George A. Romero still serves up a mean cannibal buffet, although his brand of raw-meat cinema has lost some sizzle. Land of the Dead is everything fans of Romero’s zombie flicks expect, and less.
Maybe it’s the fault of Shaun of the Dead, last year’s hilarious spoof of all things undead. The Scream trilogy ruined slasher movies forever by pointing out the dumb things that must happen in order for victims to be picked off. Shaun of the Dead so precisely picked apart the zombie myth that even Romero, the godfather of gore, can’t make audiences squirm as much anymore.
Land of the Dead is all meat and no potatoes, or any other socially conscious garnish that Romero used to lay on the plate.
There are brief nods to class conflict, runaway commercialism and racial equality that the filmmaker sneaked into his Night, Dawn and Day of the Living Dead movies. Yet viewers must strain to connect the dots, and they must even add a few to make the picture clearer.
Romero originally planned a trilogy; this fourth movie takes us to the flesh trough one too many times.
| ‘The Land of the Dead’
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The mysterious epidemic of revived corpses chomping humans has continued, and the most affluent survivors are tucked away safely in Fiddler’s Green, a high-rise community controlled in Donald Trump fashion by Kaufman (Dennis Hopper). He has an elite team of zombie hunters led by Riley (Simon Baker) and Cholo (John Leguizamo), who venture outside the protected area for supplies and random zombie kills.
Cholo wants to live large, so he steals Kaufman’s super weapon, an armored vehicle named Dead Reckoning, and demands a fortune in extortion money, or else he’ll destroy Fiddler’s Green. Riley is dispatched to recover Dead Reckoning, while the zombie army storms the gates of the city.
The most interesting social aspect of Land of the Dead is that Big Daddy (Eugene Clark) is smarter than the average zombie, remembering how to use tools and communicating through grunts and screams. Big Daddy is African-American and, compared with the movie’s humans, a sympathetic hero. He recalls Romero’s decision to make a black man the hero of Night of the Living Dead in 1968, when such an idea was rare in movies. Now the shoe’s on the other foot, even if that foot is gnawed to the bone.
Other satirical touches don’t work as well. Fiddler’s Green isn’t as sharp of an indictment of commercialism as the abandoned shopping mall of Dawn of the Dead. There isn’t a nuclear family subtext to the violence that still makes Romero’s first movie shocking. Kaufman’s secret industry of using zombies for gambling purposes, or pimping low-class humans such as Slack (Asia Argento) aren’t explored enough.
Land of the Dead is more concerned with carnage, but even those cannibalistic sights are old hat today. Heads are ripped off or blasted to bits, a spinal column gets pulled from a victim, the term “finger food” is taken literally, and the worst fear of anyone with body piercings is confirmed. Horror fans ate it up at a screening. But the most unsettling thing about Land of the Dead was how many parents brought young children to the show to witness all this terror. Now that’s sick.
“George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead”
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R for pervasive strong violence and gore, language, brief sexuality and some drug use|HORROR|1 hour, 33 minutes|Written and directed by George A. Romero; photography by Miroslaw Baszak; starring Simon Baker, John Leguizamo, Asia Argento, Robert Joy, Dennis Hopper, Eugene Clark|Opens today at area theaters.
