Wel­come to The George A. Romero Zom­bie Cycle Film Fes­ti­val. Join The Dork Report in revis­it­ing all five canon­i­cal episodes in the orig­i­nal epic zom­bie saga:

• Part I: Night of the Liv­ing Dead
• Part II: Dawn of the Dead
• Part III: Day of the Dead
• Part IV: Land of the Dead
• Part V: Diary of the Dead

George A. Romero’s spo­radic zom­bie flicks are some­times decades apart in pro­duc­tion, but nev­er­the­less form a chrono­log­i­cal sequence telling the story of the down­fall of soci­ety from every angle. Night of the Liv­ing Dead (1968) is set in the early days, with a few ran­dom civil­ians trapped in a farm­house. Dawn of the Dead (1979) zooms out a lit­tle to see what’s going on in cities and sub­ur­bia, and Day of the Dead (1985) exam­ines a final remain­ing pocket of sur­vivors months into the plague. Land of the Dead opens some time after the zom­bie epi­demic has swept the world, and the sur­viv­ing dregs of human­ity have retreated behind the for­ti­fied walls of the ulti­mate gated com­mu­nity, a city dubbed Fiddler’s Green. Romero has used each of his zom­bie films to satir­i­cally artic­u­late some social com­men­tary, and here his tar­gets seem to be big busi­ness and class war­fare. Another pos­si­ble alle­gor­i­cal tar­get is the Israel / Pales­tine con­flict. Have humans walled the zom­bies out, or walled them­selves in?

A man named Kauf­man (Den­nis Hop­per) has set him­self up as mayor/president/king of Fiddler’s Green. Kauf­man is very much a busi­ness­man along the lines of Don­ald Trump or Michael Bloomberg, so here Romero seems to equate big busi­ness with total­i­tar­i­an­ism. Kaufman’s machi­na­tions ensure that his sup­posed safe haven is actu­ally a highly tiered class soci­ety. The rich live in high-rise com­fort while the under­classes starve in skeezy street-level slums. We know soci­ety is truly depraved when caged go-go dancers are the only form of entertainment.

wet zom­bies smell like wet, uh, zombies

In the world out­side, the zom­bies have long since eaten all humans within reach, and have noth­ing left to do but stand around. Despite the big bud­get, there only seem to be about a dozen of them. Some have returned to old rou­tines: work­ing gas sta­tions, push­ing shop­ping carts, and bang­ing tam­bourines. Dawn of the Dead showed zom­bies instinc­tu­ally drawn to the shop­ping mall (a new Amer­i­can inno­va­tion at the time) like pil­grims to Mecca. But Land of the Dead Goes fur­ther and sug­gests they have even greater pow­ers of logic, and can feel actual emo­tions such as vic­tim­iza­tion. Their leader Big Daddy (Eugene Clark) is soul­ful and sym­pa­thetic like Bub the zom­bie from Day of the Dead.

Kauf­man sends min­ions Riley (Nathan Fil­lon) and Cholo (John Leguizamo) out into the infested waste­lands, in car­a­vans of heav­ily armored vehi­cles. They dis­tract the “stench” (the deroga­tory term of choice for the undead) with fire­works as they loot for food and valu­ables to cart back to stock Kaufman’s larders in Fiddler’s Green. Riley and Cholo are old friends since fallen out, and their rela­tion­ship pro­vides the one gen­uinely funny bit of dia­logue: happy-go-lucky Cholo tells the per­pet­u­ally dour Riley: “Didn’t I tell you not to bang chicks with worse prob­lems than you?” That’s not bad advice, actually.

The intel­li­gent zom­bies, appar­ently feel­ing dis­en­fran­chised, orga­nize and mount an attack on the city. Any­way, Riley and Cholo finally become dis­il­lu­sioned about Kaufman’s utopia. Together with Slack (Asia Argento, daugh­ter of Dario Argento, who col­lab­o­rated with Romero on Dawn of the Dead), they try to escape for the imag­ined safe haven of Canada (as if they think they are merely dodg­ing the draft and not the twin threats of plague and humanity’s own venal over­lords). In true Romero fash­ion, the vil­lain­ous Kauf­man also hap­pens to be a racist, shout­ing epi­thets at the zomb­i­fied Cholo (John Leguizom­bie?) as he comes to kill him. If there ever were a point in human his­tory when race will have truly become irrel­e­vant, this ought to be it.

Den­nis Hop­per as the mayor from hell, or is that the mayor OF hell?

I don’t think Romero and his zom­bie films would be remem­bered with­out the racially charged end­ing of Night of the Liv­ing Dead and the pointed satire of con­sumerism found in Dawn of the Dead. But if he had started out with some­thing as unfo­cused as Land of the Dead, he prob­a­bly wouldn’t have been. Romero admits to Par­al­lax view he didn’t fully work out the anal­ogy: “I have to tell you that even when we started to shoot, I was wor­ried that this isn’t quite clear. Who are the ter­ror­ists, is it Cholo and his gang or the zom­bies? And it gave me a lit­tle pause, but we had to start shoot­ing because we had the money. I’m being per­fectly hon­est, I have to sit down and re-analyze it and fig­ure it out. Some­times you just run on instinct.” Even the round­table of hor­ror afi­ciona­dos on InternalBleeding.net agree that the movie is “not scary, but really gross.”

Land of the Dead obvi­ously has the biggest bud­get of all of Romero’s zom­bie cycle so far, and remains the only one with well-known stars. But it is only super­fi­cially “bet­ter” than its pre­de­ces­sors, fea­tur­ing big­ger names and more tech­no­log­i­cal pol­ish. As is the case with many a Hol­ly­wood pro­duc­tion, raised finan­cial stakes bring a low­er­ing of stan­dards and dimin­ish­ing returns: more money in, more shit out. A “some time ago…” pro­logue mon­tage illus­trates for the slower mem­bers of the audi­ence what zom­bies are all about. Per­haps the movie stu­dio exec­u­tives were pitch­ing the film to audi­ences beyond the usual hor­ror genre ghetto already versed with the zom­bie genre.

Offi­cial movie site: www.landofthedeadmovie.net

Homepageofthedead.com’s exten­sive archive of Land of the Dead info

Must read: The Light That Failed: George Romero’s Dead Rock On by Kath­leen Mur­phy; and George Romero Sur­veys the Dead by Sean Axmaker, both on Par­al­lax View

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.