The Unseen Movie Review

Land of the Dead

If you don’t like horror films, don’t bother. If you don’t like zombies, don’t bother. If you don’t like films with lots of violence, don’t bother. For those who like all of the above, it’s time to put your happy faces on – the master has returned.

Yes, twenty years after the last film in the classic series, and nearly forty years since the first, cult hero George A Romero has returned to the zombie genre which he did so much to popularise with the low-budget 1968 megahit Night of the Living Dead, which by now surely ranks as one of the most influential horror films of all time, we’re getting a new Romero zombie movie. After the recent rather disappointing remake of that black and white classic in 1990 and the more recent remake of the 1978 sequel Dawn of the Dead, now we finally get to see how it’s really done.

So, after Night of the Living Dead introduced the idea of the dead rising to hunt down and eat the juicy innards of the living, Dawn of the Dead’s superb zombie siege in a shopping mall, and Day of the Dead’s vision of the desperate underground resistance of the last remaining humans in an America entirely overrun, now we see humanity trying to recover from the refuge of a chaotic walled city fortress.

It may all sound like it’s getting more sci-fi than straight horror, but never fear – this is still pure violent, gore-filled zombie joy, complete with Romero’s trademark twisted humour. Hell, there’s even a (very brief) cameo from Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright, the writer/star and writer/director of Shaun of the Dead, last year’s Brit hit spoof of Romero’s movie trilogy.

Romero is obviously fully aware that his films can be as funny as they can be scary with their often incredibly slow, mindless, lumbering zombie stars. He’s also fully aware how much his films have been loving joked about in innumerable movies over the years. He evidently realised that, as beloved as the undead beasties he created may be amongst his fans, cinematic times have moved on and zombies have been parodied so much that an injection of something new is needed to keep up the scare factor.

So this time, the zombies seem to be evolving. Rather than a mere mindless mass, in some ways a metaphor for the mob mentality which had seemed endemic in parts of America in the decade in which the first film appeared, now the creatures are beginning to work more as a team. This new strain of the rotting hive shows signs of intelligence, just as the last remaining outpost of humanity is beginning to lose its cohesion.

Doubtless more metaphors and satires could be read into this latest addition to the series – the tendency of recent years for people who should be working together in the face of a common enemy to descend into bickering and infighting over the best ways to respond - and there is certainly more to this film than mere violence. But, at its heart, it remains grimy gorefest entertainment, pitched into the top league by Romero’s uncanny knack for a shock. This is horror as horror should be – gruesome, explicit and unrelenting. A top night out for fans of the genre, and guaranteed to be a welcome addition to the beer and curry-fuelled night in for years to come.

posted by Nosemonkey @ 4:23 AM