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LAND OF THE DEAD (2005)
Alas, Savini only PLAYS a zombie George Romero put out a zombie movie about every decade until he skipped over the 90's for some reason, and has been far from prolific since then; this is only his second movie since I was a teenager. So to call this long awaited might be an understatement. Two things surely tempered that enthusiasm - the makeup wasn't by Tom Savini, and it's rated R. Trying to release a movie theatrically without a rating is probably less feasible now than it ever has been, so I don't really blame him for this, and not being up to splat is not so much of a problem, since it's as bloody as any R-rated movie I can remember. This movie has enough problems to sink it without my apprehensions helping it along. Land Of The Dead is almost certainly the weakest Dead movie yet, lacking even the scattershot inspiration of Day. It doesn't seem very well thought-through, which is hard to forgive when there's been so much time in which to iron out its story's wrinkles. Without the Romero name, one suspects this might not have even gotten a theatrical release, and considering the long wait between movies you'd think this would feel like a movie Romero had wanted to make for a long time, instead of one hammered out quickly before zombie movies go out of fashion for another twenty years. Set an unspecified amount of time after zombies have overrun the world, the bulk of Land Of The Dead takes place in an unnamed city (presumably Pittsburgh) which is surrounded by water on two sides and an electric fence on a third, in the doomed assumption that zombies can't cross water. Most of the human survivors live in the streets below, but a wealthy elite lives in Fiddler's Green, a gleaming tower which appears to have the only working lights at night. People in the tower and people in the streets have one thing in common; they're living off of scavenged bits of the old world while entertaining themselves to their doom. The tower people like shopping, and the unwashed masses outside have to make do with gladiatorial zombie fights. A disgruntled employee of the Fiddler's Green elite (John Leguizamo) hijacks the anti-zombie RV Dead Reckoning (regrettably, it isn't nearly as much fun as the school buses in the Dawn remake), and threatens to shoot its missiles at the tower unless...I don't even remember what his demands are, but nothing could've made more sense than just driving away with it and not coming back. So the mayor of Fiddler's Green (Dennis Hopper) gets Dead Reckoning's designer (Simon Baker) go retrieve the machine. The setting of this movie is the biggest problem; none of it made sense to me. Since the value of the bills isn't based on anything, of what use is money beyond kindling? Never mind of what use money is here - when the mayor attempts to flee the town with suitcases full of money (to spend where, on what?) one wonders how somebody too stupid to have asked himself these questions could possibly have been responsible for creating a pseudo-thriving community like Fiddler's Green in the first place. What's powering that tower, or the fence for that matter? Water? What use is TV if nobody's broadcasting anything other than ads for the tower, something everybody watching already wants anyway? When zombies are gladiatorially pitted against each other to fight over dogs and cats, why would the crowd be so into it when that's ramped up to a sexy hooker? If they were doing this regularly, I could understand, but as a new thing, I don't buy it. It takes so little imagination to think of better uses for a sexy hooker. The sledgehammer satire here will give new parameters of unsubtlety to anyone who thought the satire in Dawn was too heavy-handed. Fiddler's Green, the ultimate gated community, advertises to all the undesirables in the streets below but doesn't actually let them in even when they can afford it because they're not our kind of people. Hopper's butler always seems a breath away from saying "Yes, massa!" and predictably has a makes an escape into the night as his boss meats his fate, a "Feets don't fail me now" moment if there ever was one. Hopper repeatedly calls his enemies "terrorists", bland do-gooder Baker wants to leave for Canada, Fiddler's Green security dress like SS officers...do you get the idea? Certainly so far as zombies go, Land Of The Dead gives the fans much to complain about. Those who lamented the running zombies in the Dawn remake (why shouldn't zombies be able to run?) will be relieved to see that here, they're still the shambling, old-school zombies. And then they'll see that everything else about them ruins them way more than running ever could and they'll beg for running zombies. They'll beg! When we first see the zombies, they're rendered harmless by fireworks - the fireworks go off, the zombies look up, and you can pretty much just walk past them. I know zombies were never supposed to be smart, but they never seemed more harmless and easy to deal with. Day taught us about instinct being their primary motivator for their behavior; does this mean their instinct to look up when there are fireworks is more powerful than their instinct to eat human flesh that's walking by? That's disappointing. When they finally learn to look down again, it's not even a moment of horror because it just brings them back to what we'd expected of them before the fireworks. And they do eat some human flesh, tear some people apart, and shamble along slowly. But if their interest is in eating flesh, why would they blow people up with propane tanks or rip bellybutton rings out squirming vixens? That the makeup isn't by Tom Savini doesn't bother me that much; what bothers me is that some of the makeup really sucks. Especially that on the lead zombie, "Big Daddy", who gets more close-up screentime than any other zombie, and has the worst makeup job - just a shitty latex mask around his eyes with a perfectly healthy, fleshy human nose poking out from under it. Come on, the girl with half her cheek missing looked great - why couldn't the zombie we see the most often look that good? Big Daddy spends much of his time as the point man during zombie-on-human battles, with the humans mowing down waves of zombies as they shamble forth. He survives a few of these, which is lucky for the movie since the co-operative behavior of the zombies is limited to following his examples and without him, they'd all just stand around like dumb shits staring at the sky again. Maybe he survives because while everybody else shambles, he strides about forcefully enough that even if we don't see him run, he looks like he probably could. He only needs to survive long enough to get the zombies into the city though, because that's exactly as far as the notion of zombies' new rudimentary thinking is taken. Four movies over the course of almost forty years, and Romero has taken zombies from being mindless eating machines to mindless eating machines that can be told what to do, sometimes. The scares are a bunch of well-telegraphed "Boo!" moments, the characters behave in stupid ways at every turn for no reason other than to pad out the movie and add supposed suspense to the scenes (why else would Dead Reckoning's driver back up all of a sudden while one of her own was trying to climb up the windshield?), and the dialogue is mostly pretty dumb, not dumb the way Day's was dumb, dumb in more of a "I came for a battle...but this is a fucking massacre!" way. And there's a fucking ridiculous ending that takes the movie's message from "the zombies are us" to "zombies are people too", I mean come the fuck on. I didn't hate Land Of The Dead, but there aren't a lot of nice things I can whip up to say about it. The gore is more plentiful and nasty than you'd expect from an R-rated movie, and it's got a good gritty look to it. One character gets in a funny line explaining his acceptance of being chomped and Robert Joy as a mildly retarded, facially scarred sniper attracts some of the same sentimental sympathy Bub got in Day. The cast otherwise features Dennis Hopper, Asia Argento, Tom Savini, that guy in Shaun Of The Dead...all of them bringing nothing at all to the movie other than their supposed "cred", which you'd think a zombie movie directed by George Romero would never need. (c) Brian J. Wright 2005 BACK TO THE L's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE |