June 24, 2005

In my (mostly embarrassing) review on The Ain’t It Cool News, I jokingly called George A. Romero’s LAND OF THE DEAD “the actual, genuine most anticipated movie of the summer,” despite all the excitement over the Batman one and the Star Wars one. I don’t know if that was true even for me, but it was certainly a long-awaited event. In the review I mentioned there had been other recent zombie works including 28 DAYS LATER and Zack Snyder’s DAWN OF THE DEAD remake, but my love of zombies was really more of a love of George Romero movies. There had not been one of those since BRUISER in 2000, there had not been a good one since THE DARK HALF in 1993, he had not been involved in a zombie one since the NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD remake in 1990, and hadn’t directed one since DAY OF THE DEAD in 1985. Twenty years. And now it’s been twenty years since that.

I really liked LAND OF THE DEAD at the time, and for a while after. But when I last watched it in 2017, having bought the Scream Factory special edition, I wasn’t as into it. I was hoping that would change this time, but I’m sorry to report that LAND OF THE DEAD just doesn’t do as much for me these days. And that’s a shame because it has plenty of cool ideas, and its central theme of the powerful living in luxury locked safely away from most of the world (including the people who actually do all the work they got rich off of) is somehow even more relevant now than it was then.

I think the problem comes down to the characters. Each of Romero’s original trilogies has a really transfixing lead – Duane Jones, Ken Foree, Lori Cardille. Nothing against Simon Baker (THE RING TWO), who is fine as this movie’s protagonist Riley Denbo, but I don’t think the combination of his sensitive, reasonable guy presence and the things the movie is telling us about Riley being the man exactly add up to a compelling enough main character. He doesn’t really seem like it, but apparently he’s the boss of this crew of scavengers on a supply run in Uniontown, as well as the designer of their missile-launching battle bus Dead Reckoning. We never hear what kind of background he had to make that possible, and he never uses his engineering skills for anything else. He does have a remote control to the thing. That’s his secret weapon.

In DAWN OF THE DEAD and DAY OF THE DEAD our survivors found supplies left over in abandoned stores and took them for themselves; if you’ve watched any of The Walking Dead you’ve seen such scavenging depicted as a regular activity of the zombie apocalypse. In LAND it’s an actual profession; the crew works for Paul Kaufman (Dennis Hopper, SPACE TRUCKERS), a rich guy who lives in and runs Fiddler’s Green, a high-rise in Pittsburgh that “offers luxury living in the grand old style.” It’s fenced off and fortified, only the super rich live there, and everybody else huddles outside the fence, “eating bones while he’s having a steak.” (We don’t see much of Pittsburgh, and it’s filmed in Toronto anyway.)

This is supposed to be Riley’s last night as commander, handing over the reins to his brash asshole second-in-command Cholo (John Leguizamo, TITAN A.E.), though actually they both have plans for restarting their lives. Riley has pulled strings with underworld connections to try to buy a car and get the fuck out of Dodge, while Cholo thinks literally burying bodies for Kaufman will buy him a place in Fiddler’s Green. Another difference between these two is that Riley thinks safety is the most important thing, but Cholo gets a new guy (Shawn Roberts, JACOB TWO TWO MEETS THE HOODED FANG) killed on an unauthorized detour to loot an unlocked but strangely untouched liquor store. And maybe most importantly, Cholo’s side hustle is selling goods for his own enrichment, while Riley (if I understand correctly) is secretly providing food and medicine to Mulligan (Bruce McFee, DEATH TO SMOOCHY), a righteous leader trying to uplift the people of the slums.

They also have different attitudes toward zombies, which Riley calls “walkers” (like The Walking Dead) and Cholo calls “stenches.” Riley is observant enough to notice that they’re starting to communicate. He spots the one we viewers refer to as Big Daddy (Eugene Clark, THE SWORDSMAN/GLADIATOR COP) because he works at a gas station called Big Daddy’s and has the name embroidered on his coveralls. He’s just a guy sort of remembering his job, which means if someone triggers the bell he knows to stumble out to the gas pump. But this humble worker is also the first to see through the human trick of shooting “skyflowers” (fireworks) to distract the zombies. Big Daddy looks away and tries to rouse the others out of it, like Fishburne yelling “WAKE UP!” at the end of SCHOOL DAZE. Skyflowers, the drug of a nation, breeding ignorance and feeding radiation.

