Welcome To the Dead Parade #3: Six Crazy Nights
Ooookaaaaayyyyyy. On to a different kind of insanity: The kind that ensues when, for whatever reason, zombies start popping out of nowhere to feast on your brains. On to six crazy Nights (and Dawns, and Lands, and Days, and Diaries, finally followed by some much-needed Survival) of the living dead as envisioned by George A. Romero and his (mostly incompetent) crew of directors and soforth. Note that the following deals only with the remakes and recent sequels, not the original films.
Let's begin with the 1990 remake of Night Of the Living Dead. Although suffering from the poor visual quality and overdone acting commonly seen at the time (exasperated, shouting power-struggle performances from the actors and scream-queen performances from the actresses), Night has one of the most entertaining and suspenseful opening sequences I have ever seen in a horror movie. Barbara, the heroine, and her goofy husband go to a cemetery to visit her dead mother, only to be attacked by the shambling, rambling, moaning dead. She escapes to their car and, after fumbling for the ignition key with a zombie banging and clawing at her windshield, frantically drives backwards downhill into a tree while the zombies limp and crawl to catch up. Luckily, she stumbles upon what appears to be a deserted country home. Enter a few more undead surprises and The Candyman himself, Tony Todd, as a fellow survivor looking for shelter, who must get a shocked Barbara back to her senses so that they can actually be of use in each other's survival. The rest of the movie is pretty much a bunch of screaming, nailing wood to the windows, fighting with other survivors, zombies constantly trying to break in, and the audience expecting a zombie to be hiding around every corner in the house and not finding any. After a good chunk of time is wasted on that, we actually get back to the point of the movie: Barbara, representing the desensitization of America to all behaviors American, rednecks hanging zombies from trees and shooting them like Klan members in the old South, man's inhumanity to the different (who are, at their core, the same), and ultimately, the message Romero later bludgeons us with in four of the next five films: "They're us. Oh, my God! We're them and they're us!"
One of the best of Romero's new Dead Series, Dawn Of the Dead stars Sarah Polley in the Barbara-type role, Ving Rhames as a badass cop, and Mekhi Phifer as an over-protective father-to-be. The opening sequence, as in Night, is one of the best I have seen. Polley's character, a nurse named Ana, is working late at the hospital, where a strange insurgence of rabies victims is the talk of the ICU, but not really worth looking into. She goes home to her perfect, peaceful little suburban cul de sac, waves to the little girl rollerblading on her block, kisses her husband on her way in the door, and begins to tell him about her day. Suddenly, the girl is in their bedroom, rabid and covered in blood, and biting her husband to death. Ana is able to escape her infected husband by crawling out the small bathroom window, only to find that the world has gone directly and rapidly to hell. Explosions, turbo-zombies (a fairly new concept in 2004), and other chaos dot the once peaceful landscape as, once again, our shellshocked heroine crashes her car into a tree. Cue a chilling credits sequence, backed by Johnny Cash singing "When The Man Comes Around." The bulk of the movie takes place in, on, and around the local mall, where Ana, the cop, the expecting couple, and a few surviving mall residents are holed up. Although the message is not so cheesily and bluntly stated, the zombies outside the mall are akin to a mindless horde of shoppers waiting for Mervyns to open, open, open so they can rip savagely through each other and the sales racks inside to get what they crave, and the lynching rednecks are this time replaced by a band of sadistically selfish mall security guards. One of the best parts (better than the group's daring Twisted Metal-inspired escape, but not as good as the opening) is Rhames' cop befriending the owner of the gun shop across the way; the two try to spot zombies of their least favorite celebrities in the crowd and pick them off. Also listen to the song somewhere in the middle of the film. It is a lounge cover of "The Sickness" by Disturbed. I had heard the original on the radio, so I laughed my ass off as soon as I recognized what it was.
