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Category:    Home > Reviews > Horror > Thriller > Zombie > Political > Night Of The Living Dead - Millennium Edition

Night Of The Living Dead – Millennium Edition (1968/Elite Entertainment DVD)

 

Picture: C     Sound: C+     Extras: B     Film: B+

 

 

Along with Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, George Romero’s Night Of The Living Dead is consider one of two landmark Horror classics that took the next giant step after Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) in breaking new ground and setting off a new era of freedom and innovation in filmmaking overall.  Sure, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey also arrived in 1968 and was absolutely as important, but of the four films, Romero did the most with the least.  Still the subject of endless imitators, satires, and a third sequel in 2005, the film was a sensation when it arrived.  Influenced by the look of the Vincent Price film The Last Man On Earth and loosely inspired by its source material (Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend), the film comes up with a great Classical Horror moment of reference (the brother of the couple does a Boris Karloff impersonation that is uncanny in saying “There’s coming to get you, Barbara!”) that makes for a great joke.  Romero turns this on a dime and the first of many zombie attacks begin.

 

The reason the film continues to be a classic is because it asks the question beyond Matheson’s book or the first three feature film adaptations (the second being the 1971 Charlton Heston vehicle The Omega Man, the third bearing the title of the book with Will Smith) of what would happen if authority broke down and the set world as we know it was over?  Note that it is never nuclear holocaust in these films, but something biological and even supernatural.

 

You can read more about the first two versions of I Am Legend at this link:

 

http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/6388/The+Omega+Man+(HD-DVD/Warner)

 

 

 

That leaves just enough room for inner catastrophes to be unleashed.  You cannot buy anything, as stores are not open, product is not being shipped in & produced, and the owners are dead or have become monsters.  So have family members, so the security of the family, without even going into Capitalism, heterosexuality and patriarchal order (though applicable) because you do not have time to think about and analyze these things when a monster is coming to kill you.  It is that idea that propels the film immediately and does not let up, while Romero sets up juxtapositions with resonance that allows the build-up of all kinds of horrors for the audience to see, experience and project into the film.   For the home to the African American lead to the interesting use of canted angle shots.

 

The film has also been often dubbed a film reflecting Vietnam, and though it does to some extent, that is an inadequate reaction.  On one hand, it dismisses a classic as overly simple, while those who would like to bury it dub it that because they want to make everyone forget Vietnam.  This goes beyond Right Wing rollback groups who keep lying that we could have “won” that “war” echoed by the Iraq situation to too much of an extent for comfort.  In this respect alone, the film gets better with age, still being considered subversive by political forces with nothing better to do but ruin lives and life.  Maybe the monsters are just too similar to them for comfort.

 

That’s not all though.  In the tradition even of John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards in John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), who is ready to kill anyone out who becomes affiliated, influenced or overtaken by “Indians” in their world and culture, people in this film literally are taken over by a force like nothing Edwards could have imagined and this amounts to a reversal of that prejudice of The Old West.  Ideas of “the other” take on existentialist new meaning here, a secret to the films success.

 

Finally, as all classics do, it creates a world we have never been to before and are impressed and engulfed by because the film always remains smarter than its audience.  Classics do this with the smartest of audiences, as happens here.  The film is a hit, but some of the success has transmuted for certain viewers as a granddaddy of slice & dice, serial killer, reactionary Horror film fans who think this is the first film such happenings occurred.  It is much more, with the acting being just unprofessional enough to make you think this is possibly more real than you would have otherwise.  The conclusion remains one of the most chilling in all of cinema because the film (like all classics) exceeds genre when all is said and done.  Night Of The Living Dead was even remade by make-up artist Tom Savini in what is now a cult item, but it and the hundreds of films that followed never displaced it because its Horror is still very real and self-contained.  In some way, cinema and the world still has not totally caught up with this film.

 

The 1.33 X 1 black and white image is the weak point here, looking like DVNR (digital video noise reduction) was used, causing hazing and even ghosting of the image throughout.  This is not a modern HD transfer, but was THX certified, so it should still look better than this.  This package originated on the 12” LaserDisc format, so that explains some of the problem.  Romero shot the film, as well as co-writing and co-editing it with John Russo at a time this was not common.  It was very graphic for its time, but note how effectively the gore was used.  Romero is so aware of this that when he did the first sequel, he knew he had to make it ironically comic and comic book.

 

The Dolby Digital 5.1 mix is also disappointing; sounding more like it is interested in echo than enhancement and direction.  Fortunately, the Dolby 2.0 Mono is good enough, though not as full as PCM sound would have been.  For that HD transfer, DTS HD and MLP need to be done from a newer restoration and clean up of this soundtrack and its stock score by William Loose.  That music is sparse, yet effective and Romero and crew were so in the moment and on target.  That is why the sound upgrade is necessary, because a classic like this deserves it.

 

Extras include an essay by Stephen King in paper print inside the red DVD case, stills sections with posters, photos, memorabilia, props and a scrapbook, text about Romero’s company The Latent Image and Image Ten (two sections), on video camera interview with the film’s co-star Judy Ridley, a spoof, a section on Romero’s lost and incomplete film There’s Always Vanilla, two audio commentary tracks, an original theatrical trailer, an original TV spot, a THX optimizer that can help you adjust your video for maximum fidelity, the original screenplay as frame-by-frame text, a final interview with star Duane Jones, outtakes from sepia-toned The Derelict short and eight TV commercials Latent produced for several local companies.  The exception is one for Calgon, in which Romero and company use a mock-up of visuals inspired by the hit Fox film Fantastic Voyage (1966) to sell the product.  That makes this DVD still the definitive release of the film to date, despite aged and problematic performance problems with the film itself.

 

Romero also allows his love of old Horror films to seep into the film.  Though it is hard to see how closely related Diary Of The Dead, here are links to the first three sequels to his film, including high definition versions:

 

Dawn Of The Dead (1978) DiviMax DVD-Video

http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/887/Dawn+Of+The+Dead+(Divimax)

Ultimate Edition DiviMax DVD-Video Set

http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/1416/Dawn+Of+The+Dead+-+Ultimate

Blu-ray also issued

 

Day Of The Dead (1985) DiviMax DVD-Video

http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/622/Day+Of+The+Dead+(Divimax+set)

Blu-ray

http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/6152/Day+Of+The+Dead+(1985/Blu-ray)

 

Land Of The Dead (2005) HD-DVD

http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/4341/Land+Of+The+Dead

DVD-Video

http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/2965/Land+Of+The+Dead+-+Unrated

 

 

That leaves us wondering who has the best film print of this classic and will we see a high quality HD transfer of it.  Stay tuned.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo


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