Lessons from Criterion: "Night of the Living Dead" by George A. Romero

What a strange and surreal experience it can be to look upon George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead” in the here and now, so long after zombie culture has ingrained itself firmly in our minds and our sense of cynicism has caught up to its underlying influence. All the obligatory questions emerge before a single frame has transpired. What does a dated relic from the era of indie counter-culture have to offer us now? Aren’t we too desensitized to be shocked or dismayed? Does any of the material on screen resonate in any way, especially given how effortlessly its grim sensibilities have been upstaged by dozens of indirect remakes, sequels and modern interpretations through the years? In almost every conversation about the most prolific of horror sub-genres, the popular benchmark is usually spoken of in only passively admiring terms. Many, including self-appointed experts on the pseudo-politics of the walking dead, are inclined to dismiss it on the grounds of its amateur values, downplaying the matter for the favor of the more technically-competent – and challenging – endeavors. Perhaps they are the sorts raised in the shadow of the much more well-regarded “Dawn of the Dead,” which was the first of Romero’s zombie films to add the much-lauded sardonic cultural subtext to the ambitious flesh-ripping violence.

House of the Dead / zero stars (2003)

The utterly dreadful “House of the Dead” wages war against the enthusiasm of moviegoers by asking a dangerous key question: can filmmakers be as stupid and irresponsible as the characters they exploit? Five minutes into the picture and I felt my inner child weeping for the future of the industry. That’s not to say this is an endeavor made with dubious intentions; on the contrary, I’m positive everyone involved legitimately thought they were participating in something amusing, at least on a professional level. But that makes their associations all the more damning when one contemplates them in the context of the final result, a film so inept that one can only gaze on it with relentless confusion. What possessed the director, Uwe Boll, to orchestrate his maddening opus with the hands of a clueless lunatic? What nerve did these writers (if you dare call them that) have in pitching a screenplay that most college students would be embarrassed to submit as a first draft assignment? And what of the designers of the game it is based on, who will no doubt look on at these images and find themselves inflamed with outrage that their source will now forever be disparaged by this stain of an incompetent adaptation?

Evil Dead / * (2013)

Deep in the woods underneath a rickety old cabin lies a weapon of great chaos and suffering. A potent stench of death acts as a wall against would-be adventurers, and corpses of cats line the basement ceiling as darker warnings to those willing to abandon all reason. At the end of the room, a bulky book seemingly made of flesh is wrapped in plastic and barbed wire, and its presence is of such chilling proportions that it inspires the soundtrack to reverberate lowly across the theater speakers. Inside, anxious scribbles serve as a last-ditch plea: “Leave this book alone.” But anyone who has ever made a horror movie, or more importantly seen one, knows how fool-hearted such declarations are when in the face of naïve 20-somethings who all wander away from civilization. Words are spoken out loud by one such moron, and a great presence of evil is awakened in the woods whose mission becomes clear right from the start: possess the five one by one in succession, corrupt their souls and mutilate their bodies, and open a gateway that will allow hell to overtake the world and consume it in eternal damnation.

28 Weeks Later / ***1/2 (2007)

The zombie movie is a silly but stimulating beast, a popular sub-genre in horror that has survived, evolved and outlasted many of its counterparts for as long as movies of this nature have been popular on the big screen. Those who acknowledge it as such would also be more than happy to stress the fact that the cinematic undead developed a lot more potential after they were discovered by George A. Romero, the director who, in 1968, took a nearly childish premise and used it as a platform for things no one would have ever expected of the material: that is, thought-provoking (and relevant) social and political commentary. Many an avid filmmaker have made great efforts, have sought various avenues, in their attempts to capture the success – or better still, the resonance – or the director’s notorious and on-going series of “Dead” films, but almost none have ever quite tapped into the safely-guarded chutzpah that continues to tower over all his would-be successors. Many still fail to realize that the key rests not in zombies themselves, but rather in the well-executed atmospheres that envelop them. Isolated, the flesh-eating undead make notoriously uninteresting characters; but surround them in a premise and narrative that tap into human feeling and psychological unrest, and an audience will have no problem projecting genuine fears onto them. Before Romero, stories about the undead were the stuff of B-movies, and zombies were just their visual distractions.

Land of the Dead / *** (2005)

There is a certain morbid obsession I share with the average moviegoer when it comes to zombie movies, an ongoing allure that has me inexplicably flocking to stories in which mankind is being victimized by walking corpses with a taste for warm human flesh and blood. The approach is certainly not without its restrictions, true - exactly how much can you do with a villain when he's dead? - but something about the stagnancy of the setup (or maybe even the complete lack of seriousness of the concept) makes it impossible to disregard. Thankfully most filmmakers seldom stray far from these sentiments, too; in the years that the zombie has walked the celluloid, they have come to recognize their mindless mute antagonists as a creation whose only viable purpose on film is for synthetic thrills. Some might consider this a kind of back-handed exploitation of a genre that began with relevant psychological context, but consider this more carefully: if you are going to spend two hours at a movie for nothing other than sheer visual stimulation, wouldn't you rather be around brainless zombies rather than brainless teenagers getting hacked to death by masked killers?

28 Days Later / **** (2003)

"28 Days Later" begins with three animal rights activists breaking in to the Cambridge primate research facility, their purpose as clear as crystal when a series of cages scattered across the room reveal apes being confined for some kind of scientific experimentation. With another strapped to a table at the opposite end while background television sets drop in and out of activity with various local news stories, their game plan is quick and specific, even though the animals themselves begin to exhibit ballistic behavior at the mere sight of outside activity. For them, the behavior is just a sudden reaction from their presence, but for a scientist who accidentally wanders into the lab while they're preparing the release of the creatures, it signifies something much more dangerous. "You can't release them!", he demands fearfully. "They're infected!" With what, exactly? When one intruder asks that question, the man's eyes merely stares back with a harrowed gaze, his shaky voice replying, rather enigmatically: "...Rage..."

Resident Evil / *1/2 (2002)

The adaptations of popular video games to major motion pictures is one of the biggest transitional curses of the modern cinema, and effort that is incessantly crushed by the fact that that screenwriters are too afraid to expand on ideas that the games themselves barely scratch the surface of. Consider last summer's ambitious retelling of the "Tomb Raider" computer game craze; it was flashy, ambitious and sometimes amusing, but the small plot, as with the source material itself, was simply an excuse to throw us in to countless sequences in which creatures are shot up and the hero of the story moves on to the next level, waiting for new dangers. At least with video games, we at least have control of the action. When it comes to the cinematic equivalent, it feels like we're simply observers of players who visit the same levels over and over again without making any progress.