In the original Night
of the Living Dead, his first feature film, George Romero explored some
previously uncharted territory in the vast wilderness of horror, reinventing
the zombie movie and suggesting a new relevance in its central concept of the
reanimated dead. His essentially ridiculous notion of a disease that reawakens
corpses who then stagger about the countryside in search of live people to eat
somehow caught the imagination of filmmakers and filmgoers.
The low-budget picture spawned a number of much more
expensive sequels, remakes, and imitations, some of them his own work,
inspiring a whole generation of filmmakers to strive for ever new and more
gruesome displays of shock and disgust.
Although a rather small and limited subgenre, the
zombie flick often displays an inclination toward social and political
commentary. Like so many other popular films of the 1930s, a movie like The White Zombie, for example,
indirectly addresses a Marxist view of the oppression of the worker, hinting
that the frightening zombies actually become the slaves of the ruling classes,
a source of cheap labor, brutes who revolt against their masters just as
Frankenstein’s monster attempts to destroy his creator, or King Kong attacks
modern civilization. Romero’s original update of the form, however macabre,
appears to deal with the volatile issues of its temporal context, the 1960s,
especially the Cold War, racial tensions, and Vietnam.
Now, a generation later, after a number of other
zombie flicks, including Dawn of the Dead (itself made twice), which satirized consumerism, Romero advances his original
concept, uniting the premise of Night of
the Living Dead with a vision of the future right out of the Mad Max movies, which allows him to
comment once again on contemporary capitalism, social unrest, class tensions,
the way we live now. The picture shows some unspecified time some years from
the present, in which the dead occupy the countryside while the living hole up
in cities, sending heavily armed patrols out to kill the walking corpses by the
usual methods of shooting them in the head or burning them up.
The particular city in this film is Pittsburgh,
where a multimillionaire named Kaufman (Dennis Hopper) occupies a glittering
edifice that overlooks the city he controls, an impoverished community of slums
guarded by a private army and constantly threatened by throngs of walking
corpses. A group of heavily armed fighters under the command of Riley (Simon
Baker) regularly ventures out to the hinterlands, foraging in the deserted
towns for food and slaughtering as many of the cadavers as they can. Though
they serve Kaufman, the fighting men and women also regard him as an enemy,
intent only on enjoying the profits from their patrols.
As in nightmares, the slow, stumbling, apparently
mindless creatures, in various horrible stages of decay, seem absolutely
inescapable, somehow much more efficient as pursuers and killers than the
patrols in their armored vehicles equipped with machine guns and rockets.
Whatever their potential for fright, their uncoordinated, clumsy, but
unstoppable progress and their occasional invulnerability defy any sense of
logic in the film. Their climactic assault on Pittsburgh itself ends
ambiguously and inconclusively, apparently allowing for still more sequels as
well as indicating the possibility of some weird reconciliation of the living
and the dead.
Romero famously introduced cannibalism into the
horror flick, and naturally Land of the
Dead continues his fascination with the practice. With the assistance of
state-of-the-art special effects and makeup, the film simply wallows in blood,
flesh, and entrails, with a special taste for dismemberment and some really
creative decapitation — enough heads roll to make Robespierre envious. He
also shows that the dead can evolve, in this case acquiring some ability to
organize, follow a leader, devise methods of attack, and handle weapons: If
this trend continues, the living are finished.
Land of the Dead suggests the continued relevance
of its form, showing the future of cities, with wealthy citizens protected from
invading mobs by private armies, an oppressive class system maintaining the
servitude and poverty of workers, and power concentrated in the hands of a
ruling elite.
In a time when some prominent national figures look
rather like reanimated corpses themselves — e.g., the late Dick Cheney or
Alan Greenspan or even Strom Thurmond, who eventually did reach his latter end
— and a spectacularly unbalanced economy systematically squeezes the poor to
benefit the rich, and the zombies march inexorably toward us, Land of the Dead provides an appropriate
image of the state of the nation.
Land of the Dead(R) is playing at Canandaigua Theatres, Cinemark Tinseltown,
Culver Ridge Cinemas, Eastview Mall, Greece Ridge 12, Henrietta 18.
This article appears in Jun 29 – Jul 5, 2005.
