director/screenwriter
George A. Romero
producers
Mark Canton
Bernie Goldmann
Peter Grunwald
cinematographer
Miroslaw Baszak
music
Reinhold Heil
Johnny Klimek
editor
Michael Doherty
cast
Simon Baker (Riley)
John Leguizamo (Cholo)
Dennis Hopper (Kaufman)
Asia Argento (Slack)
Robert Joy (Charlie)
Eugene Clark (Big Daddy)
Joanne Boland (Pretty Boy)
Jennifer Baxter (Number 9)
Pedro Miguel Arce (Pillsbury)
Sasha Roiz (Manolete)
Phil Fondacaro (Chihuahua)
Tom Savini (Machete Zombie)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 93m
u.s.
release: 6/23/05
video
availability: TBA
official
website
other george
a. romero films
reviewed on this website:
- dawn
of the dead
- day
of the dead
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The key to George A. Romero's
Dead films is that, movie by movie, the flesh-eating zombies
become more and more sympathetic -- animalistic, but pure and
sincere, compared with corrupt human survivors -- until, in the
new fourth entry Land of the Dead, they emerge
as something like heroes. Breathes there a moviegoer with soul
so dead who won't cheer on the zombies as they tuck into a refreshing
midnight snack of rich people? Romero has always used his zombie
films as vehicles for social commentary, and here, several years
after the dead began to rise and eat the living, the city is
separated into two segments: those who are wealthy and white
enough to afford a safe skyscraper existence far away from the
moaning undead; and everyone else. What's more, the zombies have
grown tired of being used for target practice. Through instinct,
or perhaps through trial and error, they have begun to learn.
For many horror fans, Romero's
Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Dawn
of the Dead (1979) are the gold standard of independently
financed fearmaking. His Day
of the Dead (1985) was by necessity truncated -- Romero
simply didn't have the budget to realize his initial concept
-- and it was a bitter and frustrated movie, yet still offered
some pleasures. Two decades have passed since Romero has put
a zombie in front of a camera, and the danger is that some fans
will bring to Land of the Dead twenty years of
anticipation, dreams of the epic Romero should have been free
to make for all these years in limbo. Forget all that. The film
cannot and will not meet such expectations; no film could. What
it does, and does tightly and with a finely wrought sense of
purpose I haven't seen from Romero in a very long while, is to
tell a ripping good zombie yarn.
The hero, of a sort, is Riley
(Simon Baker), a weary veteran of warfare with the "stenches."
He has built an impenetrable transport rig called Dead Reckoning,
and in it he and his men travel to hot spots in the zombie-laden
areas of the city, scavenging for supplies. (This saga may have
begun in 1968 in our time, but in the movies' timeline we're
probably only talking about a span of a few years, which would
explain why there are still places that can be scavenged from.)
One of Riley's men, Cholo (John Leguizamo), has other ideas;
his scheme is to hijack Dead Reckoning and threaten to blow up
the rich-people sector of Fiddler's Green unless the boss of
everything, Mr. Kaufman (Dennis Hopper), gives Cholo a large
amount of money. Meanwhile, a band of zombies, gradually growing
in number, line up behind a vengeful zombie (Eugene Clark) who,
like "Bub" in Day of the Dead, is a rather
quick study.
The movie is fast but never
rushed; with a master's control, Romero sets his characters in
motion and against each other. Special-effects guru Tom Savini
isn't in charge of the gore this time (he does reprise his role
from Dawn, though, a brutal machete-wielding biker
now turned shambling zombie), but Savini's loss is Greg Nicotero's
gain; his zombie make-up is, dare I say, subtly crafted, and
the splattery bits are suggested more often than shown, just
as in Night of the Living Dead. I'd also say that,
with a cast including Asia Argento as an ex-hooker Riley rescues
and Robert Joy as a sort of Lennie to Riley's George, not to
mention dependable veterans Leguizamo and Hopper, Land of
the Dead boasts the best acting since Night.
The movie successfully brings this series full circle, or perhaps
begins (dare we hope?) another trilogy. Hey, if George Lucas
could do it, why not this much more visionary George?
Land of the Dead quieted my misgivings early on, when
we see zombies chained up for cheap entertainment at some punk-goth
dive frequented by the scummy dilettantes of the city. You ache
for one of those poor zombies to break loose and gnaw some meat,
and soon enough they do. In the Dead films, Romero shows
us humanity at its most callous, against which the guileless
hunger of the zombies seems innocent. Supposedly soulless, the
flesh-eaters have more soul than those trying to eradicate them.
Romero understands his genre from top to bottom: The subject
is not humans but monsters, and how they reflect each other,
and how, as Nietzsche put it, humanity consists mainly of battling
monsters without becoming one. It's a message that has been uniquely
relevant in every decade Romero has advanced it, and it is ultra-relevant
now.
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