Land of the Dead 2005

This is the another and fourth instalment of Romero’s much-loved original ‘Dead Trilogy’ and as a fourth film it was not needed and is easily the worst and the biggest flop.

Land of the Dead is a Hollywood-backed ‘Dead’ film with a big budget and well-known names including ‘star turn’ Denis Hopper. The more money pumped in, including CGI effects, the more the film is diminished.

The acting is good, the cinematography and settings look good and that really is about it.

The story is derivative and to be quite frankly poor. Whereas the first three in the series had some sort of social comment, that was small and part of the film but not overwhelming in LOTD it is front and centre and smashes you in the face with a sledgehammer and is a bit cliché to say the least. The rich stay rich and screw over the poor who scrabble for crumbs from their table. Really? In 1985 we need a half-arse zombie film to tell us this – and not very well too?

The plot-holes in this film are big enough to get the Thunderbirds-style ‘Dead Reckoning’ through with room to spare. The first time I saw the film in the cinema, excited to see the fourth part, I really, really tried to like the movie, probably too much, but I could not and the main thing was the glaringly stupid plot holes. The biggest of which was the money. It is a self-contained city with no contact with anywhere in the USA or the world, which as far as we know is now the domain of the living-dead, so how does the monetary system work? It just does not make sense. Nobody makes anything, they just go and steal it and money in this world is good for burning only, it the first thing in any collapse that becomes instantly valueless. How stupid and how vacuous can these hundreds of rich people in the tower be? They buy expensive clothes, although what does expensive mean in this film? Eat fine food, who makes it and why, and are waited on hand and foot whilst seemingly not working. Forever. Even the people who live like that today have some purpose in their life try to do things, trapped in this tower being ‘rich people’ is pointless and nothing is explained. It is not J.G. Ballard to say the least.

Where is the power supplied from? After twenty or more years from the plague. This is very silly. It is never addressed. The giant train-like Dead Reckoning whilst having a cornball name is the most pointless, and let us face it, unmanoeuvrable giant willy extension. All to take on a few stumbling useless zombies? Talk about overkill. It does not even carry the goods that the ‘teams’ have looted. It just barrels into a town mows down about a dozen zombies and barrels out again, luckily they never have to reverse anywhere. Another big stumbling point is the first three films present the living dead as shambling inhuman monsters that want to eat you alive, tear you to shreds whilst you still live, a truly awful fate. Here Romero is deliberately trying to create sympathy for them. Whilst Bub in Day of the Dead was an amusing one-off, who despite calling for Aunt Alicia and trying to shave and ultimately shooting the one big human monster, he was not human, I did not want to be his friend, he did not want to save other zombies or form a society. In Land of the Dead the imposing figure of ‘Big Daddy’ played by Eugene Clark is slightly less bright than some of the mercenaries. When we first see him he appears to be still wanting to work in a petrol station but then for no reason at all, we discover he can control all the other zombies by bellowing ‘urrrrgggaahhhh’ and luckily each ‘urrrrrrrgggaahhhh’ means a different thing, despite it sounding the same. It is beyond ludicrous and for me made the zombies comical, not in the slightest bit scary. If they can walk underwater, some distance too, without being affected by the clogging mud of a riverbed and the currents, because they do not breathe, how do they blow a trombone?

The zombies in this film also do not really look good. The few featured ones mainly out in front of screen and being Big Daddy’s best friends look okay but most of the others look more like Halloween masks, dying does not make your teeth get big, your face get angry and give you deep, deep wrinkles but hey-ho. Of course, despite all the explosions, gunfire and fighting Big Daddy and his core of best-buddy-zombies, baseball girl or No.9 as she is known, meat-cleaver man, the young lovers, hey-Mr. Tambourine-zombie and a few others never get hit or hurt. They are with him right to the end.

The surviving civilians, soldiers and mercenaries are presumably people who got through this terrible event in the world so should be a bit savvy are in fact very stupid, more stupid than the zombies. They do inexplicable things, in tight and extremely dangerous situations they do not pay attention, wearing headphones so zombies can creep up on you, having a good old lesbian snog when there is an attack of zombies taking place, the list is endless and dreary. As well as the dead taking over the world and consuming the living, they seem to have eaten all the logic and common-sense as well. It is head-slappingly depressing.

When the big bad, Kaufman, Denis Hopper’s character bails out it is never explained where he is going, and he takes bags of money with him – what for exactly? This type of writing seems to have been done with haste and its only purpose being to show that Kaufman is a very bad man. There is no thought given to the motivation or actions of the character. The whole film is like this. The character’s motivations seem only to be there to lead to set-up final scenes. Cholo and his reason are as nonsensical as Kaufman’s but it is consistent when he becomes a zombie, oh no spoiler, he remembers his revenge and specifically seeks out Kaufman remembering exactly where he is and what he needs to do. Not really a zombie then is he?

I honestly could write chapter after chapter about the head-spinning lack of logic and character traits, for instance the crew of Dead Reckoning took a mere heartbeat to change loyalties and start attacking the city, but it would be as dull as this film and twice as long.
I am sorry to say but this is an awful George A Romero film and it seems to have been written in a hurry with little attention to detail or storyline and comes across as a slightly gory 1970s TV show in the mould of the A-Team or similar.

Bub was great but Big Daddy had more in common with Shirley Crabtree than any ravenous and terrifying zombie.

Clearly the idea spawned from Night of the Living Dead advanced in interesting increments, but it was also obvious that the last hoorah for humanity was Day of the Dead. I have no idea what Land of the Dead was about.