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Category:    Home > Reviews > Horror > Thriller > Zombie > Political > Canada > Land Of The Dead - Unrated Director's Cut

Land of The Dead – Unrated Director’s Cut

 

Picture: B-     Sound: B     Extras: B-     Film: B-

 

 

It has been 37 years since George Romero’s Night Of The Living Dead (1968) changed the Horror genre forever.  After years of waiting and some world events that changed its tone, Romero’s Zombie films have become their own Quadrilogy with Land Of The Dead, a film with mixed results that did not do well at the box office when fans preferred to see the uncut edition.  It has arrived on DVD and is a better version of the picture, but it is also the strangest and most inconsistent of the pictures to date.

 

Rumor has it that Romero had problems with the production, beginning with its shooting being transplanted from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Canada.  The original trilogy (all reviewed elsewhere on this site) was all Pittsburgh, which was one of its appeals.  The fact that he finally reached a fourth film in itself is a heady thing.  Like Alien Resurrection (reviewed elsewhere on this site), it is obvious that the Horror aspects are being stretched out a bit and the in both cases, the films ride with that fact.  When the James Bond films reached their fourth installment with Thunderball (1965), it was cleverly self-reflective, but Land was too far from its last installment by twenty years to be able to take advantage of something like that.  Of course, no part four went for comedy like the very entertaining Star Trek IV – The Voyage Home, which departed from the “serious” side of Trek as much as possible.

 

The humor here in Land is able to skip being the celebrated ugliness its many imitators and even send-ups have become.  There is enough ironic distance and well-drawn moments of people actually involved with acting out such sick moments that Romero does succeed on this level.  However, those scenes either resemble George Miller’s Mad Max – Beyond Thunderdome or Steven Spielberg’s A.I., the latter of which was totally lost with such scenes.  This is something Spielberg’s War Of The Worlds did not get trapped in, a film released the same Summer as Land, both with their own problems in dealing with post 9/11/01 America.  In Spielberg’s case, it’s the sudden tacked on ending that is the worst since the disastrous theatrical Blade Runner, though we can add that after running contrary of Romero in all his Horror genre work, Spielberg was able to meet him head on for the first time in the darker side of Horror despite running into his own complications.

 

Where Spielberg deals with an alien invasion in a still industrial New Jersey town, Romero is back in his near-future version of Pittsburgh, a place not unlike the prison city of John Carpenter’s Escape From New York (1981, also reviewed on this site) in its militarism.  This is meant to be the logical continuation of such activity from Day Of The Dead, but it runs into some trouble.  For one, it has the burden of The Dead Reckoning vehicle from the remake of Dawn Of the Dead, already a compromise on Romero’s vision.  Then there are the zombies, who continue to become more self aware, but in a way that is backwards versus what Romero examined in Day.  An African-American gas station attendant zombie becomes a lead zombie without any true exposition, something you would never have seen in the previous films.  The violence makes it more effective in the way it propels the narrative, while John Leguizamo is cast as the heroic lead as anti-hero who may only be in zombie hunting for an ultimate payoff.

 

The situation of Pittsburgh being overrun by zombies is topped off by the rich and elite holding their own in the militarily guarded condo/mall combo living spot at top dollar has Dennis Hopper as its corrupt head.  In this case, the casting is to have this figure of counterculture (and by the story being told here, the failure of that counterculture) as the villain to show how dirty the world and its ability to corrupt has become.  Hopper has played this kind of role before, but not always with this context.

 

However, the film has too many Action genre moments that do not ring of Romero at all and the larger statements of the collapse of Capitalism from most people becoming zombies is too lost in that as a result.  Still, like the corporations in Blade Runner, the big money private interests hold on as the world goes into decline.  Too bad Romero’s screenplay does not say anything new about this.  Asia Argento is the female lead for all intents and purposes, but her role is not as developed as Lori Cardille’s was in Day Of The Dead, yet another missed opportunity.  Though the current tired state of the Action genre, she and other females in the film are reduced to carbon copies of the men.  If this was a statement about how women have been masculinized in the genre, it never comes across that way.  The opening is a statement about how marriage has failed civilization completely.  In all this, even in this more open cut of the film, you can see how this film got away from Romero.

