I love zombie movies. I might be the world’s greatest zombie movie fan (although if Rob Zombie wants the title, I’ll let him have it). Even goofy zombie movies like the Return of the Living Dead series (which are collectively just a big pile of dumb fun) turn me on. But above all other zombie movies, and in fact above all horror movies period, stand George A. Romero’s classics, Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, and Day of the Dead.
I’ve waited twenty years for a fourth movie from Romero, and on Friday I finally got it. If you haven’t seen Land of the Dead yet, you might wanna skip this post, ‘cause I’m gonna talk about it at great length and I don’t want to spoil it for you; and I promise there will be spoilers. I guess this might turn out as sort of a review of the movie, as a matter of fact. ‘Cause I’ve got a lot to say about this film.
First of all, I love the tie-ins between the cast of this movie and other zombie pictures. And I’m gonna list the ones I caught. If anyone noticed any others, please let me know.
- Tom Savini, who did the effects for the first three films and appeared as a machete-wielding biker in Dawn, makes a brief appearance as a machete-wielding biker zombie in this one (although he didn’t participate in the production in any other way). He’s only in for a second, but for fans of the series, it’s a GREAT BIG second; the theater erupted when he showed up, and I’m proud to say that I led the charge. A gratuitous but entirely satisfying moment.
- Greg Nicotero, who helped with effects on Day and played the soldier who gets his throat ripped out by the “housewife” zombie in that film, plays the zombie drawbridge-keeper in this one (and was the makeup supervisor as well). Comes to a bad end, which seems to be his lot in life.
- The zombie with the butcher knife is played by Boyd Banks, who was Tucker in the 2004 remake of Dawn. You remember Tucker; he was the one who was getting dragged through the sewers and finally had to beg CJ to shoot him because he’d been bitten.
- Romero loved Shaun of the Dead, and decided to include a reference to that wonderful movie in his new one. If you watch, when Riley and Charlie walk into the zombie-themed nightclub, there are two zombies chained just inside the entrance for tourists to take photographs with. Those zombies are played by Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright, the writers of Shaun, where Pegg was the star and Wright the director. Incidentally, I said of Pegg while watching Shaun, while he was doing the fake-zombie scene, that he was imitating Bub from Day. He does it so well, apparently, that when I first saw him in this one I thought he was actually Howard Sherman (the guy who played Bub), and had to check the credits to realize my mistake. I really regret, incidentally, that Nick Frost couldn’t have found a place in this film. He was so wonderful as Ed.
Asia Argento. She's here in part as a nod to her old man, I expect. Dario Argento was the greatest of the Italian filmmakers that started doing spaghetti horror movies when the craze for spaghetti westerns faded. Suspiria, Inferno, Opera, and Tenebre make him one of the most accomplished directors in the genre. Plus, of course, he worked with Romero on Two Evil Eyes and co-produced Romero’s original Dawn. Romero’s known his daughter Asia since she was in diapers. Anyway, including Asia really seemed like an acknowledgement of Italian horror, and I thought it was great. And, although I always loved her for her daddy’s sake, I’ve become quite fond of her in her own right over the past couple of years, as well (if you’ve seen The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, you’ll be with me there; she’s wonderful in a non-horror role). Hell, she even made xXx almost worth watching. And she’s very good in this one, too.
Okay, now that the obligatory references are out of the way, let’s get started on analyzing this movie. Because of course, I have my complaints. And number one on the list is, way too many people survive this movie.
I mean, seriously. In Night, no one lives. Period, straight-up, seven people go into the farmhouse, all seven die. Clean, simple, memorable. In Dawn, only two people survive, and odds are they aren't gonna get far. In Day, we're up to three survivors. Still, I went to see this movie thinking that THIS would be the end-of-the-world movie that we’ve been expecting since the series began. But no…at least thirty or forty people survive this one. Way too many, especially if you’re expecting there to be no humans left after it’s done.
I always refer to the coming of the living dead as the Zombie Apocalypse (and, being me, I really believe it’s gonna happen). Apparently, Romero and I have different feelings about this, because his movie is as un-apocalyptic as it can be, given the rather extreme circumstances.
Also, I feel that Kaufman (Dennis Hopper’s character) has far too merciful a death. I’m thinking of Captain Rhodes in Day, how he was hunted by Bub, gunned down, and finally ripped to pieces by the zombie horde. Now, that’s how a bad guy dies in a zombie picture. Kaufman just gets blown up ‘cause he’s standing too close to his car. Where’s the justice in that?
