The zombie movie is all the rage again, thanks to a bite in the arm from “28 Days Later,” the “Dawn of the Dead” remake, and the comedy “Shaun of the Dead.” But now it’s time for the Elvis of zombie movies to show ‘em what for.
| Effective: The fourth film on zombies from director George Romero, whose “Night of the Living Dead” kicked off the genre. It’s the usual serving of gore with social commentary, and quite effective.
Rated: R rating is for violence, nudity, language, subject matter. Now showing: tk |
George Romero, who concocted the enormously disturbing “Night of the Living Dead” on a shoestring back in 1968, is back in the realm of the reanimated. “George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead” is Romero’s fourth zombie picture, trailing after the epic “Dawn of the Dead” and the scrappy but interesting “Day of the Dead.”
As is customary for Romero, the film has massive helpings of gore mixed with wry servings of social commentary. “Land” presents a world that has barricaded itself in against the onslaught of the zombie population.
Specifically, a fatcat aristocrat (Dennis Hopper) has created a little upper-class utopia in a luxury high-rise building. The poor still live, somewhat precariously, in the city streets below, and the dead clamor outside the electrified fences that surround the place.
The main thing zombies lacked in the previous films was the ability to think. (Well, their manual dexterity wasn’t too swift, either.) For this film, Romero depicts the spark of cognition, when a zombie leader named Big Daddy suddenly realizes that pulling the trigger of a machine gun will make it go bang. It’s the zombie equivalent of the apes using bones as weapons in “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
Our hero is a mercenary (Simon Baker), who runs errands for the rich folk (which means stealing into zombie-land and retrieving valuables). He’s accompanied by a loyal sidekick (Robert Joy) and a streetwalker (Asia Argento, the bewitching daughter of horror director Dario Argento), the latter liberated from a cage fight with two hungry zombies.
The story isn’t much – both too simple and not quite clear enough – and Romero may be running out of ways to shoot zombies. His outlook is pretty bleak this time, and his attempt to draw a parallel between the threat of terrorism and his plot is tenuous.
He’s better at sorting out the haves and the have nots, particularly in a scene where a hired mercenary (John Leguizamo) stakes his claim with Hopper to be allowed to buy his way into the luxury Metropolis. Hopper’s withering reaction is entitlement at its most unruffled. Romero is also good, since “Dawn,” at showing the absurd lengths human beings will go to create systems of living, despite the unpleasantness around them.
And, of course, the movie has brains. Also entrails and organs. And a scene that gives a new meaning to “finger food.”
“Land of the Dead” probably won’t attract anybody except zombian enthusiasts, but it should be noted that this is an effective film (its terse dialogue exchanges had me wishing Romero would make a Western). In the way that genre movies can, each of Romero’s “Dead” films has reflected its era, and given a skeptical verdict. At this point he doesn’t seem to mind if the zombies win.
Zombie Big Daddy (Eugene A. Clark, center) leads a growing and evolving horde of the dead in their attack on the city of the living in “Land of the Dead.”
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