I generally hate most “genera” movies with a passion. Ok, maybe “hate with a passion” is too strong, but it does annoy me when good stories get bogged down in genera expectations. It is hard for characters to develop well, or at least in any realistic sense if he or she is preoccupied fulfilling their genera archetype. The Hero must win, Good must prevail, and the male lead must get some action from the outrageously hot actress regardless of his social and/or financial inferiority. To me it makes for lazy writing and a weak story, like a novel that stopped working out and devolved a taste for malt beer and calzone. No one has the balls to mix things up any more, or when they do it is poorly received because most movie watchers are just content with the beige colored mediocrity that is modern film making. No film series is a better example of hacky, lazy story telling than George A. Romero’s Dead Series.
I am not just referring to the latest installments to his series either, I mean all of them. Night of The Living Dead was the most tolerable of the bunch and honestly was not half bad for Romero’s freshman film. It was creepy, atmospheric, and had this “doomed from the start” feeling I love in stories. It also was not afraid to touch on social ills of the time, or at least that is what you drooling fan boys of his would say. Truth be told Romero often pointed out that he did not mean for any political message to be read into his movie, his intentions were just making a straight gory horror show that was very good for its time yet has not aged well. These claims of its “gripping social commentary” are just a prime example of his fans giving him more credit than he deserves. Yeah, it had a black lead and a white female protagonist, so what? You people act like this film was “Look Who’s Coming to Dinner” only with zombies when it was nothing more than what it claimed to be. Also, is it just me or are all the side characters in a Romero zombie flick so nails-on-chalkboard irritating that you find yourself rooting for the zombies to have a little picnic on their digestive systems? Seriously, the character Cooper was a balding walking excuse for legalized murder. The guy was an insufferable prick, so much so that he wasn’t even that believable. And the rest of his family was just as bad. Cooper’s wife spent most of the movie wandering around gasping at anything looking remotely like a zombie while the daughter laid in the basement slowly turning into a zombie herself. One thing I thought was funny was that as much as I hated Cooper, he was right about it being a stupid idea to try and barricade the house with ironing boards and plywood. He insists over and over that it is safer in the basement that he was going down there and he wasn’t letting anyone up.
A few zombie fights, a car explosion and a laz-e-boy recliner Molotov cocktail later and the barricade plan crumbles to nothing, the zombies break through and eat everyone but Ben (charismatic black guy), Cooper, and Cooper’s wife. She runs down to the basement and is quickly stabbed and ate by her newly undead daughter. Cooper meanwhile is trying to get the only remaining gun away from Ben but is quickly thrown to the ground and shot. Ben goes down stairs to the basement and kills zombie girl and zombie wife. He locks the basement door and chills till that morning when he gets accidently gunned down after being mistaken for a zombie. Moral of the story, “racist asshats like Cooper can be right sometimes, they were safer in the basement.” The film ends with a bunch of sepia still shoots of rednecks burning bodies and striking semi-menacing poses at the camera. Yeah, nothing spells out ground breaking horror like sepia still shots. But remember folks, this was the best of his dead series, the rest get exponentially worse in every conceivable way.
No comments:
Post a Comment