George A. Romero's Land of the Dead

[MacGuffin]

Trailer here.

Release Date: June 24th, 2005 (wide)

Cast: Asia Argento (Slack), Simon Baker (Riley), Dennis Hopper (Kaufman), John Leguizamo (Cholo), Robert Joy (Charlie), Pedro Miguel Arce (Pillsbury), Krista Bridges (Teahouse), Phil Fondacaro (Chihuahua), Jason Gautreau (Gus), Max McCabe (Mouse), Sasha Roiz (Manolete), Christopher Russell (Barrett), Alan Van Sprang (Brubaker), Jonathan Walker (Cliff Woods)

Director: George A. Romero (the Night of the Living Dead films, Monkey Shines, The Dark Half, Creepshow, Bruiser)

Screenwriter: George A. Romero (Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, The Dark Half, Monkey Shines, Knightriders)

Premise: In a modern-day world where the walking dead roam an uninhabited wasteland, the living try to lead "normal" lives behind the walls of a fortified city. A new society has been built by a handful of enterprising, ruthless opportunists, who live in the towers of a skyscraper, high above the hard-scrabble existence on the streets below. But outside the city walls, an army of the dead is evolving. Inside, anarchy is on the rise. With the very survival of the city at stake, a group of hardened mercenaries is called into action to protect the living from an army of the dead.

[Sleuth]

aw shoot

[SiliasRuby]

Ah, yummy. Another zombie flick from one of the greats.

[Pubrick]

and that's how trailers work on the average american viewer, ladies and germs.

[socketlevel]

you know, after seeing the trailer i was skeptical.  but then upon second viewing i realized what i didn't like about it: the editing.  George romero and John Carpenter have a similar style (which Romero established and Carpenter took on).  they like static shots with quick cutting to create action.  whomever cut the trailer doesn't understand their style and is trying to garner the same crowd as all the other zombie films that have come out in the last couple years.  fair enough, but barely representative of the film.  this is apparent in the trailer, the camera isn't moving all fast and ramping every fucking second like any other film made these days.  (including 28 days later and the remake of dawn of the dead, both of which i enjoyed but dislike the style)

so even though the trailer looks shitty-modern, we still don't know what to expect.  I trust Romero more than any other with this genre.  Like the trailer says, he created it, so i can't wait to see it.

I think it's going to have the romero style through and through and i can't wait until the opening.  maybe he's over the hill, but i will only think so when he fails to create a great zombie film.  3 for 3 are good numbers, so i won't judge him quite yet.

-sl-

[MacGuffin]

New Trailer

Romero Tribute Featurette

[matt35mm]

Those aren't really dead people.  You can't fool me.

[grand theft sparrow]

Those aren't really dead people.  You can't fool me.

Actually, the bald lead zombie really was dead.

Everyone else was just terminally ill.

[Pubrick]

man i hate movies that overrate themselves before anyone's even seen them.

at best, this will be unintentionally hilarious.

[Stefen]

As long as it contains Asias nizzos, i'm downloading it.

[RegularKarate]

I saw this tonight and I liked it.

It's about as good as if not better than (I'm thinking probably "better than") Day of the Dead.

People should obviously not expect another Dawn of the Dead.  I feel sorry for those who are.  I wasn't.  

The gore is great and pretty old-school (though Savini wasn't working behind the camera on this one).  There was some use of CG, but not much and what was used mostly worked.

The story starts out great and the tone is set up pretty quickly and is quite engaging, but it doesn't really keep up in the end.

Overall, it keeps the traditional Romero Zombie spirit and adds a few new small things.

Romero seems to have been very mildly influenced by those that he influenced in the past, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it kind of feels strange at some points.

[grand theft sparrow]

People should obviously not expect another Dawn of the Dead.  I feel sorry for those who are.

I didn't realize until you said that, that I was expecting another Dawn of the Dead.  Thank you very much; my expectations have been lowered accordingly.

[MacGuffin]

'Dead' Head Romero Brings Zombies to Life

George Romero lurches among us again, doing what he does best: Creating a combustible microcosm of society, then besieging it with zombies who just can't get enough of tasty human flesh.

The director, whose 1968 chiller "Night of the Living Dead" established an entire horror subgenre, is back with "George Romero's Land of the Dead," a tale of survivors coping with legions of walking corpses outside their walled city.

It's zombie king Romero's first big film in 12 years, following a cinematic exile when he and producing colleague Peter Grunwald were unable to get their projects off the ground.

"I missed the '90s," Romero, 65, told The Associated Press. "My partner and I were in development hell for about eight years and never got anything done."

Along with 1978's "Dawn of the Dead" and 1985's "Day of the Dead," Romero's films include the '70s cult flicks "Martin" and "Season of the Witch" and bigger studio fare such as 1982's horror anthology "Creepshow" and 1993's "The Dark Half" both in collaboration with Stephen King.