Kaufman is the über-capitalist in this film, too. He’s the guy who’s found a way to make the Zombie Apocalypse work in his favor. He’s set Fiddler’s Green, the high-rise that approximates the luxury of pre-zombie days, up as an oasis, with a city full of human refuse surrounding it, and then the zombies fenced out beyond them. You want Kaufman to suffer. You want the rich fuckers who live in his place to suffer, too…and yeah, they all die, but there’s none of the evisceration that characterized Dawn and Day here. The zombies just catch rich folks, and then the camera moves away before they get what’s coming to them. Not a single rich person gets torn up in this movie, and goddamnit, that’s criminal. That’s what I was there to see. Maybe there will be an unrated DVD version.
Finally, I’ve got a logistical complaint. When Riley and his troupe set off in search of a new life in Dead Reckoning (the armored truck they drive, which draws its name, I assume, from the fact that Romero briefly considered calling this movie by that name), it doesn’t seem to occur to anyone that this vehicle can get maybe five miles to the gallon. I mean, it’s huge, it’s carrying six people, a mess of armor plate, a couple of cannon, and (presumably) a lot of ammunition. How many times will they have to stop for gas? Hope they’re well-armed, ‘cause this looks like a long and eventful trip.
I wonder, too, about having “name” actors in this movie. I mean, Asia Argento I can understand, because no one in America knows her anyway. But Dennis Hopper and John Leguizamo? That’s a little too big-time for these pictures. Maybe, Romero having more money to do this than he usually does got him to break with his own conventions. And I'm not saying that they weren't good in the picture; I'm just not used to seeing people I know in these damn things.
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“Mass hysteria?” What do they think, we’re imagining all this?
--Karl Hardman as Harry Cooper, Night of the Living Dead
Okay, all that being said, I still loved this movie.
The main thing I enjoyed was that Romero finally got to do the movie he wanted to do with Day of the Dead. I don’t know if you’ve ever read the original script. If you haven’t, you can download it in Word format from the Homepage of the Dead. Just hit “films” on your menu, then “Day of the Dead,” and you’ll see “Original Script” come up on the menu on the right-hand side.
Anyway, Romero wrote a very involved script for Day, more of an epic than Dawn was. But he couldn’t get funding, because the big studios were afraid of the project. They knew it would get a bad rating (Night of the Living Dead got an X, if you can believe that), and Romero was honest about not changing the script so that it would get a more acceptable rating. So, he was out of luck. This has happened to him repeatedly; the studios are afraid they'll lose money, though every single one of these movies has become a cult classic and grossed eight- and nine-figure profits. Hollywood's got no balls, though, and apparently never learns its lesson.
In the original Day script, several of the zombies were experiencing the awakening that Bub did in the version that actually got made. Instead of a tunnel complex in Florida, it was supposed to take place in a survivalist compound on some island. The zombies were becoming self-aware, and human society was on the verge of breaking down. But, Romero had to tone it down because he had no money; and the breakdown of society had to be expressed by twelve people trapped in a bunker.
But Day was still a brilliant movie. In a sense, it was fortunate that he couldn’t do the movie he’d wanted to, because we got to know the characters so much better than we would have if the original script had been used. And the toned-down script allowed Bub, the greatest zombie ever, to come to the forefront. The zombies in Land of the Dead don’t seem too strange to us (in spite of using guns and knives) because we remember Bub. Thus, Land is much better as a fourth movie than the original Day would have would have been as a third movie. So, all in all I guess it was a good thing that Romero had to wait twenty years to make this film.
There were plenty of great zombie-violence moments, though the movie was not as gory as its predecessors. For example, I love the bit with the zombie priest, whose head flips over his shoulders to attack the commando. That’s a nice touch.
I like the politics of it, that a small cadre of wealthy people have separated themselves from the rest of humanity. Even though “money” as we know it is essentially worthless, the rich still find ways to exclude the rest of us. ‘Twas ever thus; if all paper currency became worthless tomorrow and rich folks discovered that they all had a lot of clam shells, then the next day clam shells would be the new currency. That’s just the way it is. They know each other, they’re comfortable with each other, and they keep the rest of us outside.
I love Cholo’s attitude, too. I’ve always wondered about people from the first three films who know they’re gonna die and beg to be put away with a bullet to the brain. I always thought the way Cholo (John Leguizamo) does: fuck shooting me in the head; put me in the middle of a bunch of people I don’t like and let me RAMPAGE. I was proud of him for that. Go get the bastards, Cholo.
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The people of 107 will do what you wish now. Many have died, last week, on these streets. In the basement of this building, you will find them. I have given them the last rites, now, you do what you will. You are stronger than us... But soon, I think they be stronger than you.
--Jesse Del Gre as the old priest, Dawn of the Dead
The big thing, though, is the evolution of the zombies (if evolution is the right word). A running theme in all these movies has been that we are more dangerous to each other than the zombies are to us. Friction in the farmhouse leads to disaster in Night of the Living Dead. Peter, Stephen, Fran, and Roger decide to stay in the mall in Dawn of the Dead because they’re afraid of what the authorities will do when they (the authorities) discover that our heroes have stolen a helicopter; and later, their consumerist fortress is destroyed not by the living dead but by a roving army of bikers looking for loot. In Day of the Dead, the tension between the various humans is so profound that the zombies, outside of Bub, are an afterthought.
