Saturday, June 25, 2005

Review: The Dead Films

Before I get to Land of the Dead, I think I should explain the previous zombie films that George A. Romero shot. As the trailers point out, he invented the genre, and he's pretty much the man.

The dead films have always been about how we live in the semi-zombified world. Night of the Living Dead (1968) was nomially about a handful of survivors holed up in a farmhouse, dealing with the fact that the dead are inexplicably rising (Romero never explains why in any film). But, beneath the surface, the film played with the idea that the family was collapsing, that Vietnam era violence was coming home, that mobs of rednecks were driving around killing off undesirables, that people would have as hard a time accepting the authority of a black man as they would being eaten alive, and that the world was being turned upside down causing the remaining survivors to flee to the countryside. Strangely, it has all this under the surface, but the movie still plays as a tense, straightforward horror film. It's a perfectly constructed work of art, and one of the true classics of American film.

When Romero made Dawn of the Dead (1978) I think he realized that he couldn't make a film as grim as Night of the Living Dead. So, he went over the top and made an action-adventure film about a bunch of survivors holed up in a shopping mall. People laugh when the characters first see the mall and one of them asks: "What the hell is that?", but remember that indoor shopping centers were a new thing in 1978. The film is a vicious satire of me-decade consumerism; you'll never be able to walk through a mall full of Christmas shoppers without thinking of zombies after this film. As if you could before. The movie is faster-paced than Night, and more amusing, but the characters are quite, ahem, fleshed-out and the idea that the dead would wander around a shopping mall all day because it was the happiest part of their life is just as sardonic as the idea of a few humans holed up in a consumer's paradise slowly realizing how lifeless and constricting it is. Oh, and this one was extremely gruesome for 1978. When a zombie's head is blown up five minutes in, you pretty much know the brakes are off.

Romero had tweaked the 60s and 70s, so with Day of the Dead (1985) he attacked the military as well as science. Here we have a group of soldiers and scientists holed up in an underground bunker trying to make some sense of the zombie problem. The scientists want to condition the dead and turn them into some sort of pets, while the soldiers want to blast them. Meanwhile, Cpt. Rhodes is quickly becoming a fascist dictator and Dr. Logan is quickly finding excuses to kill off soldiers in the name of science. This one is grim. The humans have no hope, but are clinging to straws. Also, it's a bit slow-moving with about an hour of dramatic scenes and a last act that's suddenly gorier than anything Romero has ever done. A lot of people didn't like this one as much, including me, but it's very well put together and it really, really grows on you. After a few viewings, I came to really enjoy it. It is, again, very grim though.

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