next while millions of dead people wander around upstairs.
And somehow the zombie chained to a laboratory wall is making the most progress.
So what happens when the dead start learning and the living stop?
You get Day of the Dead.
Romero traps the survivors inside an underground facility and lets pressure do the rest. The scientists want time to understand the zombies. The soldiers want answers they can use immediately. Nobody has enough people, information, or patience to make either plan work.
Sarah keeps trying anyway.
Lori Cardille plays her like someone permanently stuck between bad options. She isn’t chasing some miracle cure. She’s trying to keep the research moving while nearly everyone around her loses the ability to function together.
Then there’s Captain Rhodes.
Joseph Pilato doesn’t ease into anything.
Rhodes arrives furious and somehow keeps finding new levels of furious.
But that’s exactly why he works.
He isn’t just the movie’s human villain. He’s a man obsessed with control in a situation where control no longer exists. Soldiers are dying. Supplies are finite. The scientists can’t give him the answer he wants.
So Rhodes responds to uncertainty by becoming more certain.
Louder.
More threatening.
Less capable of hearing anybody else.
Meanwhile, Dr. Logan is teaching a zombie to use a razor.
Bub is the movie’s strangest idea and its most important one.
Sherman Howard gives him enough personality that every small behaviour matters. Bub recognizes objects. He handles a book. He salutes. He reacts to music. When Logan gives him a gun, something buried inside him understands what it is.
None of that makes Bub human again.
It makes the line between human and zombie considerably less comfortable.
Because while Bub is remembering how to interact with the world, the people around him are forgetting how.
Rhodes stops listening.
Miguel falls apart.
Logan becomes so obsessed with his experiments that his own moral limits begin to disappear.
Everybody claims to be protecting humanity while demonstrating less and less of it.
That’s the cruel joke at the centre of Day of the Dead.
The zombies are supposed to represent the endpoint.
Bub suggests otherwise.
He can learn.
He can form an attachment to Logan.
He can grieve.
Then Rhodes kills Logan, and Bub’s reaction is disturbingly understandable.
By the time the underground compound finally collapses, Romero lets Tom Savini’s effects team turn everything loose. Bodies tear apart. Order disappears. The military control Rhodes spent the entire movie demanding collapses into total chaos.
But the gore isn’t the real payoff.
Bub is.
Rhodes spent the movie treating the dead as mindless things that could only be controlled or destroyed.
Then one of those things remembers enough to come looking for him.
That’s what makes Bub’s final pursuit matter.
The supposedly mindless creature understands loss, anger, and consequence.
The supposedly rational humans spent most of the movie forgetting all three.
So what happens when the dead start learning and the living stop?
Eventually, calling one side civilized becomes difficult.
Bub spends the movie becoming something more than a zombie.
Rhodes spends it becoming something less than a man.
Written by Rob Joncas for DeadNoteMedia.
© 2026 DeadNoteMedia. All rights reserved.
