Land of the Dead

[Barendd Nobeard]

Saw it last night. I was a bit disappointed that so few people were there when I got there (I was about the 16th person in the theater), but by the time the movie started there was about 100 people in the audience.

I wasn't bored during the movie, but it wasn't really as exciting as I had hoped. Visually, it's very nicely done for such a small budget, and the gore is great. I liked the actors (I prefer a low-key acting style), but I'll have to watch it again with a more critical eye. The first time I watch a movie I am very forgiving. It's the repeated viewings that destroy them for me.

It moves along at a nice page; it could actually do a little more with some of the characters as it's only 90 minutes long.

I did love Slack's (Asia Argento) reaction to the "You can call me Mo-town" line. The look on her face was great--and you knew right then that "Mo-town" was doomed. I liked Pillsbury (the Samoan guy; his line about 50,000 cars got a huge laugh). But I really loved Charlie. I can't believe he's the same guy who played Madonna's boyfriend in Desperately Seeking Susan.

Can anyone remind me why we're supposed to give a about Riley? Because his car got stolen?

And there is a lot more silliness which makes no sense. Mouse, all by himself, not checking out the shack he's hiding in for two hours? And then listening to music with headphones? Kaufman keeps the spare limo keys in the duffel bag....along with his spare clips? And his escape route to the car is through a public mall down on the first level? With all of his master planning, that just didn't make sense.

Still, I liked it better than Day of the Dead. But it's not even close to the original Night and Dawn.

I'll buy this one on dvd, and "Day" will be the only Romero zombie film I don't own.

 

[Iron_Chef]

Land of the Dead did not LOOK, or more importantly, FEEL like a George Romero movie. That was something I forgot to mention before and is one of the main things that bothered me (besides the terrible cast and script). I do not count Land of the Dead as part of the Dead series. It's like the Star Wars prequels. I don't count them as being really, truly Star Wars, and never will. Because they don't measure up to the originals and don't feel the same. The originals are so deeply rooted in my childhood and teenage years (in the case of the Dead trilogy), that there's just no way these new films can be as good in my mind, despite wanting them to be with all my heart. The new films all stink to varying degrees by comparison. It's not just nostalgia; the craft, the creativity, the love is just not there anymore. Crap is crap. The new Dead and Star Wars (like most of the spate of recent remakes) are nothing more than soulless husks in my eyes, pretenders to the throne, which make me sad and angry. I throw my hands up in frustration and disbelief at what they've done to something I loved. True, Land is better than the Star Wars prequels and not nearly as much a slap in the face to the fans, but it's still an unworthy sequel.

The reason I prefer the Dawn of the Dead remake is it's closer in spirit (and story) to the original trilogy (despite all the "extreme" crap they did, like making fast zombies and making the movie look like a music video). It has a smaller cast of characters (some of which are actually likable) and feels more personal as a result. Everybody in Land was a throwaway with no real backstory, and so I cared nothing for them (including the melted face idiot sidekick). Maybe my perception of Land will soften with age, but right now I'm feeling terribly disappointed by it. I'd feel more betrayed by George Romero, but I know he needs the money (unlike George Lucas).

As to Day of the Dead... originally, I did not like it as much as I do now, twenty years later and owning it on the DiviMax Ultimate Edition DVD. Now, I think it is on near-equal footing with the Night and Dawn and the Night remake. If only Day had a bigger budget and better script (I still say it's a thousand times better script than Land of the Dead) and if it could have kept up the scope and horror of the prologue (with Sara seeing that horde of walking dead coming down the street of the city), or the tension of the finale, in the middle, where we get talking heads shouting obscenities at each other, it would have been the best of the trilogy. But those talking heads are growing on me in my old age, LOL. Try watching it again (but not on the Sci-Fi Channel, they butchered it of all the zombie gore and obscenities).

 

[Tetsubo]

I saw LotD yesterday, my wife and I quite enjoyed it. It wasn't the scariest movie I've ever seen and here's why: it had little to no relationship to our real world. That was what made the first three movies scary. It was OUR world with the dead walking around.

Some thoughts I had during the movie:

In the Romero Universe, anyone that dies awakens as a ghoul (for the Romero purests). You can become one while still alive if you are bitten. Most people that are attacked are eaten. So where do new zombies come from again? Many of the zombies in the movie had no marks on them, look at Big Daddy. He looked like he just arrived at work. Was he buried in his gas attendant uniform? No. So how did he become a zombie?

The zombies return to a sort of normalcy if there are no live humans about to arouse them. I thought this was interesting. Watching them act out lives long dead was cool.

