NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968)
See it, or I'll come to get you, Barbra
A serious contender for the most imitated horror movie of all time, this baby spawned two sequels, a remake, a "Special Edition", a colorized version, and enough ripoffs, homages and parodies to choke every horse from here to the border (and that's a lot of goddamn horses). It's all for good reason - this is a movie that matters. It helped change the way movies - and not just horror movies - are made. It knocked down taboos left and right, waking up a 1968 audience to just how "safe" most of their entertainment was. And although it's a shade tame by today's standards, this movie still packs the power to scare people out of their wits.
The plot here is fairly simple, with zombies rising from the graves and chasing a group of mostly strangers into an old farmhouse, where they have to hole up and fight off the beasts who turn even their victims into cannibalistic death machines.
Though this movie makes no apparent aspirations for social significance the way its first sequel does, it became a rather important, taboo-smashing film in its own right. The casting of a black man in the lead role - this film's only real moral and intellectual center - was a fairly new concept in 1968. It doesn't stop there, either - this is a black man who takes charge by braining white "people" with a tire iron, slapping a white woman, and having a power struggle with a white man which takes up much of the film. That it's all fairly necessary in the context of the story aside, this is no small deal to an American society to whom civil rights was a pretty novel idea. Equally ground-breaking was this film's graphic violence, cannibalism and grue, although being in black & white made it less stomach-churning than it could have been.
The human center of this movie is Duane Jones. His performance brings to mind that of Kurt Russell in Carpenter's The Thing; the lone voice of reason in a crowd of panicky idiots and arrogant cowards, he takes charge by whatever means necessary - and if that means intimidation and threats of violence, so be it if it'll keep these people alive. He's just so good in this role, it amazes me that he never went on to do much else.
The setting of the film is kept wonderfully claustrophobic, and the zombies are all convincingly mindless and frightening (their best moment being when they haul away one screaming woman who sees the last person she wants to see in the crowd). The movie only drags once or twice. It even looks great, like it could have been filmed this decade, easily, on a pretty low budget.
This is not a perfect movie, and in some respects has not aged nearly as well as in others. The explanation for the zombie plague is given as a crashed probe sent to Venus - basically, your typical 1960's nonsense. No explanation is really necessary, and one this lame is just plain bad. Most of the performances are either plain or somewhat poor, with the exception of a very assured Jones. The dialogue's clumsy ("Stop it! You're ignorant!"), sometimes filling time with lengthy retellings of things we've already seen. The notion of "night" is fairly fluid here - not only does the degree of darkness outside keep changing, but all those "live" television reports are shot in the daytime!
The score sometimes goes dangerously over the top, particularly in the brass section. Much of the dialogue, for that matter, sounds like it was recorded in a small metal room (and this is indeed the remastered Anchor Bay edition). And most women in this movie just needed a shovel to the head - whether that says more about the actresses, the writing, or myself, hey, I don't care, they sucked any way I look at it. (sure, Judith Ridley and Marilyn Eastman were hot, but their characters didn't exactly make me cry out "You go, girl!")
It's with an eye on those things that I seem to have enjoyed Tom Savini's 1990 remake more than most people did. Honestly, I don't even remember if he kept the "Venusian probe" thing; I hope he didn't. But the characters and acting are definitely in another league from those in this film; maybe it wasn't as frightening, and certainly not as important to the cinema-going world, but it was at the very least a great effort. It also strove for a Dawn...-inspired depth; while the ending of the original movie is sad, it makes no attempt to suggest any sort of "the zombies are us" metaphor that is made explicit in its sequel and remake.
This isn't the greatest zombie movie ever - almost everybody has one or two they'd rank above it (my own? Return Of The Living Dead and Dawn Of The Dead). But it's the first one of the modern kind that really mattered. I've seen the novelization for this movie in a used book store, where it languished for a very long time. I have no idea if it's still there, and really, this isn't the kind of movie that begs to be experienced in novel form.
A truly classic film; most astounding of all is how soundly its sequel managed to top it! The "Special Edition" I've heard so little about doesn't sound very promising at all - on top of out-of-place new footage being inserted, there's actually old footage removed! Sounds like a boneheaded idea to me. Ah, well. We'll always have this baby, won't we?