But zombies have been his calling card. Countless imitators have adhered to the rules Romero laid down. The creatures move slowly and stiffly, as if struggling with rigor mortis. They hunger for living human flesh. If bitten, a person inevitably dies and comes back as a zombie. And the only way to kill a zombie is to shoot it in the head.

"There were zombie films prior to George, but he pretty much invented the cannibalistic aspect," said Edgar Wright, director and co-writer of the affectionate Romero homage "Shaun of the Dead." "What we now think of as zombies really are Romero zombies."

For all the larger-than-life terrors such as Dracula, the Wolfman and Frankenstein's monster, Romero's zombies arguably are the most frightening because they're just plain folks, albeit decomposing ones.

"Land of the Dead" features a zombie in a cheerleader outfit. Three zombies holding musical instruments hang out on a bandstand, one brainlessly tooting its tuba. Another zombie in a gas station attendant's outfit has a vestigial desire to pump fuel for vehicles that will never arrive.

"It's the neighbors, man," Romero said. "That's the scariest thing in life, the neighbors. Who am I going to move in next to?

"I don't think metaphysically about this. It's not about death or an afterlife or anything like that. This is a new situation, it's a change. A new species that just happens to be related to us."

After "The Dark Half," film after film fell through for Romero. The only movie he had managed to make was 2000's low-budget thriller "Bruiser," which virtually no one saw.

The recent onslaught of zombie copycats including the "Resident Evil" flicks, "28 Days Later" and a remake of Romero's "Dawn of the Dead" made the time ripe for the creator himself to resurrect his franchise.

"Land of the Dead" stars Simon Baker, John Leguizamo, Dennis Hopper and Asia Argento.

Like Romero's previous zombie tales, "Land of the Dead" offers gore galore yet transcends the blood-and-guts genre with heavy doses of satire and social commentary.

"It's a very clever thing to use horror as a metaphor, and George does that very well, like dealing with people's fears and insecurities amid the blood and gore," said Simon Pegg, star and co-writer of "Shaun of the Dead," about two London slackers bumbling their way through a zombie invasion. "He manages to combine the visceral and the splatter with real brains."

Pegg and "Shaun" director Wright had cameo roles in "Land of the Dead" as zombies at a photo booth.

The new movie is the most expansive of Romero's zombie tales and features his biggest cast yet, both living and dead. When it comes to directing his zombie players, Romero continues to take a hands-off approach.

"George is a great believer of not giving you too much direction when you turn into a zombie, because he wants you to find your inner zombie," co-star Leguizamo said. "He wants you to really find your own tics and mannerisms ... So everybody's not doing the same thing."

Each film has been a product of its times.

After an early career in commercials and industrial films, Romero shot "Night of the Living Dead" in stark black and white with a documentary style that fit the naturalism overtaking American cinema in the 1960s. The tale of bickering people trapped in a farmhouse surrounded by hungry zombies reflected the decade's social unrest.

"Collapse of the family unit, lack of communication, people not being able to get it together. `Should we stay upstairs or go down to the basement?' Instead of trying to really sort of pull together and address the problem," Romero said. "Just missed opportunities. The '60s in a nutshell."

"Dawn of the Dead" was a perversely funny condemnation of mall culture, featuring survivors who take refuge against zombies in a shopping center. When zombies manage to get inside, they passively ride escalators and mindlessly window shop for savory morsels essentially, the same thing they did while living.

"`Dawn of the Dead' is bawdy. It's this comic book, and it's in your face with the criticism of consumerism," Romero said. "It was the beginning of logo shirts and murder for Nikes. It was that period in time."

"Day of the Dead" reflects the cold opportunism of the 1980s, centering on scientists and military officers performing experiments on zombies in a bunker, where humans begin devolving amid the new world order of the undead.

"Land of the Dead" is a have and have-not story timely, given the current focus on the chasm among classes in the United States. An elite few live the good life in a skyscraper while the masses suffer in squalor. Mercenaries scour the suburbs, gunning down zombies and foraging for groceries for the urban privileged.

The wealthy use fear of zombies to control the living population, an angle Romero uses to comment on the post-Sept. 11 world.

"Since 9/11, a fear came into it, and people have capitalized on how productive fear can be as a device," co-star Baker said.

Romero doubts he ever will do a movie resolving his zombie-vs.-human scenario but he thinks his films have been moving toward some degree of peaceful co-existence between the living and dead.

"When you think about how do you solve this problem, there has to be some degree of that," Romero said. "But the zombies also have to cooperate with that. I think one of the things is, they have to learn to eat something else."

[MacGuffin]

Knight of the living dead
Zombies are George Romero's specialty, and he's about to unleash them for the first time in 20 years.
Source: Los Angeles Times



As he sips iced coffee in the restaurant of the Regent Beverly Wilshire hotel, filmmaker George Romero — the father or, at 65, the grandfather of modern horror films — admits what's scaring him these days: June 24.

