Dead Alive Again

For the past three years, the American moviegoer has had to sit through two Resident Evil movies, 28 Days Later, a good remake of Dawn of the Dead, Shaun of the Dead and the obscure Undead. In the end, there is Land of the Dead, George A. Romero's fourth installment in his Living Dead series. While it's been twenty years since the last one, which was the very less than perfect Day of the Dead, the events of Land of the Dead are set in a bizarro present day setting. For the living dead to be walking around for nearly 40 years is a very high suspension of disbelief.
Of course, the dead coming back to life and eating people is something that is hard to believe as it is.
Rather than churn out another zombie flick, Romero has decided to turn his latest Dead movie into the most political. Night of the Living Dead had grim images of the civil rights movement with people walking around in shotgun doing lynchings. Dawn of the Dead focused on the explosion of consumerism in the 1970's, along with an ironic proverb of having to kill in order to live. Day of the Dead was about the futility of the military to become more a part of the problem rather than part of the solution by wanting to train the dead to fight rather than find a way to keep them from coming back.
Land of the Dead is set in a big city surrounded by three rivers. Pittsburgh, maybe? The name of the land is not important. What is important is Fiddler's Green, a towering skyscraper that is a small community full of yuppies sipping on coffee and living in harmony, free of the poor who live out on the streets. Fiddler's Green is designed to keep the rich elite like Kaufman (Dennis Hopper) safely in and mercenaries like Cholo (John Lequizamo) out.
That is until Cholo and his motley crew steal a tank called Dead Reckoning, complete with rockets, and threaten to bomb Fiddler's Green unless Kaufman and his cronies pay up. Kaufman sends another mercenary, Riley (Simon Baker), who designed Dead Reckoning, to stop Cholo.
Now, this isn't a basic set-up for a zombie flick. But it's two movies in one. An action movie and a horror movie. You see while Riley hunts down Cholo, an army of the undead lead by Big Daddy (Eugene Clark) have discovered the use of tools. Romero hinted on this in Day of the Dead. Big Daddy, referred to by the name on his gas station uniform, carries a machine gun. Another carries an axe. They break down a wall and enter in. The rivers are no obstacles because they are dead to begin with, so drowning isn't a problem. The image of the dead bobbing out of the water is very scary.
Before Land of the Dead opened, Romero said the script was about people ignoring the problem. Here, he makes satirical referrences to the 9/11 attacks, terrorism, and social class. Even in a world in which the majority of the population is the undead, people will still bicker about their standing in society. Why have a commercial about how great Fiddler's Green is when anybody would be willing to be included? Because there is still a separation between the haves and the have nots even in a time of major crisis. Money is even more important when the supply of products is based on what the mercaneries can find from the land of the zombies. Rather than coming together in order to survive, the residents of Fiddler's Green has shut themselves out from what is happening. However, they have put themselves in a very vulnerable position. Its the biggest target in the area.
Land of the Dead isn't as good as Dawn of the Dead, but it is a lot better than Day of the Dead. It is also his first Dead movie to be released by a major studio, Universal. It also has a nice cast. While Baker is almost wooden, Lequizamo and Hopper are fun to watch. Also, Asia Argento, daughter of horror director, Dario Argento, pops up as a mercenary. Robert Joy provides good comedy relief as a man with a badly burned face but with a good eye that is used for shooting the dead. Tom Savini, who appeared in Dawn of the Dead as well as doing the make-up, has a small cameo as a zombie and is the only character to have appeared in another Dead movie.
Sure the zombies look fake, but after four decades, Romero and his crew still have creative ways for the dead to look and be killed.
Land of the Dead is my DVD/Video pick of the week.