Land of the Dead

It’s always encouraging when mindless zombies display more intelligence than regular humans. Sadly, it’s also not surprising.

Land of the Dead is not your average predictable zombie movie, in that director/writer George Romero throws in the additional plot component of zombie evolution combined with human stupidity. While he does not explore the intricacies of the physical and chemical zombification process, he does make it clear that one walking corpse in particular, Big Daddy, is one quick-learnin’ dead dude. Big Daddy gets an A+ in common sense, whereas many of the humans attempting to escape do not meet the requirements for such a grade. Then again, perhaps that’s not fair of me. After all, the zombies do possess some superhuman powers, such as the ability to rip down a small, unstable chainlink fence to gain entrance to the city. Humans could not possibly be expected to display such mental and physical capacity, nor should they be expected to later find an escape route through the fortress that is chainlink protection. I mean if these people came up with the brilliant idea that flimsy metal wires criss-crossed into diamond shaped patterns would be more sufficient protection than, I dunno, say…concrete or steel, then it’s really not fair to expect any amount of intelligence from them.

The movie takes place some thirty years after Romero’s original zombie film, Night of the Living Dead, wherein the dead are brought back to life with a rather unfavorable tendency to eat human flesh. Once a person is bitten by a zombie, he has about an hour before transforming into a zombie himself, at which point it becomes necessary to shoot said person in the head in order to destroy him. Fairly standard so far. However, this movie actually explores a future in which zombies were never fully annihilated, so it portrays a culture that has degenerated into near anarchy, as only a very few cities have managed to survive. Riley (Simon Baker) lives in one of these cities, and commands a militaristic crew of men who periodically raid zombie towns for food and supplies. The kingpin of this city, Kaufman (Dennis Hopper), operates a residential complex in the middle of the city called Fiddler’s Green, in which only the rich are invited to live. The rest of the people are forced to make do on the streets, living a life of poverty and service to those in Fiddler’s Green.

Eventually, the zombies, led by Big Daddy, get fed up with all this raiding nonsense and decide to attack the city. I can hardly blame them—after all, here they are living peaceably amongst each other, and then in come some rootin’ tootin’ cowboys stealing supplies and shooting up the town. So Big Daddy, Ph.D leads his fellow zombie townsfolk in an attack against the city while the humans stick their fingers up their noses and run around in a necrophobic panic.

I found Land of the Dead to be more than entertaining, and if you like horror movies, zombie movies, scary movies, etc… then you will definitely appreciate this one. The humans are wonderfully idiotic, the zombies refreshingly two-dimensional (versus the standard one dimension), and there are many surprising moments of comedy when the viewer least expects it. There’s a healthy amount of gore for those who like that sort of thing—I always cringe during those parts—but it’s not overflowing with guts, as the movie really relies on the story and characters for entertainment, with the gory bits being more supplemental. Keep in mind that this is a zombie movie, so I wouldn’t recommend it unless you dig that genre. I give it four stars because I think it is actually a good zombie movie.