"It's terrifying to be opening up in summer," says Romero of his latest zombie opus, "Land of the Dead." It hits theaters Friday — 37 years after the debut of his seminal flesh-eating flick "Night of the Living Dead" and 20 years since his last undead venture, "Day of the Dead."

Originally planned for a Halloween release, Universal bumped up the $18-million film as a sign of confidence in the highly anticipated gorefest. And although early reviews have been raves, Romero says, "I just hope it's not too much of a specialty niche thing. We're sandwiched between 'Batman' and 'War of the Worlds.' Gulp."

Romero, a gangly, soft-spoken man with mad scientist-like black horn-rimmed glasses, has never had the rep of a journeyman scaremeister or no-holds-barred stylist, but instead that of a painterly satirist, a cinematic Bosch.

His zombie sagas, which also include the critically lauded 1979 masterpiece "Dawn of the Dead" (the remake of which was a hit last year), are splatter-happy and sweat-inducing survival dramas, but, as Romero says modestly, he likes "to throw in some observations about what's going on in the world."

"Night" evoked Vietnam-era bloodshed and, with its black male lead trapped in a farmhouse, echoed civil rights hysteria. "Dawn" poked fun at soul-deadening consumerism. And "Day" addressed ethics in science. With "Land," Romero tackles issues of safety and boundaries, showing a community fortifying itself against a murderous horde while its wealthiest keep alive class divisions separating them from the powerless.

"It's the folly of saying, 'Everything's OK, don't worry about it,' " says Romero, who wrote "Land" before the events of Sept. 11. Its focus then was about "ignoring social ills, setting up a synthetic sense of comfort."

He says he didn't have to tweak it much to reflect new fears of terrorism. When told that it's hard not to think of Iraq watching an armored car of trigger-happy humans roll through a zombiefied suburb shooting anything they see, Romero smiles. "That's one of the things I put in there afterward."

Producer Mark Canton, who quickly secured a deal at Universal for "Land" after it had languished at 20th Century Fox, says, "Once again, George has a lot of layers to this movie. It's thoughtful, it's societal, it's political, and it's very cool.... It's the return of the master."

There were the pilgrimages of fans trekking to Toronto last winter for the freezing, all-nights "Land" shoot to fulfill lifelong dreams of being a Romero zombie. Two of those were Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg, who created last year's respectful zombie spoof "Shaun of the Dead," which Romero loved. "They're the zombies at the photo booth," tips Romero to their cameo in the film. "They shot their own little film [while] on set, and it's going to be on the DVD."

Romero is busily assembling the unrated DVD edition, so although the R-rated theatrical release has plenty of the crunchy, squishy, visceral extravagance that is the hallmark of a "Dead" movie, the carnage will linger a bit longer for home video.

Until "Land," Romero's MPAA dealings were few — his zombie movies typically go out unrated. And when the MPAA did get involved, it inevitably became about frame counts, something Romero is still puzzled by. "An old film I made called 'Martin,' there's a scene where Martin cuts a woman's wrist, and it took 28 frames. They said, 'Make it 17 frames.' Is that going to protect anyone's innocence?... Either take it out or leave it in."

His is an old-fashioned soul, though, when it comes to what he calls "the personality of horror." "Land" even opens with Universal's '30s-era black-and-white logo, a touch Romero requested as a signal that he aligns himself with the studio's heyday of Frankenstein, Dracula and the Mummy, pictures he first saw as a kid in Bronx movie theaters. (He's lived in Pittsburgh since college.)

And although he found last year's "Dawn" remake "pretty well-made," he dismisses the new vogue of sprinting zombies, a feature of "28 Days Later," the 2003 movie that sparked the zombie resurgence.

"I grew up on these slow-mov-ing-but-you-can't-stop-them[creatures], where you've got to find the Achilles' heel, or in this case, the Achilles' brain," he says, referring to the organ whose destruction waylays a zombie. "In [the remake] they're just dervishes, you don't recognize any of them, there's nothing to characterize them.... [But] I like to give even incidental zombies a bit of identification. I just think it's a nice reminder that they're us. They walked out of one life and into this." (One of the lead zombies in "Land" is a former gas station attendant.)

In Romero's world, the extras are the leads, and the scariest idea in "Land" might be just how much he doesn't take them for granted.

"I'm focused on advancing them mentally," he adds, referring to ways he envisions the franchise continuing. "I say jokingly that my guys will take out library cards before they join a gym."

[deathnotronic]

I was going to go see this at midnight tonight with some of my friends but then I was too lazy. I fucking love Romero.

He's kind of creepy looking now. I can't remember, did he have anything on the directing side to do with the Dawn remake?