Cholo’s boys are on motorcycles firing machine guns into the stenches. One guy carries an American flag and uses its eagle finial to explode the skull of a cheerleader zombie (Erica Olsen). I love the gag that Big Daddy grabs a zombie and accidentally pulls his head off. He drops the head, it rolls down some stairs, still alive, but Big Daddy has the empathy to stomp him out of his misery. Then he screams to God. Helplessly witnessing these atrocities radicalize him. Also he takes a gun from one of the goons and hangs onto it for later.

So Cholo causes some blowback, but also he turns into blowback against Fiddler’s Green. Turns out Riley was right when he said “They won’t let you in there. They wouldn’t let me in there. We’re the wrong kind.” Cholo broaches the question when he personally delivers champagne and cigars to Kaufman, who tells him “There’s a very long waiting list” and calls security to escort him out, by which I mean execute him. Instead he escapes, steals Dead Reckoning and threatens to blow up Fiddler’s Green if he doesn’t get the money he’s owed plus five million.

Which kinda makes him the hero in my book, but the movie acts like he’s the bad guy. Riley accepts a job from Kaufman to go get Dead Reckoning back. Admittedly it’s his way of getting let out of jail (long story), and he has secret motives we can get behind, but it’s still not great to spend the middle of the movie feeling you’re supposed to root for a guy doing a thing that kinda sucks. He says he’s trying to protect the people in the slums from becoming collateral damage, but I don’t find that very convincing. It’s hard to root for the guy working for the tyrant against the one guy fighting back, whatever his motives.

Romero was always well meaning regarding race in his films, and ahead of his time back in the day, but by 2005 I’d argue he was lagging behind. Casting Leguizamo and Phil Fondacaro (THE CREEPS) as important characters was arguably a step forward from DAWN OF THE DEAD’s brownface Latino radicals, but did he need to name them Cholo and Chihuahua!? Also when a Fiddler’s Green cop who calls herself Motown (Krista Bridges, NARC) hits her Samoan colleague Pillsbury (Pedro Miguel Arce, GET RICH OR DIE TRYIN’) with some racism Romero is obviously on the right side but it almost seems racist to have come up with such a random stereotype. I’m sorry George, I still love you, I have a glow-in-the-dark figurine of you here on my desk, but that was weird to have a character who seems to think Samoa is a pre-technological society.

(Or, if you prefer, you can just be annoyed that they argue about regional car theft statistics in a makeshift society rebuilt through scavenging. What qualifies as stolen? Who is keeping track? How? Why? It makes no sense.)

One of the more Romero characters, but also a questionable one, is Riley’s sidekick Charlie (Robert Joy, DEATH WISH V: THE FACE OF DEATH). Long ago Riley saved Charlie from a fire, so Charlie observes Chewbacca rules and follows Riley around protecting him. He’s a very good marksman, which repeatedly saves the day. Half of his face is burnt, seemingly just for the one gag of having him seem like a zombie for a second the first time we see him. The problem is that he’s also supposed to be mentally disabled in some way, getting called the r-word and making comments like “Well, hell. Dead folks is near as dumb as me.” Obviously Romero loves Charlie and means to be standing up for the downtrodden, but it’s just such a cartoonish echo of some trope from Of Mice and Men or something, you kinda wish he left it alone.

Charlie gets some chances to shine, though, like when a macho soldier named Steele (Richard Clarkin, TEENAGE SPACE VAMPIRES) is offended by the way Charlie turns down a machine gun that “fires 14 rounds a second.”

“Um, I— I don’t normally need that many,” he says.

The female lead is Slack (Asia Argento, DEMONS 2), a tough prostitute Riley rescues when he sees her being fed to zombies as entertainment at Chihuahua’s bar. It’s a decent character moment for Riley, that he can’t go along with this barbarism even though the rest of society is willing to, and he initiates a shootout with gangsters in order to stop it. Also we see that Charlie has his back without hesitation or discussion. Unfortunately as cool as Argento looks, and as much as I appreciate the concept that she’s a trained fighter but “somebody figured I’d be a better hooker than a soldier,” neither her character or her relationship with Riley go much of anywhere. She’s just around.

