One of the best horror spoofs ever! Though I haven’t seen Shaun of the Dead yet.
House of The Dead may have been the worst movie I ever seen, so I have purposely forgotten most of it.
I do remember I started off annoyed when they showed bits of the video game as they cut between scenes, but then I started to look forward to those bits because they ended up being the best parts of the movie…
I loved both “Return” and “Shaun”. I think I’d give “Return” the edge, because it works better as a horror flick (more gore and that creepy tar-zombie), and has some Linnea Quigley nudity (always a plus in a horror flick). And the great 80’s punk soundtrack.
“Shaun” is probably funnier though, and has more genuine drama.
“Now you’ve done it Tina, you made me hurt myself again, you made me break my hand clean off this time, but it’s okay because i love you, and you have to let me eat your BRAAAIIIINNN!!”
“You watch your mouth boy, If you like this Job!!!”
“Like this Job?!?!”
“Whaddya mean, no blood pressure, no pulse”
Ghouls would be more accurate.
I’m looking forward to this movie. It opens this weekend.
“Why do you eat brains?”
“To stop the pain…the pain of being dead!”
“It…hurts…to be dead…”
In a lot of cities it opens tonight (Thurs. 6/23) at midnight. Any Vegas-area Romero fans/Dopers interested, be at Texas Station Cinemas 11:30-11:45.
I’m going tonight… reviews are mixed but I will take that as some critics don’t know how to take Romero.
Yes I’m in denial. Can’t wait! Will report back after I see it.
Saw it last night! FAN-FREAKIN-TASTIC!!!Worth waitng 20 years! 'Nuff said.
Question for the zombie-philes: how do the Italian zombie movies compare to Romero, 28 Days Later, etc.? I always hear about Argento and Fulci in particular. Are their movies really gory? More serious? More “epic” in scale and scope? What’s the straight dope on Euro-zombies?
Holy Flirkin Shnit!!!
I had hoped for a good Romero Zombie Flick and I walked away from a Great one!!!
I’m not sure if I prefer Dawn (1978 of course) or this one! What made it more enjoyable was that I know practically all the locations (I’ll never look at the Gardener Expressway the same again!!)
Great effects, nice plot
Though, thematically it makes sense, I’m not sure why money still has value… Perhaps a hold over from the good old days?
and it moved along at a good speed. Almost too good. I would prefer that Romero took his time setting up the place a little more (Perhaps these scenes will come in the DVD?)
I loved Dead Reckoning and the opening was pure magic.
See Slow Zombies are still the best. You couldn’t have that fucking freaky scene in the river with Sprinter Zombies.
Romero Knows what a Zombie movie should be. He nailed it big time! Now I have to wait for the DVD to see the full gore!
Nice to see Blades again. I missed the other cameos though…
Thanks George!!!
I enjoyed Land of the Dead quite a bit. Good plot, good special effects, interesting view of what people would do if faced with a situation like that.
[spoiler]I’d wondered about the money issue too-who cares? I guess if there were outposts in different parts of the country, money could still be useful for people who needed to travel between them.
I found one part of the end intensely annoying. After Riley decides not to kill the zombies because “they’re just looking for a place to be,” I wish one of the characters had turned to him and said “You, know, they still EAT people.”[/spoiler]
I have a take on that ending sentement.
I think he just realizes that in the end it doesn’t matter what they do… the zombies will always be there. Everyone he knows will eventually die and become one. Perhaps he is just tired of fighting the tide of living dead which is why he wanted to escape up North. (The audience in my theatre cheered at the mention of my Home an Native land… of course after a while I got kinda tired of hearing that there is nothing up here… I mean damn we aren’t a complete wilderness)
just my take… of course we all know Romero is just a big ol hippie still so His world his sentements
As someone who has never seen any of Romero’s zombie movies should I see them before land of the dead comes out in the UK? I will see them at some point though. (And I loved Shaun of the Dead).
Did anybody catch [spoiler]Simon “Shaun Of The Dead” Pegg as a zombie? I didn’t see him. According to the IMDB he was a “Photo Booth Zombie”, but I don’t recall seeing a photo booth.
I did notice Tom Savini though.[/spoiler]
OK, to answer my own question, the photo “booth” was where people would get their pics taken with chanied-up zombies, as a gag. Pegg was one of the zombies, and ‘Shaun’ director Edgar Wright was another in the “booth”.
I was vaguely disappointed. I mean, it was cool and all. I liked Big Daddy and Dead Reckoning, but I felt the social commentary of the film was a bit lacking.
