Horror Extreme Movie Catalog

Overall, I thought this was a good film. The writing was good, it had a decent plot, lots of scares, and an interesting twist on the genera. So, it's good entertainment. But from the social commentary standpoint, I think Romero is slipping.

The zombies in this film are compared - by Romero himself - to Islamic terrorists. George Romero tried to make this utterly twisted comparison between people behaving badly and the zombies. The profundity at the end, where they claim that the zombies need to find a place of their own in the world, is just staggeringly bizzare. Zombies control the entire world at this point. They eat people. There is no making "friends" or creating some lasting peace by simply letting the zombies be.

It's just plain loony.

The character played by Dennis Hopper is supposed to be Dick Chaney. Aside from a haircut that looks something like what Chaney would wear, there is no personality comparison between the two individuals, save only from the superficial mindset of a modern-day liberal. It just doesn't play.

It's clear that what Romero professes to achieve in his grand social commentary in the film, fails when executed on the big screen. And it's probably just as well. Had it been less "subtle", the film would have undoubtedly been unwatchable.

While speed zombies have become the rage, in such films as the recent remake of Dawn Of The Dead and 28 Days, in Land Of The Dead- the fourth of what is now a tetralogy of original Dead films by George Romero- we are back to the slow moving ghouls of old, although they are showing signs of evolving intelligence, if not fleetness. That said, it is clear that Romero has run out of ideas, and his attempts at social commentary in the original Night Of The Living Dead and original Dawn Of The Dead (both have been remade) have gone pallid. Those two original films were unique, in that they rose above their horror genre and zombie subgenre to become great films, much in the way Alien and Aliens transcended the horror-sci fi ghetto and the first two Terminator films did the same for cyborg-time travel flicks. But, there must be some sort of rule that allows only the first two films of such genres to become classics, for the last original zombie film from Romero, 1985's Day Of The Dead, was horrible, and this film, while a little better, is still nowhere near passable. Romero, in fact, has seen subsequent generations of zombie enthusiasts pass him by.... The film is the most impressive of his zombie quartet, due to CGI, but the actual dead look the least scary of all the zombies. The DVD comes with a number of featurettes, but the Romero-led commentary track talks of mainly minor film details, in an in-jokey way, and little of the mythos, so is rather banal, which recapitulates the almost generic feel that this film has, as if Romero was told some backers wanted a fourth film, gave him lots of money to make it, and then he was stuck with figuring everything else out, especially a script, so took the money and ran, and merely stole from his earlier films.