Part of the fun at the time was seeing what Romero did with a later stage of his post-apocalyptic world. Society has returned enough that there are cops and jails, business establishments, markets, food carts, protests, street preachers, even (I discovered through the power of the pause button) psychic readings, or at least a fluorescent light advertising them. They apparently still have video games, since driving Dead Reckoning is compared to playing one. Money has value again. Fiddler’s Green somehow has cheesy commercials (note the DAWN joke that there’s a “fully stocked shopping mall” inside), though I’m not sure who watches or broadcasts on TV.

Outside of Fiddler’s Green we only see a TV hollowed out and used as a stage for a zombified Punch and Judy show.

Of course this worldbuilding emphasizes wealth inequality. Hopper could’ve easily played a crazy warlord (like he did in WATERWORLD), but Romero recognizes that a guy in a suit and tie can be basically the same thing. He has a fancy board room with a bunch of kiss ass executives and a Black servant named Knipp (Canadian football player Gene Mack, POLICE ACADEMY, RENEGADES, FX2, BODY PARTS, IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS, JOHNNY MNEMONIC) who serves them drinks.

Another attraction was seeing authentic Romero zombie effects for the first time in forever. It was a big showcase for Greg Nicotero, a Pennsylvania native, acolyte of Tom Savini and asshole soldier in DAY OF THE DEAD who then moved to Hollywood and co-founded the legendary KNB EFX Group. Working with a larger budget than Savini, and with advancements in animatronics and digital enhancement, he was doing some cool new things, but of course no one could top the cool old things Savini did last time around. (“Choke on ‘em!”) It’s also fair to say that LAND has lost some of its novelty in the decades since, because Nicotero has perfected his zombie methods over nearly 200 episodes of The Walking Dead.

That said, I do like the look of these zombies, especially the occasional animatronic one, like this gal:

…and because the story follows one (growing) group of zombies they give the main ones distinct gimmicks – there’s a softball player (Jennifer Baxter, Marla Maples in the 2005 TV movie TRUMP UNAUTHORIZED) with a bat, there’s a butcher (Boyd Banks, THE JESSE VENTURA STORY) with a meat cleaver, stuff like that. These identities make them recognizable as the same ones we saw earlier, and also represent this idea of the dead starting to remember who they were when they were alive. I love that it opens on a gazebo full of zombies who still think they’re in a band. The one trying to play tuba (Wilbert Headley) is my favorite.

The subplot following the zombies is LAND’s biggest success. They would’ve just kept on minding their own business if Kaufman’s men hadn’t wrecked their town. Now they all follow Big Daddy straight to Fiddler’s Green for vengeance. Other zombies had mostly stopped approaching the fence, learning they couldn’t get in – it took one visionary leader to say no, fuck this and lead them to the fence where they all work together to push it right over. Then these zombies representing working people pick up various tools to break the glass and get into an all you can eat buffet of sheltered people who don’t know how to handle zombies. It’s literally about eating the rich.

By accident, or fate, or whatever, Big Daddy’s journey brings him all the way to the top of the pyramid, in a parking garage with Kaufman as he tries to flee. I love that there’s a gas pump there and Big Daddy uses it to puncture the windshield and pour gas inside. I don’t know if he sort of understands what he’s doing or if he’s just half-remembering what his job used to be. Either way, I support him.

It’s also great that Knipp isn’t loyal enough to stay – he runs off (with the keys!) and says “Good luck Mr. K!” Yeah, shoulda been nicer to him I guess.

I’m sure you can tell from what I’m writing here that I think this is a movie with some true observations about the world. That was what made me like it back then when I was hungry not only for a new Romero Living Dead movie but a genre movie speaking to what seemed like the craziest of times in America. So I still respect the movie for that, I think a good story is there, you could do a hell of a remake, but when I watch it it’s kinda like Big Daddy working that gas station – going through the motions of what a Romero Living Dead movie was. You can see the resemblance, but it doesn’t feel right.

In later interviews Romero lamented that working with a studio (Universal) was a problem. He had more money than before but not enough for what he was trying to do. Whether by choice or studio pressure, some of it seems like he’s trying to make an up-to-date style of movie that doesn’t come naturally to him. Or maybe it’s just the artificial sheen of trying to fake this world in another country, on a backlot, and with digital effects. I don’t mind artifice, I like some of the fog machine atmosphere and painterly composite shots, but when I think back to the amazing opening of DAY OF THE DEAD, filmed on actual empty streets, LAND just feels tiny and plastic by comparison. I wish this had that scope, that sense of place, that feeling of gritty authenticity. I wish I got a better look at Dead Reckoning in action and understood its capabilities and purpose and what it’s like to be part of the team operating it. I wish some of these characters felt like people.

