Michael Wood reviews Land of the living Dead
In his fourth zombie film, George Romero — who started the genre with Night of the Living Dead in the late 1960s — uses the backdrop of a zombie plague to look at the way people interact, their motivations and their flaws. In this he is more upfront than his earlier, still pretty bold, films.
In the film the last survivors of humanity’s brush with the living dead are holed up in a city called Fiddler’s Green. They’ve blocked out the zombies. The rich live pretty much as they did before, while the poor are bought off with alcohol, gambling, and the continual threat of zombie invasion. Fiddler’s Green is, in mythology, the sailor’s heaven. An ironic twist, as the heaven of capitalist consumerism depicted here is built on some pretty hellish foundations.
The rich pay the poor to raid the zombie infested towns surrounding the city, and then they sell the produce to the other denizens. The poor have to do this, just to stay alive, all the while continuing to make money for someone else. The zombies, in the meantime, get angry that their towns are being destroyed, and amass to attack Fiddler’s Green and take their revenge.
The parallels with the current world situation are pretty obvious and comes as no surprise that the script couldn’t get any funding in the aftermath of 9/11.
Romero provides us with three possible ways out of the situation for the exploited workers, by showing us the responses and plans of three character.
Firstly, they can try to rise out of their class and become rich. Romero’s conclusion is that this involves screwing over those around you, and is, in the end, unlikely to get you anywhere.
Secondly they can take power and run society for themselves.
Thirdly, they can just try to get out of society altogether. The third conclusion has always been the one Romero has supported, but in this film his ending is considerably more ambiguous. Romero is much more favourable towards the second option. The hero of the film, Riley, represents the third option, but he is shown to be considerably more naïve than many of those around him about the nature of the society they live in.
Several moments of this film are simply brilliant. The capitalist in charge of Fiddler’s Green, Kaufman, has a lengthy rant on the fact that he has the right to make the decisions as he has taken the responsibility. He took the responsibility to build walls and to employ workers, etc. His sense of entitlement is so strong that when the zombies attack the city his response is to scream repeatedly “You have no right!”
Most current horror films seem to rely on cheap tricks to scare. Basically they occasionally should “Boo!” very loudly at the audience. Land of the Dead is scary in a completely different way. The zombies are slow, shambling, and comical, but also numerous and unrelenting. It is the very concept of the film that creates a feeling of constant threat.
There are many flaws however. Several plot lines are left unresolved. Much of it doesn’t make sense. Also I thought too much of the film is based on computer graphics. Previous Romero zombie films had a down to earth grittiness. The sophisticated stuff sometimes looks less realistic than the effects Tom Savini used to do with red paint and plasticine. Romero seems to have gone overboard on his first big budget film in a forty year career.
This film’s premise may be outlandish — the dead walking round trying to eat the living — but it’s also one of the most socially conscious films you could ever hope to see.