The next movie, Land Of the Dead, went back to the blatant "We're them and they're us" statement right from the beginning. The zombies here are still in turbo mode and eating human flesh, but are no longer mindless. They crudely play musical instruments, share meals with each other, learn to use guns (uh-oh) and other tools, communicate in a primitive caveman sort of way, and become aware of their own immortality. On the living side of things, mankind has set up its own fortified society under a wealthy dictator (played in his usual matter-of-fact-yet-crazy-underneath way by Dennis Hopper), who throws his opponents and the dregs of society into cage fights with the living dead. In addition to searching for survivors, shooting zombies in the head, and keeping the fortified city safe with their custom-made assault vehicles, the rescue team (the good guys, played by The Mentalist star Simon Baker, John Leguizamo and other, less well known actors) are also concerned with overthrowing Hopper's dictator. There is one impressive scene where all of the zombies walk into the moat surrounding the city, cross it underwater, and come out the other side. But as Romero & Co. always seem to do, they pad time with a lot of running and screaming, and come back to the "They're trying to be us" message; Simon Baker's character says it best near the end of Land: "Don't shoot them. They're just looking for somewhere to go, same as us." Lock, schlock, and two smoking barrels.
Possibly the worst Dead of them all, the "update" of Day Of the Dead is also the first to propose a source of the zombie outbreak: an unusual strain of blood-borne flu. Unfortunately, the zombies here are made unnecessarily more turbo than ever; J-Ho rejects that blur forward with the aid of rocking, flickering camerawork, and even display the ability to crawl along the ceiling. Amid all this, Romero has abandonned the "zombies can learn" concept that made Land moderately tolerable in favor of a more obvious, "story"-convenient concept that zombies retain some fragment of who they were before they were infected. I get the symbolism that zombies are associated with African slaves, mindlessly commercial society, the unknown, the enemy within, human savagery, owner-pet relationships, a medium for "why can't we all just get along?," blah, blah, blah; pick an angle for making socio-economic commentary and zombies can fit in there somewhere. But the fact is that if you look deep enough into the lion's mouth for an ounce of humanity, you'll be several pounds of humanity in his stomach after he bites your head off.
Then Romero goes back to the slow-moving zombie concept for Diary Of the Dead, a Blair Witch-style documentary-within-a-movie. The characters--film students--start out making a cheap mummy movie (isn't it ironic? Don'tcha think?) for their final project that turns into a documentation of "The Death Of Death" so that other survivors are made aware of their experiences and the ignorant can become aware of the outside world. A few dramatic moments (having to bury loved ones after shooting their dead bodies in the head--further testament to man's inhumanity to man) and trying-to-be-clever literary devices ("It's not that people are waking up dead. It's that dead people are waking up." I can hear Sheryl Crow and JFK screaming with jealousy right now), but aside from the documentary approach and the return of the classic zombie, there's nothing outstanding here.
Saving the best for last, Romero scales down the production value for Survival Of the Dead, the first in the series to be a canonical sequel. Survival follows a quartet of soldiers (who raided the film students' motor home in Diary Of the Dead) as they search for sanctuary in a world overrun with "Dead Heads" (what's so wrong about being a fan of Jerry Garcia, anyway?). After running afoul of a shady sea captain, the four make their way to the exiled captain's home of Plum Island, an Irish community where his lifelong rival has taken it upon himself to domesticate the undead and train them as slave labor.
Like the rest of Romero's series, Survival becomes a vehicle (thankfully, a much less ostentatious Mac Truck than in the past) for commentary on everything from degradation of the media ("now that everyone's dead, the only people on the radio are assholes") to slavery, torture, religious fanaticism, and war. It also incorporates some elements of previous Deads, such as the zombies' ability to learn and/or retain a measure of who they used to be.
Unlike much of the series before it, Survival keeps the running and screaming to a minimum, and keeps the pace and number of zombies low to heighten the almost non-existent suspense. And while there is still the drama and stigma that comes when a character has to "put down" one of their loved ones, the tone is generally more campy and fun than in the rest of the series, seemingly as a throwback to cheesy zombie flicks like Return I & II and Night Of the Living Dead. Even the makeup effects look somewhat retro, tending more towards gaunt and pale and utilizing less exposed gore.
So what we have here is an actual sequel with more subtle commentary, less gore, and more character than the five movies that came before it. It's new, it's different, and I like it.
Night: C, Dawn: C+, Land: C-, Day: D+, Diary: D, Survival: B-
Next issue, the Dead Parade marches on as I give you a Just the Ticket Update on the state of the Residents. Until then, give your friends a taste of the Ticket and spread the fever.
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