On Friday afternoon (three cheers for getting off early from work!) I finally saw George Romero’s new zombie film Land of the Dead. (Sure, it’s only been out a week, but I feel I can still say “finally” since virtually everyone who knows me assumed I’d be there on opening night. Alas, I have no “zombie friends” here on Strong Island, and the Missus isn’t particularly responsive to gore (though to her credit she loves Night of the Living Dead), so seeing a zombie movie requires high-level logistical coordination with either my buddies from work (which can screw up my already beastly commute home) or my friends in the city (which requires me to spend upwards of 30 bucks just to see a movie). Pulling off either one of these options requires some time and effort. But I managed.)
The first thing that strikes me about it is that it’s probably the least frightening zombie movie I’ve yet seen. This is not to say that it isn’t scary at times–there are plenty of those jump-out-at-you startling moments; just that, as a friend who saw the movie with me put it, “you get the impression that the scares are just fanservice for Romero at this point, like he’d be perfectly happy to just do a straightforward drama that happened to have zombies in it at some point.” Even the gore (which was plentiful) didn’t “gross me out” as gore in zombie movies, particularly in Romero zombie movies, tends to do. Maybe this is due a lot of the Savini-patented “analog” gore effects being supplanted by CGI work; maybe it’s due to the arty, filter-y cinematography as compared to the bare-bones, brightly lit carnage of the original Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead. With the exception of the most disturbing image involving fingernails since The Silence of the Lambs and I believe one other moment that I’m forgetting somehow, I didn’t get that heebie-jeebie feeling.
But I still really enjoyed this movie, because I think that being frightening is, as my friend argued, beside the point now for Romero, and what’s left is the usual thought-provoking rumination on human behavior that the best zombie movies tend to offer. (How did zombie movies become the thinking man’s horror genre? And how funny is it that mainstream-media critics are treating Romero like a respected auteur? I love it!)
However, I don’t feel that that rumination is as nakedly political as certain viewers, on both sides of the aisle, are making it out to be. Lefty Ian Brill‘s characterization of the film as a “radical” one that depicts “the neurosis of living in the ‘War on Terror'” (complete with sneer quotes), and his assertion that “Decades from now it