Maybe Romero had lost it, maybe he didn’t fit this era very well, maybe things just didn’t come together this time. I wouldn’t say his heart wasn’t in it. In fact there seems to be a personal aspect we never knew about before. There was a very interesting story in the New York Times recently about Romero’s daughter Tina (who cameos as a soldier here), ex-wife Christine (thought I spotted her too but she’s not credited), and widow Suzanne all working on separate Living Dead movies and (fortunately) trying to stay out of each others’ way. A sad, painful story is told that after George finished filming LAND OF THE DEAD he just stayed in Canada, and it took Christine back in the real Pittsburgh six months to realize he had left her. The article does not mention that in the movie the disillusioned protagonist takes a job working for The Man that he uses as an opportunity to abandon Pittsburgh and start a new life in Canada. ‘Cause he feels “locked in,” is “looking for a world where there’s no fences,” and wants to be alone.

Romero’s a hero to me and I’d only ever heard people speak of him lovingly. I didn’t enjoy reading that he did something so shitty to his wife, who I was familiar with from his movies starting with KNIGHTRIDERS. But I also feel for him as a human – here he was in his mid-sixties deciding he’s so unhappy he can’t stay in the city he’d been so loyal to his whole life. He remarried not to some movie person, but a bartender who’d never heard of him, and he stayed with her until he died, apparently believing he wasn’t very important to the world of film. Yeah, so what, I designed Dead Reckoning, nobody cares. If Riley wasn’t gonna be some cool Snake Plissken motherfucker I wish he could be as compellingly tragic as the George Romero of this article. The movie doesn’t really give the sense that he’s Going Through Some Shit.

You know what, I started writing this review thinking I was done with LAND OF THE DEAD, but now I’ve chewed into it so much I can’t deny there’s some meat there. Maybe I’ll give it another shot in a decade or two.

NOTES:

The opening credits happen under snippets of not-so-convincing radio voices from the beginnings of this apocalypse, to catch up new viewers, I guess. What’s weird about this is that another late sequel, MAD MAX: FURY ROAD, uses pretty much the exact same technique. You know how those Georges are when they come back 20 or 30 years later to do a fourth movie in their most famous series. They do the ol’ radio montage opening credits.

And come to think of it, what is Dead Reckoning but a war rig? Which would kinda make Cholo Furiosa, because he steals it to use against the tyrannical boss.

Most 2005 parts of the movie:

The cage fight and its excited spectators that seem like they’re straight out of UNLEASHED.

The Tom Cruise style leather jacket Cholo wears that signals he’s a formidable zombie fighter and not some shit-talking sidekick who will get humorously killed early on.

The leather jacket + hoodie + pigtails combo on Dead Reckoning driver Pretty Boy (Joanne Boland, PHANTOM OF THE MEGAPLEX).

Other Dead Reckoning crew member Mouse (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos, right) riding a skateboard like he’s one of the LORDS OF DOGTOWN or Lindsay Lohan in HERBIE: FULLY LOADED.

And holy shit, I’m glad I looked him up because I didn’t make the connection he was the sicko Stephen Miller looking serial killer in RED ROOMS!

But the most 2005 touch is this pair of hipster zombies right here. Look at that guy’s spiky frosted tips!

tie-ins:

IDW published a five issue comic book adaptation written by Chris Ryall and illustrated by Gabriel Rodriguez.

In the fall there was a first-person-shooter prequel video game came called Land of the Dead: Road to Fiddler’s Green. It starts at the beginning of the zombie outbreak as a farmer named Jack tries to make it to the city to find shelter. The developers made it on spec before presenting it to Universal and adding elements from the movie. That explains why it doesn’t have Dead Reckoning in it, even though we were told it operates like a video game!

Road to Fiddler’s Green was also released in some territories with the movie-specific elements removed and retitled Day of the Zombie.

In 2007 the toy company SOTA released action figures of Big Daddy, Butcher and Machete (zombie Tom Savini) in their “Now Playing” series.