Land of the Dead

I wanted to love Land of the Dead. But I didn't. I didn't hate the film, but I thought it was a hugely disappointing way to end one of the most important film series in the history of horror, probably the history of cinema itself. If I consider the film in isolation (i.e. try and forget that it follows three hugely important landmark films) then I enjoyed it as a well-made and moderately entertaining slice of pulp horror fiction.

I guess I'm paying the price of spending too long thinking about dead people. I've spent the last five years writing the Autumn series and I've spent hundreds of hours planning 1000+ pages of zombie fiction. I've thought endlessly about the condition of the living and the dead, and I've tried to follow the zombie apocalypse from day one right through to a logical conclusion at the very end of everything. And that's why I was so disappointed by Romero's film.

I keep hearing people saying 'this wasn't the film he wanted to make...' if that was the case, why did he make it? Because in my opinion he's dragged a horror classic down to the level of Resident Evil and other such drivel.

So why didn't I enjoy it? My main gripe is that I felt the film didn't really have anything to say. The hopeless finality of Day of the Dead was the full-stop that the series needed. This uneccesary continuation didn't add anything. If you follow through the logic of a zombie story (any zombie story in fact) then the human race is doomed from the outset. Everyone dies, so in most cases everyone will, eventually, join the legions of the undead. There will be no happy ending. If, as in Romero's series, there is no immunity to the infection, then there will be no salvation. No matter how secure an outpost is built or how strong a community of survivors becomes, when someone within that community dies then, by default, the enemy is already inside. I don't accept that the walled city and Fiddler's Green would have lasted long enough to develop such a defined class system and economy.

Second problem - the 'awakening' of the dead. Romero's series has never had a set timeline. The films were made decades apart in cases but in reality Night, Day, Dawn and Land would have happened in quick succession. Within a year a body will rot down to just about nothing so within that year the vast majority of the world's six billion dead inhabitants would probably have disappeared. But if the film was set within a year of the crisis beginning, what was the trigger for the lead zombie's sudden awakening? Why did it start to remember at that moment? Was it the arrival of Dead Reckoning on the scene? Was this particular corpse somehow less dead than the others? Why wasn't this awakening being repeated elsewhere? Okay, perhaps it was happening elsewhere off-screen and off-story, but the isolation of the main dead character's actions made them difficult to believe. They didn't seem to follow the actions of Bub in Day who was being trained by Dr Logan to remember what it used to be. I had two other problems with the zombie leader. Firstly, his appalling make-up. He looked like he'd got fed up and walked out halfway through his stint in the make-up chair. The back of his bald head didn't match the decay of his face. Secondly, I was irritated by his annoying dead cronies who stood at his side continually (and illogically) and who, like their leader, managed to avoid endless rounds of gunfire and a long walk across the bottom of a (presumably) fast flowing river. Great make-up on the zombie with exposed teeth, but why did we have to see the same gormless expression on her dead face again and again and again...

Third problem - some shoddy writing. Bad dialogue makes me cringe. When I watched the scene when a group of soldiers explained to each other (clearly for the audience's benefit) how the city's defences worked, I could have cried.

Right, that's enough. I've made it sound like I hated Land but I didn't. I enjoyed it. It was a great 2 hours in the cinema that felt much quicker. It just wasn't a worthy successor to the other films in the series - films that have had such an enormous impact on myself and many other thousands of horror fans over the last thirty-five years or so since Night first fell.

The cinema chain and the film company got my money and I guess that, sadly, is all that matters.