I agree with your concern about the speedy undead.
While I totally forgive 28 days because it was not undead, just really hyped up living people, the Dawn of the Dead remake has me scratching my head (other than the obvious question of why remake a classic).
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That said, I just don't think that zombies can run that fast. A) A zombie certainly wouldn't be any more agile in undeath than it was in life and B) Rigor mortis affects zombies.
I'll start with B because I totally agree with that. Not only should there be rigor mortis, but there should be decayed muscles and tendons (meaning weakness as well as stiffness).
Until yesterday I would have agreed with A as well. In a News of the Weird article, it said that scientists had discovered that cockroaches, like humans, get stiff and slow as they grow older. Some of them wondered how much was do to a slowdown in brain processes rather than body processes. So they chopped off the heads of slow, old cockroaches (essentially making them undead) and the cockroaches became speedy and agile again (thought obviously without sight).
So maybe A isn't true. If undead humans are freed like undead cockroaches, maybe they'd react quicker and nimbler than in life. Of course then again, that would mean hitting a zombie in the head wouldn't kill them.
Personally I am not willing to sacrifice the gory necessity of obliterating a zombie's head, just to give a justification for added speed.
To an earlier question, I'm not sure if I have a favorite zombie scene, but my favorite zombie movie remains Night of the Living Dead. For some reason the choices the people were faced with seemed realistic and fresh, and it was fun to see them go through the learning curve. I also think the black and white made the zombies seem more grisly... or maybe less fake?
holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)