Just about everyone knows about zombie master George A. Romero, the director who effectively created the standard pop culture image of zombies. I haven't seen much of his stuff: I watched a really poor public domain version of Night of the Living Dead a couple weeks ago, and it didn't do much for me -- though some of the suspense may have been lost because the picture quality was so wretched. (The catatonic woman whose boyfriend was killed in the first scene was really, really hard to watch, though.) I enjoyed Zack Snyder's remake of Dawn of the Dead (rating: 75) in a vacuum. It's long past time that I started watching the master in action. Even at the age of 69, few are capable of getting more out of a dollar. When Hollywood finally gave him $15 million to come back to the zombie genre after 20 years, he came up with a winner.
Romero's never been known for subtlety: when he's commented on racism and American consumerism in his previous movies, you know exactly where he stands. Land of the Dead is, for better or worse, his Iraq movie: John Leguizamo talks about a jihad, and bad guy Dennis Hopper gets to say, "We don't negotiate with terrorists." The main thrust of the plot follows Riley and Cholo, former partners in zombie killing who both want to find peace but choose different ways to do it. Riley plans on getting a car and driving to Canada, where there are supposed to be no people or zombies; Cholo decides to steal a high-powered battle tank and attempts to extort money from Hopper by threatening to destroy the human enclave that Hopper runs. And, of course, there are zombies everywhere. Hopper claims to have patterned his character on Donald Rumsfeld, and the zombies -- who are capable of communicating with each other and learning, and appear to be remembering some of their lost humanity -- are pretty clearly the insurgents. There probably are no real-life counterparts for Baker, Leguizamo, or Baker's sidekick Asia Argento.
The thing is, it's basically just a good action movie. There's tons of blood, gore and death, some of it really icky, and make-up maestro Tom Savini has a cameo. (So do Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright of Shaun of the Dead, one of Romero's favorite movies, rating: 90.) It's pretty astonishing that this movie was made for $15 million, because film budgets have become so strongly stratified over the past few years and particularly since the writers' strike and recession: blockbusters cost $80 million and up, and indie dramas and quirky comedies cost $40 million and below. Romero's a special case, because he's a legend and a cult hero, and he'll always be able to find someone willing to give him a million to make a new movie. (His 2007 follow-up, Diary of the Dead, was made for $2 million.)
It certainly isn't a perfect movie, but it's barely an hour and a half long, which makes up for a lot of flaws. The plot has a couple more threads than it needs, as Baker's pursuit of Leguizamo detracts from the more general question of how these humans live in a country in which they are completely surrounded by evolving zombies. Because they're out on the road killing zombies wherever they see them, it's different from the more claustrophobic thrills in Night of the Living Dead. It really is hard to consider this a horror movie; it's an action movie by a horror director. But it's a fun one.
Rating: 78
Crossposted on Remingtonstein.