Big Daddy was the Einstien of the undead set. He had the epiphany that he was dead. He became aware of his own mortality. Heck, most live people don't do that...

In one scene a zombie is being consumed by worms. So why haven't ALL the zombies been consumed by worms or insects? In the real world insects lay eggs in a corpse within hours of it's death. And what about rats or dogs or bears. Or in the warmer climates alligators and such. Packs of wild dogs would take out zombies in a snap. Walking, rotting meat... a dogs wet-dream. I'd give the zombies 18 - 24 months and they'd be picked clean by nature...

Humans would adapt to this new world. We survived an ice age. After adaption would find a way to exploit the undead. Use them as labor. Not too mantion they are a necrophiles dream come true...

Why was the city state using US currency? One of the scavanging teams could open up a bank and destablize the economy in one day. Better if the city printed it's own food ration script. They could use that as money. US currency would just be tinder...

Hot shots are not good choices for scavanging teams. You need forceful Type A personalities yes. But you need disipline. People without disipline end up dead.

Dead Reckoning (vehicle in the film) was very cool. But you needed a fleet of them. Pittsburgh has lots of industrial sites. It would have been easy to armour a larger number of vehicles.

The city needed much better walls. There were lots of empty buildings (why were people living on the streets again...?). Tear them down and use the materials to build actual walls for the city state. Start a process of reclamation with new walls. Moving outward slowly. You've got time on your hands... The drawbridge would have been a perfect in and out path from the city. You essentially turn the whole darn city into a castle...

Why did the soldiers "spray" the zombies with autofire? You know that only a head shot will kill one. You aim, you squeeze the trigger, you conserve your ammo. If those soldiers had keep fire displine, the movie would have been mich shorter...

Romero got me to feel sympathy for the zombies. I didn't think that was possible.

You should still kill every single zombie you come across. Each one is a walking danger to live humans. With fast vehicles you could stage short hunter/killer missions. Taking them out a few at a time. You can eat a whale one bite at a time...

What happened to the official US goverment? You're telling me known of them survived? Or even the local city or county government. Parasites like that have a way of staying alive...

Someone mentioned that the film felt like a post-apocalyptic story-line. That would be because it was a post-apocalyptic story-line... a world-wide plague of zombies pretty much fits the definition of apocalyptic...

I loved the timeless feel of the movie. My wife comment on the way out of the theater, "It felt like the 80's."

Many of the characters were flat and uninteresting. A smaller group of more well written characters would have been better.

There were many people living "normal" lives in the city. Living well, consuming in a mall, basicly living in deep, deep denial. What where they consuming? Why where they consuming? I can see a Stalin-like state emerging among the survivors. A collective with the goal of taking back their world. One zombie at a time. But to live "idyllic" lives in a literal ivory tower made no sense.

Romero made some great comments on the class rift in America with this film. Just as he tackled racism with Night, consumerism in Dawn and rampant militancy in Day. This is why the remake of Dawn wasn't as good for me. It had no point. The film had no message. It was just a bunch of people planning poorly and dying... I mean, the bite is the most dangerous aspect in the Dawn remake. Why didn't they wear armour or at least leather?

I spent way too much time thinking about zombies...

 

[JoeGKushner]

Good stuff and I'm glad I saw it.

It was almost standing room only in the friggin theater.

I was surprised that there were so many survivors though. Usually there are only one or two. Nice to see the 'yuppies' get their come uppins though.

 

[WayneLigon]

Just got back from seeing it. I liked it a lot. The utter complete denial of the people in the towers, the subtle madness everyone has; they're all been through a degree of trauma that no-one but a soldier under live fire can know and they've lived with it for years. I liked seeing that. The people in the tower aren't living. They're just waiting for things to finally wind down, though they're not even aware of it.

The scerne with the rat is pretty cool. Apparently animals are so rare that this guy will pick up and play with a rat just to touch a fuzzy warm thing again. The birds were mechanical, so it might be the old 'rats and roaches' are the only things to survive. I think most of the other animals are all dead by the time of this film. I figure if you die when a zombie just bites you, then you eating or taking a bite out of them does the same thing. Dogs, dead. Cats, dead, Birds, dead. Apparently though they don't come back; whatever it is that causes this just affects people. Rats are very smart and cautious, so they eventually learn 'don't eat the dead people'.

 

[Tetsubo]

Just got back from seeing it. I liked it a lot. The utter complete denial of the people in the towers, the subtle madness everyone has; they're all been through a degree of trauma that no-one but a soldier under live fire can know and they've lived with it for years. I liked seeing that. The people in the tower aren't living. They're just waiting for things to finally wind down, though they're not even aware of it.