 

Other moments with the zombies are just too unrealistic, while this is not to say they suddenly become supernatural, they still do not seem as gory, plausible and defined as they were in the trilogy.  Another missing element involves scientists, or the lack of; a point examined very much in Day Of The Dead.  Though this was not complementary, it told the story better in that the science becomes a tool for the worst, exploited in its ability to only give facts and not the deeper truth.  Even without scientists, however, there are truths the film cannot and does not address.  As far as 9/11 is concerned, it is a big hit on the economy and Capitalism as we know it, no matter how it happened and who allowed it to happen.  The film cannot address those issue, but the trilogy has subtly sent up Capitalism throughout.  What post-9/11 did do is show that the system is more durable (for better and for worse) than its critics, detractors and even many supporters expected.  That is especially compared to Communism.  The film presents no modifying or expanding of a position, so that makes it the least attached to the time of its release.  That is a great missed opportunity.

 

One film that comes to mind that has been put on indefinite hold after many false starts since the late 1980s is Francis Ford Coppola’s Megaopolis, which also wanted to examine (in the style of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead) a great advanced civilization on the verge of losing its greatness for al the wrong reasons.  This film could have covered that too, but misses that opportunity as well, though many may argue that the critique of Capitalism Romero style might have made this more difficult.  Taking the film for what is here, it still has plenty of issues.  SPOILERS AHEAD…

 

Land does a reverse on the issue of money, where it actually has spendability at the moment, versus Day with money blowing in the streets uselessly.  Some critics on the Left may be disappointed by that, while the film may even negate the previous films in that a Capitalism Elite was spending money and living well in all the horrors despite the zombies outnumbering the humans by 100,000ish-to-1.  However, with a contracting economy and contracting civil rights, to have it relegated to a few armed luxury buildings is more in line with the trilogy.  Like Spielberg’s War Of The Worlds, the end of the world is all over the place.  And like yet another part four, J. Lee Thompson’s Conquest Of The Planet Of the Apes (1972), you have an armed takeover of an elite, though the zombies in this case are their own weapons.  As a gag, Romero gives a few of them “human” instruments as they move forward.  This is not always realized either, as the later sequence seems more like a repeat of the same sequence in Dawn, which is most of Dawn with less spontaneous results.

 

One thing Land does have in common with Thunderball is that it is the first installment in its series to be shot in a scope frame.  This does not necessarily open up the Horror factor here, and the way Thunderball was accused of being overblown and gadgetry (though still the top ticket-selling Bond to date), the wider frame may actually put this film a bit out of its element.  Cinematographer Miroslaw Baszak, who does create an effectively creepy atmosphere despite the extensive use of obvious digital visual effects that render some of the gore less believable, shot the anamorphically enhanced 2.35 X 1 image on Fuji stocks in Super 35.  Cine-Byte did the digital internegative, which is not as good as E-Film’s work, but has its own unique look and feel.  Perhaps Romero wanted to keep the film in the cinematic world as opposed to the widescreen high definition ratio and this transfer is not bad, but too much digital and digital enhancement cuts into the picture quality.  There are even older visual techniques that are used and do not work well.

 

The sound is here in two 5.1 mixes, Dolby Digital and an especially impressive DTS, a treatment the first two Dead sequels received goods DTS mixes in their Divimax Anchor Bay releases, but Land is the first film to be made in the digital sound era and takes full advantage with a very rich, solid mix with a fine soundfield and warm dialogue.  Reinhold Heil’s score is not bad and this is one of the best sound DVDs of the year, easily.

 

Extras include this cut’s four extra minutes, the stars of Shawn Of The Dead meeting Romero and having their cameo in the film, deleted scenes that are not bad, a making of featurette, a Music Video, making the zombies with make-up and digital work, storyboard comparisons from the film, green screen work that had mixed results, make-up head Greg Nicotero on his work in the film, Leguizamo hosting a look at the film, previews for a video game and a couple other Universal Horror titles and an audio commentary by Romero, producer Peter Grunwald and editor Michael Daughtery.  Some of the extras are only on this edition of the DVD, which is the one to get.  Depending on how you look at it, Land Of The Dead is either a spectacular disappointment or an interesting failure.  After a film as impressive as Monkey Shines – An Experiment In Fear back in 1988, I was certain Romero would have some new surprises by now for this film, but it just does not pan out.  Now, we’ll see if a fifth film gets made or if Romero is overtaken by a different kind of zombie film.  Until then, it is the most imitated franchise in Horror cinema save The Silence Of the Lambs, Alien and Seven.  Then Romero may have another different kind of Horror film in mind next, for which he may get back on track.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo


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