Dead a Lively Return for Romero

A person cannot help but go into “George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead” without some small feelings of trepidation. Romero, a cult figure in independent film circles for almost four decades, is the man singularly responsible for all things zombie after all, his seminal 1968 black and white low budget classic “Night of the Living Dead” the reason we sometimes suspect dead people are trying to eat us. He’s a legend, and even if more stinkers (“The Dark Half,” “Monkey Shines,” 2000’s little seen “Bruiser”) than classics (“Dawn of the Dead” and its aforementioned precursor) litter his resume, said classics have had such a lasting impact on cinema and the art of filmmaking they alone make Romero a legend.

Now, twenty years after his last journey to the graveyard (1985’s rather inert “Day of the Dead”), Romero returns to his roots with this latest zombie epic. Thankfully, it is much, much better (and at 90-minutes a heck of a lot shorter) than the last entry in this series, and even if it isn’t a classic, lacking the pinpoint social commentary and spot-on black humor of its predecessors, like the first two it’s still an invigoratingly gory and grotesque menagerie of fun. In a year of horror movies going from bad (“Hide and Seek,” “The Ring 2”) to worse (“Boogeyman,” “White Noise”) to the god-awful (“High Tension”), thank goodness for Romero.

Picking up where he last left off in ’85, the world is now overrun with zombies and the last remaining members of humanity have packed themselves away in walled-off cities to keep the undead menace at bay. The few wealthy and powerful remaining live in picture-perfect skyscrapers like Fiddler’s Green, the rabble-rousing rest below in the sewers eking out an existence by the skin of their collective teeth. Ruling them all from high above is Kaufman (Dennis Hopper, having the time of his life playing the evil despot); a megalomaniacal bureaucrat intent on making sure everyone stays right where they are within the city’s moralistic social class system.

That includes the well-paid members of the team responsible for going out into the urban wilds and bringing back much-needed supplies for the rest of the citizenry. For many of them, including team leader Riley (Simon Baker), they could care less about moving into Kaufman’s bourgeoisie palace. In fact, all Riley wants to do is make enough money to buy a car, pack it with supplies and then drive it north to Canada. He’s tired of living behind walls, and even if there are some zombies running around there sure as heck can’t be as many of them in the frozen tundra.

Riley’s second-in-command Cholo (John Leguizamo) thinks his rather unemotional leader and friend is out of his mind. He wants into Fiddler’s Green, and after all the dirty work he’s done for Kaufman Cholo thinks he’s due. But when the corporate snob says no and then tries to throw him out with the trash, the battle-tested scrounger steals the city’s most potent weapon (an armored recreation vehicle/tank nicknamed Dead Reckoning) in order to hold Kaufman and Fiddler’s Green for ransom. What no one knows, however, is that an army of the undead is organizing and are slowly making their way to the city. After decades of mindless flesh-eating afterlife, the zombies are starting to learn how to communicate, and under the steady and single-minded direction of Big Daddy (Eugene Clark) they’re going to get to the center of Fiddler’s Green and put a stop to their people’s slaughter by instigating one of their own.

Theoretically, like all of the previous “Dead” features Romero is aiming for pinpoint political satire laced intricately within all the gory thrills and chills. The first two (especially the deliriously wondrous “Dawn”) did this expertly, while the maudlin and self-important “Day” drowned in too much long-winded Reagan-era militaristic finger pointing. This time, Romero’s aim is on American delusions of security and superiority in a post-9/11 world, gently comparing our current political decision makers with the clueless hoi polloi of Fiddler’s Green. It’s a neat idea, and one that actually works every now and then. Unfortunately, the constraints of working under the aegis of a major studio (in this case Universal) for this first time don’t allow for too much Bush-bashing, so whatever lofty ideals Romero intended on relating can’t help but be lost amidst all the spurting hemoglobin and severed limbs littering the sidewalk.

There are pluses, however, to Romero’s working with Hollywood this time out. For one thing, restrictions have forced the writer-director to streamline himself, the running time of this fourth entry a good thirty minutes to (in the case “Dawn”) almost an hour shorter than the last two outings. It’s faster, funnier, getting to the – if you’ll excuse the pun – the meat and bones of the story much quicker than the filmmaker has ever done before. The other main plus is that studio resources have allowed Romero to cast far better than he has in the past, scoring real actors to play not only the completely human heroes and villains but the hungrily marauding zombies as well. Best of all is Leguizamo. This is his second brilliant turn in a b-movie thriller (after “Assault on Precinct 13”) this year, the actor/comedian finding depths to Cholo Romero’s script only hints at.

Of course, the real reason so many people are going to go to this has nothing to do with the acting, storyline or almost any other technical aspect. They are going for the gore and the gore alone, and I’m happy to report they will not be disappointed. Even if this is the first “Dead” to feature an R-rating, it’s still one of the bloodiest disemboweling pieces of pulp entertainment I’ve ever ran across. For me, one of the chief highlights is a seemingly decapitated zombie regaining both his composure and his head long enough to take a big chunk out of an unsuspecting military officer. It’s both shocking and disgusting, but I mean both of those statements in a good way. “Land of the Dead” is filled with scenes like these, Romero slowly building the mutilation-level to ever-increasing plains the closer the zombies get to Fiddler’s Green. (Side note: watch closely for “Shaun of the Dead” creators Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright as two sillier members of the undead brigade, while all-time maestro of gore Tom Savini pops up with some machete moves sure to turn – and sever – a few heads.)

For all intents and purposes, “Land of the Dead” is a welcome return to form for Romero, especially for anyone who considers themselves a fan of his groundbreaking early work. It will be interesting to see how modern horror aficionados respond, though, used to the video game-like verisimilitude of “Resident Evil” or last year’s “Dawn of the Dead” remake. (I don’t really count Danny Boyle’s “28 Days Later” as a zombie movie, although the virus-infected madmen at its core definitely owed more than a tip of the hat to Romero.) I’m not sure they’ll take to it which, really, is a total shame. It’s not rocket science, but this is still a relatively intelligent and nauseatingly entertaining thrill ride devoid of the usual editing artifices and CGI shenanigans that make so many of today’s features boringly inert. That alone makes this deadly land one for the living to applaud.

Film Rating: êêê  (out of 4)