In Land of the Dead, we’re still our own worst enemies, but the zombies are moving up the list. Suddenly, our pat defenses don’t work against them like they used to. The zombies aren’t stupid anymore. Well, most of them are, but they have a few leaders who have begun to develop a rudimentary intelligence, especially Big Daddy, the former gas station attendant. He’s begun to form a tactical intellect, and the other zombies follow him, to the sorrow of most of Pittsburgh. He’s a continuation of the gradual move, on the part of the living dead, towards intelligence.
More than that, though, he’s becoming human. Not just intelligent, but human. This, too, is the culmination of a theme through the earlier movies. In Night, the zombies are animals looking for food. In Dawn, they’re still animals, but they’re beginning to see beyond food; they want to be in the mall, not because there’s food there, but just because they want to be there. It used to be important to them, they used to be happy there, and they want in. They don’t know why, but they’re compelled to get into the mall.
In Day, of course, we see the rudiments of learning. The zombies are afraid of their human captors. They are reluctant to approach the gate where the soldiers catch them for experimentation. They cry when they’re left in the dark. Bub dramatizes this so well that we forget the behavior of the other zombies. The great scene from Day is when Bub sees Captain Rhodes, recognizes his uniform, and salutes. Rhodes, of course, does not return the salute (bet he wished later that he had). Then, when Logan hands Bub an unloaded pistol, reasoning that he might have been in the military, Bub tries to shoot Rhodes. Anger…for the first time, we see a zombie expressing an emotion.
When the gun doesn’t go off, Rhodes aims his weapon at Bub, and Bub cringes away from him. Again, this is new: zombies fear fire, but beyond that they appear to have no regard for their own well-being. Bub knows that Rhodes can kill him, and he cowers away until Logan intervenes. Fear is the second emotion we see him experience.
When Bub accidentally frees himself at the end of the movie, does he set off to wreak mayhem? No, he goes in search of Logan. And when he finds Logan’s corpse, he grieves for him. In its way, this scene is as powerful as Sarah’s famous breakdown, after she saves Miguel from his bite and then fends off the soldiers who’ve come to kill him. Bub reacts with the sort of limitless emotion any of us might feel on the death of a father. He feels great sadness, and a lust for revenge. And he goes looking for it. There is no doubt in Bub’s mind that Rhodes is guilty, and he hunts him down and…shoots him! He doesn’t eat him, as zombies generally do. He shoots him, gives him a mock salute, and walks away, leaving his corpse to the other zombies. He is, in a sense, emotionally complete.
In other words, Bub has not only begun to think, he has begun to feel. He has developed the rudiments of compassion. And compassion is a theme in Land of the Dead. Humans, for the most part, seem to have lost their capacity for it. Riley is an exception, as seen in the way he keeps Charlie around, or brings medicine to a sick kid, or the way he rescues Slack from the zombie cage. But mostly, we seem to have lost the ability to feel anything for our fellow man. The rich folks, secure in Fiddler’s Green, don’t care much what happens to the poor folks out on the streets; and to be fair the poor folks on the streets don’t seem to care much what happens to their own kind (as evidenced by the enthusiasm when Slack gets put in the cage in the first place).
Compassion in this movie is experienced mostly by the zombies themselves. As a small example, there’s a young couple (or, at least, what had been a young couple before they got zombified) that spends the entire movie side-by-side, walking and hunting together. It's as if their affection for each other did not end at their deaths. But the best example is Big Daddy, the leader of the zombies. On two occasions, he takes it upon himself to destroy zombies that have been too badly damaged by humans to continue. Each time, he lets out a scream of sorrow and rage. This is telling, but less so than an early scene in the movie, where the human raiders, looking for food, have set off fireworks (which the zombies can’t ignore, for whatever reason; they stand helpless, staring at the "skyflowers," while the humans go about their looting). Big Daddy is immune to the fireworks, and sees his zombies, who are staring at the sky like turkeys in a thunderstorm, being mowed down by random fire from the raiders. He runs along the line of them, and I've heard people saying he was trying to rally them to a counterattack, but I don't think that's so. I think he was trying to get their heads down, trying to save them from the bullets of the mercenaries. He tries to save his people, with no thought for himself. Humanity has settled nicely back into its old groove of “I’ve got mine, you get yours.” Meanwhile, the zombies are learning to care about and depend upon each other.
I think this is where these movies are going, what they’re trying to say. And if there’s a fifth movie in the series, I think I can promise what its theme will be: the zombies have become more human than the humans themselves. They’ll inherit the earth, not because they’re stronger, but because they deserve it.
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