I wrote this review for an online horror magazine a while back and
thought I’d dig it out, dust it off and republish here ...
Horror/Zombies – Starring Dennis Hopper, Simon Baker, John
Leguizamo, Asia Argento. Written/Directed by George A Romero (2005)
Zombies with guns …
Living Dead fans had a long,
nail biting (or should that be finger biting?) wait for 2005’s Land
of the Dead. Two decades after Day of the Dead, zombie
veteran Romero returned with his fourth offering. Was it worth the
wait?
Three years into a zombie apocalypse, survivors live in a walled
city in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The city is ‘owned’ by Mafia
style boss, Paul Kaufman (Dennis Hopper). He has created the utopian
Fiddler’s Green complex, where the wealthy enjoy ‘Luxury living
in the grand old style’ with restaurants and shopping malls. The
‘have nots’ live outside in shanty town squalor. Kaufman keeps
the lower class citizens in their place with a steady supply of vices
– alcohol, prostitution, drugs – ensuring that they rely on his
system.
Kaufman employs a team to scavenge the outside world for supplies.
Here we have a divide between the movie’s hero, Riley (Simon Baker)
and the anti-hero, Cholo (John Leguizamo). The former, dependable and
honest, the latter, a renegade after his own interests.
As the opening credits role, grainy black and white footage shows a
zombie outbreak happening ‘Some time ago’, accompanied by an
audio of old news reports. The movie begins in earnest under the
heading of ‘Today’ with a slow panning shot that reveals a
desolate town, overrun with zombies. The colours are muted, giving a
‘twilight’ effect. Romero is showing us a cold, dead world. A
world already ravaged by zombies, long before we sat down with our
popcorn and large Diet Coke. The living do not belong here. This
contrasts beautifully with the bright, artificially lit Fiddler’s
Green complex, with its clinical, shopping mall interior, Elevator
Muzak, vibrant colours and its cocooned and blissfully ignorant
inhabitants. Outside the complex there are the cold, grey, bustling
streets of the shanty town.
Not as violent as The Horde, The Living Dead remakes
or 28 Weeks Later, Land of the Dead is still enough of
a gorefest to keep any fan happy. With high production values and a
star cast it loses the charm of its low budget predecessors. But
themes of social class, friendship, revenge, ransom, and gangster
elements create a meatier plot than your average fight-for-survival
zombie movie.
In Land of the Dead, zombies have begun to ‘learn’ and
evolve from their brain-dead state. In the opening a survivor
remarks, ‘It’s like they’re pretending to be alive’. Riley
responds, ‘Isn’t that what we’re doing?’ An army of zombies
is led by Gas Attendant-Zombie to attack the city and get revenge on
the humans intent on wiping out his kind. He ‘teaches’ his army
to use tools, including guns, to fight back at the humans.
I appreciate the attempt at moving the genre on. Warm Bodies
(2013) has embraced this idea to great effect with a zombie-hero who falls
in love with a human girl and begins to ‘heal’ and learn how to
become human again. But I worry how far this theme can go. Would
watching a movie where zombies and humans live together harmoniously
be that interesting? It could be, but with both 2008’s Diary of
the Dead, or 2009’s Survival of the Dead abandoning the
theme, I’m guessing that Romero has his doubts too.
Rating 4 out of 5
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