The scerne with the rat is pretty cool. Apparently animals are so rare that this guy will pick up and play with a rat just to touch a fuzzy warm thing again. The birds were mechanical, so it might be the old 'rats and roaches' are the only things to survive. I think most of the other animals are all dead by the time of this film. I figure if you die when a zombie just bites you, then you eating or taking a bite out of them does the same thing. Dogs, dead. Cats, dead, Birds, dead. Apparently though they don't come back; whatever it is that causes this just affects people. Rats are very smart and cautious, so they eventually learn 'don't eat the dead people'.

Actually I don't think Romero has ever explained how animals react to the undead in his universe. He had worms eating zombies in LotD. And if a worm can consume them rats and canines should be able too as well. I thought the reason that animals weren't present in LotD was because of budgeting restraints. Animals and their handlers are expensive. And this movie was made on a rather conservative budget.

If worms eat zombies, than bacteria should too. Face it, zombies wouldn't last long if handled realisticly. And since you can't have a series of zombie movies without zombies... so they don't get handled realisticly...

As for handling a wild rat... not going to happen. Humans are predators. We look like predators (the stereoscopic vision thing) and a rat knows this. Have you ever tried to catch a wild rodent by hand? I have, it's not easy and they fight for their lives. Because they figure you are going to eat them. Which is what most predators would do.

And anyone that listens to a walkman while on guard duty deserves their fate.

I still liked the movie. But I see this as another sign of lazy film making. A good creator of a fictional universe would have covered all of the points I've brought up.

Of course, I could just be a nitpicking pain in the...

 

[Tetsubo]

Another reason that there may have been no animals is because the humans ate them already...

 

[Capellan]

Went to see Land of the Dead yesterday. I'd say it is the weakest of the four Romero zombie movies. The weakness, for me, is the characters. All the other three had characters I liked and sympathised with, who were almost certainly going to end up as zombie-fodder. In the latest movie, I didn't care about the characters so much, and the one guy I did like (Charlie) never really seemed in danger of dying.

Another possible weakness is that while Romero sensibly continues and expands the themes he introduced in Day of the Dead (Zombie evolution/intelligence), I don't think he really takes it anywhere that made me say "Cool!".

Despite my quibbles, I still had lots of fun watching the movie: Romero is as inventive as ever in his gorehound antics, and there is some amusing black humour in the film. But if I was given the choice, I'd rather watch one of the original trilogy (or the fabulous Undead) again instead of rewatching this one.

 

[Particle_Man]

Land of the Dead did not LOOK, or more importantly, FEEL like a George Romero movie. That was something I forgot to mention before and is one of the main things that bothered me (besides the terrible cast and script). I do not count Land of the Dead as part of the Dead series. It's like the Star Wars prequels. I don't count them as being really, truly Star Wars, and never will. Because they don't measure up to the originals and don't feel the same. The originals are so deeply rooted in my childhood and teenage years (in the case of the Dead trilogy), that there's just no way these new films can be as good in my mind, despite wanting them to be with all my heart. The new films all stink to varying degrees by comparison. It's not just nostalgia; the craft, the creativity, the love is just not there anymore. Crap is crap. The new Dead and Star Wars (like most of the spate of recent remakes) are nothing more than ***soulless husks in my eyes***...

(ironic emphasis mine)

So you are saying that the zombie movie was a "zombie" of other zombie movies?

 

[Barendd Nobeard]

As to Day of the Dead... originally, I did not like it as much as I do now, twenty years later and owning it on the DiviMax Ultimate Edition DVD. Now, I think it is on near-equal footing with the Night and Dawn and the Night remake. If only Day had a bigger budget and better script (I still say it's a thousand times better script than Land of the Dead) and if it could have kept up the scope and horror of the prologue (with Sara seeing that horde of walking dead coming down the street of the city), or the tension of the finale, in the middle, where we get talking heads shouting obscenities at each other, it would have been the best of the trilogy. But those talking heads are growing on me in my old age, LOL. Try watching it again (but not on the Sci-Fi Channel, they butchered it of all the zombie gore and obscenities).

OK, I'll watch it again. (And I'd never watch a butchered version--DVD only for me.) Now that you mention it, the prologue and the finale were fun to watch (as least as I remember it). And you're definitely right about the "talking heads shouting obscenities" in the middle--at least I can fast foward through that crud.

What annoys me about the middle of "Day" is that human vs. human tension is the sort of thing Romero could show in one minute and then move on to show the consequences of the tension. But to waste an entire hour of a movie with humans bickering? Yawn.