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When
Night of the Living Dead was
first unleashed upon an unprepared
America in 1968, Roger Ebert
famously described the effect
it had on an audience in his
essay/review which was published
in Reader's Digest.
"The kids in the audience
were stunned... The movie had
stopped being delightfully scary
about halfway through and had
become unexpectedly terrifying.
There was a little girl ...
sitting very still in her seat
and crying. I don't think the
younger kids really knew what
hit them."
The director of that brilliant
cinematic nightmare was George
Romero, who went on to film
the successful sequels Dawn
of the Dead and Day of the Dead,
and who created an undying sub-genre
of horror films based on the
mythos of his ghoulish zombies.
The title of Ebert's essay
was "Just Another Horror
Movie - Or Is It?" Of course,
Night of the Living Dead was
not just another horror movie,
but unfortunately, George A.
Romero's Land of the Dead is.
As a zombie-hunting splatter-fest,
and as a human flesh-eating
spectacle, this latest chapter
in Romero's undead chronicles
delivers the goods. It's in
the creation of a believable,
post-apocalyptic society that
this tale feels stilted and
stale, in these stretches of
needless exposition feeling
more like a mediocre John Carpenter
film than classic Romero. At
least in Carpenter's Escape
from New York, the character
of Snake Plissken was an engagingly
bad-ass hero.
In 'Land of the Dead,' Simon
Baker, last seen in The Ring
Two, is too goodie-two-shoes
by half as the tough but sensitive
leader Riley. By the end of
the movie, he's even showing
compassion for the zombies,
a compassion that Romero himself
seems to have acquired in his
25 years among them.
In the final reel of Land of
the Dead, the zombie leader
Big Daddy is presented as a
sort of undead Moses, leading
his people to the Promised Land:
a luxury high-rise condo called
Fiddler's Green.
As a character in his own right,
Big Daddy is a classic, like
a cross between the cover-ghoul
of Lucio Fulci's Zombie and
a Uruk Hai General from Lord
of the Rings.
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