Father of the modern zombie genre, George A. Romero returns after 20 years with the fourth in his Dead series, Land of the Dead. 

Land of the Dead is GREAT! Terrible

A stunning opening title sequence featuring monochrome, stop motion style images of dead - soon to be undead - faces, accompanied by broken radio soundbites documenting the end of our world eventually fades to black and silence.  This lightens to reveal our first sight of dead world today - the long-extinguished neon sign of a suburban town diner bearing one word: EATS.  And here are the zombies; masses of them, milling around with no live bodies nearby to excite them.  This is what zombies do all day without live flesh to pursue; the macabre, undead version of what noise does a falling tree make when there's no-one around to hear it.  The living are close by though, spying on the dead.  One of the first lines spoken is also one of the best:

They're dead, but it's like they're pretending to be alive
Isn't that what we're doing? Pretending to be alive?

The trademark use of the zombie scenario as satire is in evidence more than ever in Land; "working class" zombies (car mechanic, waitress, butcher) are revolting against their rich, white oppressors and their dutiful, heavily armed military - one scene shows zombie hands taking up traditional tools of the working class - pick axe, spanner, spade, drill - as weapons. 

Yet another memorable image of the film is the procession of tattered, lurching figures wading knee-deep through the water towards the bright lights of the city.  Though the timescale of the film's release makes it impossible for this to have been intentional it still invokes images of survivors of the hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans.  Romero does seem to have a knack (intentionally or unintentionally) for nailing uncomfortable parallels - redneck hunting parties closing in on a desperate, black survivor hiding in a farm house (Night), mindless consumers gazing vacantly but longingly into shopping mall windows (Dawn), scientists blithely vivisecting an endless stream of twitching specimens for a hopeless purpose (Day).  Common to all his films, however, is the theme of how people - despite the awesome horror of their situation - adapt and adjust to their unbelievable situation.  Land takes this one stage even further though - now the zombies are also adapting. 

And those zombies! Quite simply, no-one can do zombies like Romero.  Who else could treat us to a feasting zombie sticking its hand right into its victim's throat, pulling out some gore then eating it - and not in a hurried, wild way either, it's a slow almost graceful affair.  Who would argue that this alone is not worth the entrance fee?

• a torrent of dead hands scrapes at the side of a vehicle - fingernails snap and dead, torn skin flaps.
•  lofty aerial views of the city's crossroads, first deserted, and then later teeming with a mass of the undead - from such a distance looking like a swarm of flies
• A bite victim declines an offer of a bullet in the head: "Hell, I always wanted to know how the other half live".
• Pathetic zombie "prisoners" dangle upside down from lamp posts, targets hanging off them; shooting practice for the border sentries.
• Belly button ring.  Zombie teeth. Bite, then pull.  A cinema audience flinches en masse.

Land of the Dead is Great TERRIBLE!

It is precisely 7 minutes in when it all goes wrong for Land of the Dead.  Big Daddy, the zombie "hero" carries out a mercy killing on a decapitated fellow zombie in what surely must be the first ever act of zombie compassion.  I shan't beat around the bush here, I am not happy by the new, more self aware zombies of LotD.  It's not that I think cleverer zombies can't make a contribution from the genre - they were great in Return of the Living Dead, intriguing in Dellamorte Dellamore - but this is taking a lot of liberties with the conventions laid down by Romero's own previous three films.  In Night and Dawn they were mindless, shambling automatons, in Day they demonstrated some basic instinctive / residual memory based responses but in Land they have made the zombie great leap forward.  And, frankly, it is a leap way too far for my liking; zombies on a mission, communicating, showing each other how to use guns, conducting vendettas. Maybe if it had been just one freak zombie that got clever that would have worked, but it seems like all of them, en-masse were suddenly blessed with enlightenment.  It is not just me being too precious about the nature of zombies either; I did a straw poll of random acquaintances and everyone I asked said that the idea of a zombie crying out in anger and sadness, then putting a zombie comrade out of it's misery is, well, stupid.  This scene of zombie minds awakening intended to be creepy and chilling in fact derisory.  I don't know what Romero was thinking - or maybe I do.  He was thinking that the zombie genre, narrow and limiting as it is, needs a new twist, needs to go somewhere else.  I would disagree; I think there are still many more diamonds to be mined from the zombie seam.

