Six Days, Seven Nights features an excellent 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer. The picturesque greenery, rocky cliffs, and sparkling blue water of the tropical island setting all appear bright and focused, with only a few instances of grain and dirt on the print. The 5.1-channel Dolby Digital audio track is also sharp. The upbeat music moves well through the entire range of the speakers, and gunshots reverberate powerfully from the front speakers. A Dolby Digital French-language track is also available. On the downside, this DVD is a bare-bones release that lacks any notable extra features. It does contain the theatrical trailer in a decent widescreen transfer (along with some laughable recommendations -- Metro and Nothing to Lose -- that have little in common with this film), plus English subtitles and 23 chapter cues. While the Six Days, Seven Nights DVD is technically impressive, it would be improved immensely with better supplemental materials. Even a simple "on location" featurette or fluffy cast interviews would help considerably.

When unexpected radiation raises the dead, a microcosm of Average America has to battle flesh-eating zombies in George A. Romero's landmark cheapie horror film. Siblings Johnny (Russell Streiner) and Barbara (Judith O'Dea) whine and pout their way through a visit to their father's grave in a small Pennsylvania town, but it all takes a turn for the worse when a zombie kills Johnny. Barbara flees to an isolated farmhouse where a family, a teen couple, and a lone man named Ben (Duane Jones) are already holed up. Bickering and panic ensue as the group tries to figure out how best to escape, while hoards of undead converge on the house; news reports reveal that fire wards them off, while a local sheriff-led posse discovers that if you "kill the brain, you kill the ghoul." After a night of immolation and parricide, one survivor is left in the house ... . Romero's grainy black-and-white cinematography and casting of locals emphasize the terror lurking in ordinary life; as in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963), Romero's victims are not attacked because they did anything wrong, and the randomness makes the attacks all the more horrifying. Nothing holds the key to salvation, either, whether it's family, love, or Law. Topping off the existential dread is Romero's then-extreme use of gore, as zombies nibble on limbs and viscera. Initially distributed by a Manhattan theater chain owner, Night, made for about $100,000, was dismissed as exploitation, but after a 1969 re-release, it began to attract favorable attention for scarily tapping into Vietnam-era uncertainty and nihilistic anxiety. By 1979, it had grossed over $12 million, inspired a cycle of apocalyptic splatter films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), and set the standard for finding horror in the mundane. However cheesy the film may look, few horror movies reach a conclusion as desolately unsettling.