How did the city work? How was it built? How come there was an upper class? (Where the low-class slobs had all the guns and food). What did everyone else in the city do? It seems like everyone lived on handouts from the raiding parties that Kaufman funded and ran.
I know I should just repeat to myself it’s just a show, and really just relax, but Romero has offered this level of detail and logic in his previous outings, and I don’t think I was expecting too much from him here.
Still, not bad.
Well, I just got back…and I liked it, but I was also a little disappointed. It seemed far too cliche’d and by-the-numbers for a Romero zombie flick. Although that in itelf was rather surprising… If a director who is famous for confounding viewers’ expectations makes a movie without any surprise twists, does that count as a surprise twist? …uunngh…head hurt…
In fairness, there was one twist that I thought worked fairly well, the bit where “the sky-flowers don’t work no more.” Usually I find it intensely annoying when a movie sets up an ironclad rule like that just to ignore it later, but I liked it that the characters in the movie were just as flummoxed by that turn of events. On the other hand, shooting off the extra fireworks at the end of the film seemed like a profoundly ill-advised extravagance, since even if the zombies around the city have become immune to the trick, the others on the way to Canada probably haven’t yet. I’m just saying, is all.
I had a hard time parsing out the social commentary in this movie. Romero seems to be presenting the zombies as the ultimate disenfranchised class. I don’t presume to tell George Romero what he can or can’t do with zombies, but I did find it a bit difficult to follow along with the zombie-as-class-war-victim metaphor, insofar as they are in fact near-unkillable flesh-eating machines.
In fact, the entire class structure presented in this movie seemed intensely dubious to me. Evidently the bastion of living humanity depicted in the film consists of the Golden Triangle area of Pittsburgh up to the Crosstown Blvd. or thereabouts.* This seems like a fairly small community to support a mall-dwelling upper class of cigar-puffing white people. Between the transparently corrupt city leaders and the flesh-eating homeless people, this was the most 1980’s movie I can remember seeing since the 1980’s.
Dennis Hopper stars in this movie. In his first scene, he is dressed in a finely tailored suit, sporting a well-groomed Van Dyke beard, seated in a plush leather reclining chair, smoking a cigar in front of his penthouse window. So I admit that it did come as quite a shock to me to to learn that he’s eviland laterhe dies.
I thought the notion of zombies slowly evolving, or whatever, was kind of interesting. It makes sense of a sort; the less successful zombies would be winnowed out fairly early on, leaving the more intelligent and capable ones to take their place. I kind of wish this had been a more prominent theme.
[spoiler]How is it that there are no helicopters in this universe? You’ve barricaded yourselves onto a virtual island dominated by skyscrapers, and there are no helipads or helicopters? Every evil corporate overlord should have at least one helicopter. I don’t care how much tool use or getting-used-to-fireworks your zombies learn, they aren’t ever going to evolve far enough to fly helicopters. You can never have enough helicopters in these situations.
Also, it really seems like they should have had more than one “Dead Reckoning” - style vehicle. “Curses, the armored bus has been stolen! We have no choice but to take the convertible El Camino.”[/spoiler]
One other thing that irked me, not a major thing, but still… what’s up with the lack of Pittsburgh in this movie? Don’t coyly hint that the city featured in your movie is Pittsburgh, show me a large picture of Pittsburgh, and then not actually show me any Pittsburgh. It’s one thing to shoot in Toronto when your movie is supposed to be set in New York, or Washingon, but we’re talking about Pittsburgh here! You can shoot your zombie movie on the North Side and no one will even notice! (Not intended as a slur on the Steel City, I assure you, even though they did force me to emigrate for being allergic to beer.) There is something profoundly wrong at the heart of the American movie industry when George Romero can’t shoot a zombie movie in Pittsburgh.
The zombies were top notch in my opinion. Tom Savini clearly had a blast, and I note that Bernie Wrightson did some of the concept work. One sour note: Eugene Clark is a marvelously effective zombie lord, but he had the healthiest looking neck since the Nazis in Zombie Lake. At least in that film the audience had ample reason not to be looking at the makeup, but there were no such distractions in this film.
There should have been a Cardille in there somewhere. I’d hoped to see a cameo from “Chilly Billy;” I hope he’s doing all right these days.
*It’s a sound choice, in my opinion: despite what the movie suggests, I sincerely doubt that even the most sure-footed zombie could walk across the Allegheny riverbed. Although if they had attempted to cross the Mon, there’s a chance that they might have stumbled across that nuke-bearing B-25 that city folklore claims went down there in the '50s. But that would have been a whole other movie.