It’s that time of year again! Time to celebrate the Resurrection with a weeklong plunge into all things zombie! Here’s the history: In 2008, Dr. Girlfriend and I decided to spend a week or so each year marathoning through zombie films that we’d never seen before and I would blog short reviews. And simple as that, the Easter Zombie Movie Marathon was born.
For the curious, here are links to 2008, 2009 (a bad year), 2010, 2011, 2012 (when we left the blog behind), 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017.
Ten years ago, Dr. Girlfriend and I kicked off the Easter Zombie Movie Marathon (because, you know, the resurrection!) and for the tenth anniversary marathon, we’ve decided to go back and rewatch some of the best films from (nearly) every year. We had to make a few cuts here and there to have time to end the week with a tribute to the late, great George A. Romero on the 50th anniversary of the release of Night of the Living Dead. First, we have a retrospective of Romero’s career, which will be followed by two days of reviews covering the first four of his Living Dead films.
So without further ado, here’s my overview of Romero’s career, originally published in 2014 before his death, presented here with a new conclusion.
After a career making short instructional films and commercials, including a segment for Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood about going to the dentist, George A. Romero and nine friends formed Image Ten Productions and took an old horror comedy script and repurposed it into a tale of ghouls coming back from the dead to eat the living. Inspired thematically and visually by the classic Last Man on Earth, Night of the Living Dead was released on October 1, 1968 and signaled a seismic shift in the low-budget horror landscape.
Night of the Living Dead stands alongside Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left and Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre as the trilogy of films released between 1968 and 1974 that redefined what American horror film could achieve, and changed the face of horror cinema around the world.
His next three horror films weren’t as well-received as Night, but each has its own particular personality and appeal. Season of the Witch (1972) is the least horror-driven of this set of films; a feminism-inspired tale of suburban witchcraft that was originally marketed as soft-core porn, despite Romero refusing to film sex scenes that the distributor tried to force into the project. It’s worth a look, but isn’t really a horror film per se.
The Crazies (1973), however, returned to some of the themes of Night of the Living Dead to tell the story of the accidental release of a chemical designed for biological warfare that turns the inhabitants of a small town into violently homicidal maniacs. Through dual storylines, Romero’s script follows the politicians and military leaders trying to contain the spill, and a group of survivors trying to get out of town while avoiding both the military (who have orders to shoot on sight) and the infected killers roaming the landscape. As with Night, the film is bleak and brutal, but in full color this time around.
Having gotten screwed out of that sweet Night of the Living Dead money thanks to the accidental deleting of the copyright notice on the original prints, Romero decided to return to the world of the undead with his next film, Dawn of the Dead (1978). While Night signaled the beginning of a new level of realism and nihilism in horror, it wasn’t until Dawn that the zombie craze went worldwide. Still regarded as one of the most popular zombie films ever made, Dawn is surprisingly satirical in its emphasis that the zombies are essentially just a force of nature, while human beings are the real monsters.
After Dawn, Romero made what is probably his most personal film, the rarely seen Knightriders, which follows a renaissance fair troupe who travel cross-country doing jousting exhibitions on motorcycles. The film starred Ed Harris as the romantic king of the troup, Billy, who is challenged by a faction of more commercially-minded knights led by special effects master Tom Savini (who does a fantastic job). As one might expect, things don’t end well for Billy, and the film ended up sinking at the box office.
Day Of The Dead (1985), the conclusion of the original Dead Trilogy (which had never been explicitly planned as a trilogy), is one of my favorite Romero films. It’s a lot less silly than Dawn of the Dead was, and doesn’t skimp on the horribly oppressive end-of-the-world nihilism that I crave in my Zombie Apocalypse stories. Plus, it has my favorite zombie of all time, Bub (Sherman Howard).
I won’t go into too much detail, but it takes place in an underground military base and the main drama comes from personality and communication conflicts between the science staff and the soldiers who are still holed up together. Our man, Adam Barraclough covered it better than I can in his review of the Blu-ray release of Day of the Dead, here.
Needless to say, of Romero’s zombie films, the original trilogy is required viewing.
Monkey Shines is a solid little thriller that ultimately falters and loses impact thanks to the interference of the studio. Rather than go with a more ambiguous ending — a key Romero stylistic approach — Orion Pictures forced a happy ending, and then after the preview audiences didn’t care for that, a shock ending was added without Romero’s knowledge.
There are a lot of good twists and turns here, and Hutton’s performance is pretty good; as is the always enjoyable Amy Madigan as his wife, Liz. The film’s not one of my personal favorites, but Romero does a pretty good job capturing the mood and energy of a Stephen King story — which shouldn’t be surprising given how long they’d known each other, and how good Creepshow had turned out.
Bruiser (2000) is perhaps the most problematic film on Romero’s resume. It stars Jason Flemyng as Henry Creedlow, a man who is emasculated, abused, and bullied by everyone in his life; particularly by his wife Janine (Nina Garbiras) and his boss Milo Styles (Peter Stormare). After years of just taking it, he wakes up one day and finds his face has been replaced with a featureless white mask. The revenge that he embarks on thematically echoes similar films like Falling Down or even Death Wish, where the violence can sometimes feel like it’s slipping over into white male anxieties, rather than being that of an underdog rising up.
Coming from Romero, this is surprising and seems to just be a case of tone-deaf exaggerations for dark comedic effect. But it further mars a film that was already suffering from weak performances and a poor script. This is one you can skip.
Comics readers should have no problem processing that.
Survival of the Dead (2009), his latest exploration of the zombie apocalypse, is the least well-received work Romero may have ever done. I don’t want to suggest that he’s cashing in on his reputation, but most of the reviews suggest that there’s not a lot of substance to the story here, which follows a group of AWOL National Guardsmen who appeared in Diary of the Dead, instead saving the creative enthusiasm for the gory kill shots. It ridiculously underperformed at the box office during its limited release, making back only $143,191 of its four million dollar budget. So, watch this one at your own risk. It’s the first George Romero film I haven’t really had any interest in watching and after seeing it, I can honestly say it’s probably the weakest film he’s ever made.
A shift in focus was perhaps in order, and that’s just what he did.
In January, 2014 Marvel Comics premiered his fifteen-issue series, Empire of the Dead, featuring a zombies vs vampires storyline unrelated to his prior Living Dead work. In 2015, Demarest Films began development of a TV adaptation with Romero co-scripting with his writing partner Peter Grunwald. In November 2015 it was rumored that AMC had picked up the rights to the series, but unfortunately, there’s been no real word of the project since then.
In May 2017, Romero announced that he was returning to film (sort of) by scripting and producing Road of the Dead, which would be directed by Matt Birman, the second-unit director on Land, Diary, and Survival. I have to admit, this one sounded odd from the get-go, as it focused on an island where “zombie prisoners race cars in a modern-day Coliseum for the entertainment of wealthy humans” and was described as The Fast and Furious with zombies. A poster was released on July 13, 2017 and in interviews he seemed enthusiastic about the concept.
Unfortunately, three days later, George A. Romero died in his sleep after a brief but aggressive battle with lung cancer. He was 77 years old.
While his later output wasn’t always the best, there can be no denying that over nearly fifty years of feature filmmaking, Romero had an impact like very few filmmakers in any genre. He created an entirely new subgenre of horror film that, while grotesque and extreme, allows for some of the most insightful and philosophical commentary in cinema. And even beyond his Living Dead series, he was always a maverick independent filmmaker taking imaginative chances every time he stepped behind the camera.