In a way the previous films in the series (plus many non-Romero ones) simply wrote themselves;  take one premise (zombie outbreak), add some contrasting survivors, hole them up somewhere (farmhouse, shopping mall, military base) then sit back and watch them tear themselves apart (figuratively by each other, then literally by zombies).  A simple, winning formula.  That Land doesn't follow this route is laudable perhaps in that it is attempting something new, though I feel it suffers from having too much happening.  Murky dealings by Kaufman the dictator to maintain the status of the uber-privileged, rumblings of mutiny from the ghettoised under privileged, a vendetta to be settled by Cholo the mercenary, a struggle to control the all-powerful, war-wagon, "Dead Reckoning" and all-American hero, Riley, wrestling with his conscience and trying to do the right thing.  And if all this is not enough, the zombies - which are what we've come to see - are forming themselves into an army and advancing on the bright lights.  All these disparate plot lines are merely unnecessary and distracting.

At a measly 93 minutes long, LotD is the shortest of the series, yet it squeezes the most stuff in - and I mean squeeze, there is very little of that slow burning, drawn out tension that characterise the others.  The sense of paranoia and claustrophobia absent from Land is replaced by those big Hollywood explosions.  Explosions themselves aren't necessarily a bad thing, it's most ironic to note that Zack Snyder's remake of Dawn of the Dead had some fantastic zombie / explosion action, but Snyder's a good action director; hi-octane action is not where Romero excels.  Where he does excel is the use of zombies for social commentary - and justifiably so, what makes the original trilogy stand so apart is just these observations.  Land tries, and for me fails, to continue the tradition.  Again it's a case of too much being squeezed in; too many underdeveloped ideas.  Fidlers Green: rich people are bad and poor people are good.  Kaufman "We don't negotiate with terrorists":  a Bush-like misunderstanding of the consequences of pushing people around too much. A zombie mechanic leads an undead army towards the bright lights of the city:  a working class awakening.  It's all a bit too cod, too obvious, too overstated.  Indeed, in the search for deeper meaning there is the risk of over interpretation; an Independent on Sunday review reads: "a zombified soldier ...looks like a Goya-esque cartoon of American military power in desperate straits".  Hmm, really?  Isn't the reviewer reading just a little too much into this very short scene?

Also, sadly, less evident in Land is the black, gallows humour of the preceding three.  There is the odd bleak laugh here and there, but in general the "humour" is more obvious - oh look here's a great big Samoan security guard, look at him, he's really big and fat, and his name is...wait for it...Pillsbury! You know, like the Doughboy! How funny!

Quality of acting:  Stand up Dennis Hopper and Asia Argento! Go to the back of the class!  And as for Mulligan, the head of the ghetto freedom fighters: good Lord, what accent is that?  Scottish? Irish? Indian? Somewhere on the border?  His words got the biggest laugh on both occasions I saw this at the cinema.

Also, I don't buy (pun intended) this silly issue of money.  Does paper cash still mean anything in this situation?  Perhaps it means something inside Fidlers Green but if Cholo's leaving why does he want to take a million dollars with him? Who's going to take his money?

The shopping malls are, really, all closed now.

In Conclusion

The problem I have boils down to one thing - it's a poor story.  There are great quotes, imagery, effects, scary jumpy parts, but they don't make up for what is the wrong plot.  Yes, of course, Romero invented the genre etc. etc. etc. but there is no such thing as a sacred cow here.  It's the Star Wars thing all over again - I loved the originals but they don't excuse the Phantom Menace do they?  And anyway, Romero should know better.

There has already been talk about another film in the series, but I can't see it happening.  Apart from Romero's age, LotD did not do great business at the box-office; living in a no man's land between mainstream and cult has left everyone unsatisfied.  This is a shame as I would still love to see where Romero would take us next.  I guess I'll just have to wait for Zack Snyder's Day of the Dead remake instead...

Interesting Facts (non zombie nerds need not read on)

•  A scene containing zombie rats - present in the original script - was (thankfully) dropped from the final version [reinforcing Lore item #8; zombies are dead humans]
• A quick conversation between two residents of the ghetto city about throwing live cats and dogs to the zombies to get them to fight each other is perhaps a response to the zombies of the Dawn of the Dead remake only attacking humans [reinforcing lore item #3; zombie will eat anything living]
• Another Dawn of the Dead remake link: both feature fortified, modified battle wagons (though personally I prefer the ramshackle converted buses of Dawn - you've got to love the idea of a chainsaw sized slit for easy access to pesky zombie hangers on).

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