Land of the Dead

This sure doesn't look like a George Romero zombie film. I don't know that he's ever had a budget 1/8th this size for a movie before. Romero films always look terrific, but in their own, well, cheap way. Dawn of the Dead in particular is a film of constant action and epic scope that tells a A-level story on a B-level budget. In Land of the Dead, however, he had the full resources of a studio put behind him - name actors, glossy cinematography, digital surround sound, massive effects crews and computer wizards and most importantly time. Years in which to sculpt and craft a story, to make sure it was the story he wanted to tell.

Now that it's done, I'm happy to report that most of his essential Romero-ness remains. The film's a bit choppy and short, the soundtrack kind of sucks and the conclusion is a little pat, but the film is still a major achievement, proof that Romero remains a focused, ingenious filmmaker capable of producing horror films of wit, intensity, intelligence and brutality in equal measure.



As I said in my paragraph on Romero in the Top 101 Directors column yesterday, his genius is in merging fun gory horror films with sharp social commentaries. Most famously, his Night of the Living Dead plays as a reaction to the conformity of the McCarthy years, when people were afraid that radical behavior would lead them to be ostracized or worse. Dawn of the Dead, his follow-up, attacks consumer culture, using zombies to stand in for common Americans stuck in grinding, materialistic and self-centered routines. And all three films, including the less-successful but underrated Day of the Dead, use zombies as a plot device rather than an antagonist - these are stories of people turning on one another in a crisis situation. The undead merely exacerbate an already bad situation.

In Land of the Dead, Romero goes for his most ambitious allegorical horror show yet, particularly in how he continues the neat little narrative trick of having all his "Dead" films follow one another chronologically. Night of the Living Dead showed us the initial zombie outbreak, Dawn of the Dead shows the zombies spreading out and causing humans to flee the big cities, Day of the Dead is a post-apocalyptic nightmare in which bands of survivors must avoid teeming armies of the undead. And in the new film, scattered outposts of humanity cull together behind electrified fences, desperately hoping for some as-yet-absent source of salvation.

One such outpost is the luxurious Fiddler's Green, a skyscraper converted into elegant accomodations for the super-wealthy by the meticulous and evil Kaufman (Dennis Hopper). Kaufman has quite a system set up for himself - residents pay him an exhorbitant amount to live in the safety of The Green and he in turn pays roving bands of mercenaries to scatter throughout the American wasteland scavenging supplies to bring back for guest accomodations.

It all works well until the blue-collar mercenaries, headed by the self-righteous Cholo (John Leguizamo) hijacks The Green's armored truck, the Dead Reckoning, and threatens to blow up Kaufman's entire housing project if he's not paid $5 million. Then Kaufman must send out other employees (the bland Simon Baker and blander but more attractive sia Argento) to stop him, and the stage is set for a face-off in Zombietown.

Land of the Dead works on so many levels at once, it's a difficult film to review. I don't really know where to begin. Most obviously, it's an exciting and gruesome horror film. It's not really all that scary, but it is exceptionally gory, so it all pretty much evens out. Seriously, I don't know that I've ever seen as many pulling-out-intestines shots in any film ever. There's something about extracted bowels that really seems to please Romero.

But there's also a very strong Marxist streak to the film, with its view of not one but two simultaneous class uprisings. The idea is actually floated here that lower-class people have more in common with zombies than with their social and financial "betters."

Zombies have begun to evolve and become more intelligent, with the above-pictured zombie Big Daddy (Eugene Clark) attaining a sort of zombie consciousness. He figures out how to fire guns and use tools, rudimentary language skills (mostly grunting), and leads a sort of zombie proletariat revolution against Fiddler's Green. This coincides with Cholo's revolt against the cruelty and exclusiveness of Kaufman's "paradise," which has rejected him for membership even though he has scammed enough money to pay for admittance.

The idea is simple enough. To a rich capitalist like Kaufman, everyone without money is equally useless and disposable. Just as he has built walls to keep out the undead who mill about the countryside, he has inner walls to keep out the servant and peasant class. He needs them to provide basic services, but he can't have them mucking about in his beautiful utopia. They are all dead to him; the only difference is that the zombies mean him direct harm whereas the poor people are more complacent.

In addition to this, Romero has also added some allegorial ties to the War on Terror. Cholo refers to his mission against Fiddler's Green as "a jihad." Kaufman memorably states that Fiddler's Green doesn't "negotiate with terrorists." And the friendly warning system, that informs Fiddler's Green residents that there's no reason to fear a breach of security even as zombies pound on the glass doors outside, is a particularly sly comment on authoritarian systems in times of crisis.

There was a time when many horror films tackled real issues with this sort of maturity and insight. I fear this time is over, for now anyway, in American filmmaking. Most of the young guys who seem poised to take over the genre just lack an essential seriousness. They're like Eli Roth, who helmed the disappointing Cabin Fever, which was little more than a retread of familiar 70's and 80's horror movie staples and conventions. Just as Romero was ahead of his time in the 60's, telling zombie stories with far-reaching cultural relevancy, he has remained ahead of time all the way up to 2005. Hopefully, some other directors will start to catch up.