Dead-Alive -- good pick. Forgot about that one.

K

I'll take you up on that offer, contact me at jmhunter03@gmail.com

You forgot the original classic "Night Of The Living Dead." One Of the greatest low budget horror films ever made

...You got me.


Is it a zombie movie? Who Directed it?

I'm with gene. My favorite zombie flicks aren't of the modern, shuffling (or, now, running), decomposing, brain-eating hordes type -- they're the Halperin Bros. White Zombie and especially the haunting Val Lewton/Jacques Tourneur I Walked with a Zombie (aka Jane Ayre in the West Indes). Altho I do like both Night of the Living Dead (original) and 28 Days Later.

But, they're really two entirely different beasts. The former is sorta more about zombie-ism, while the latter is sorta more about zombies, you could say.

Matthew

Thanks for the rec's, all! I'll probably rent one on Friday for my zombiefest. VERSUS and BURIAL GROUND look like good bets.

I saw Land of the Dead in the theater. Didn't care for it. Making zombies sympathetic and forcing them to share screen-time with a story about corporate greed does not a fun movie make.

I just saw Land of the Dead last night.

I'd put it a notch above the DOTD remake, but that's not saying a whole lot. Promising set-up and interesting premise, but disappointing on the whole.

K

"Making zombies sympathetic and forcing them to share screen-time with a story about corporate greed does not a fun movie make."

Personally, I've always found Romero's zombies, as emblems of our consumerist use-value culture, sympathetic, and thus loved LAND. It's the attempt to make John Leguizamo sympathetic that proves entirely boneheaded.

Romero's metaphors worked better in previous movies. The banal contemporary sheen and dull, predictable characterization really killed LAND for me. What worked previously as implicit metaphor here functioned as clumsy, explicit plot device.

I wanted to see something different done with the premise at this point. Or if he needed to spell out his original themes, roll 'em all out and nudge you and say: "Eh? Class warfare! Racism and xenophobia! Greed! Eh? Eh? Get it?" with ever-so-subtle lines like: "Isn't that all we're doing? Pretending to live?" (and even making topical references to the War on Terrorism!) -- then I'd like to at least have seen him put it all together more tactfully, thoroughly, coherently, excitingly, bizarrely -- whichever. An art movie without the art, a zombie movie without the thrills = barely passable entertainment.

And that awful "thinking" revolutionary zombie-leader returning dignity to his people (!) -- I much, much preferred Bub.

I did enjoy seeing Bub pop up as one of the zombies chained up in the nightclub. The nightclub was actually pretty interesting and up to about that point I figured LAND was gearing up to be pretty good stuff. Alas, downhill from there, more or less.

Next in line, The Devil's Rejects.

K

I've been reading Leo Braudy's "The World in a Frame" where he gives a brilliant analysis of genre films (or genre works in general). He points out that simple summations of genre works will always be to the disadvantage of the works themselves, including Shakespeare's. I think all that you've said of Romero's latest could be applied to his other films. Yeah, verbally summarizing the analogies is simple, but is there anything to the visual analogue that creeps below our rational faculty, revealing something about the way we are?

Hmm, where are we with these zombies?

If one looks at Romero's development of his theme, the incorporation of the Other into a reflection of the self -- ourself, this film is a necessary addition to the canon. What we've seen is the Other as totally alien, foreign, to how closely it resembles the detachment of the national body in daily practice of nothingness, consumerism, to a militant resistance to that recognition, nationalism, to a now sympathetic view of those suffering from this demonic view of the body, where our similarities to the Other can only be controlled by a blind acceptance of the aforementioned nationalism, which is increasingly revealed as anothing more than a desire for laissez-faire consumption. The only difference between the havenot zombies and the haves living in that tower is the desire to consume unabated and the ability to consume in such a fashion.

Shit, out of time, I'll be back.