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Night of the Living Dead (1990 remake)
There is a moment early on in George Romero’s remake of his own 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead where I knew immediately where he and director Tom Savini were taking us with their commentary on society. As two men bicker about what to do about the legions of hungry dead that are swarming outside of their barricaded farmhouse, a female character quietly takes off her skirt and exchanges it for jeans. She also happens to be the character with the biggest gun. The point is clear: The 1990s was the decade of the woman, as she came into the workforce and took over jobs normally associated with men. In this wonderfully inventive retelling, they are the ones wearing the pants. When this remake was first released, it was dismissed by both the public and the critics. It was probably too tame for the Friday the 13th crowd to notice, and critics complained that it stayed too close to the original version to be memorable. Leonard Maltin called it a shot-for-shot recreation, and Roger Ebert claimed, “The remake is so close to the original that there is no reason to see both.” I can only comprehend their reasoning by speculating that when Maltin and Ebert watched the film, they only rated it as a horror movie. In that context, this Night of the Living Dead is certainly laughable—its characters are routine and exaggerated, and the events are pretty much as they happened in the original version. But we cannot forget that George Romero is in the business of making social commentaries, and as such, this new version of Night is just as effective as his previous entries in the series. The differences in this new version are its tone and themes. George Romero, as I have established in previous reviews, began in the sixties with the original Night and went on to make a film in each subsequent decade that reflected the social and political issues of the time they were made. For his fourth film, Romero tries a slightly different method: Instead of analyzing the major issues while in the midst of the decade, he predicts the major issues of the 1990s in its early stages. In retrospect, his observations are dead-on (they will be discussed in detail below), and in considering them, it was only natural that the filmmaker would choose to shoot a remake instead of a sequel. After all, both the 1960s and the 1990s were about minorities striving for equality: In the 1960s, African Americans battled for equal rights and the freedom of human dignity. In the 1990s, it was the American woman who was struggling to overcome her stereotype of housewife and “damsel in distress” and trying to establish herself as independent. In the 1960s, America was in a panic over inevitable nuclear destruction. In the 1990s, America was in a panic over the AIDS epidemic. Obviously, Romero thought that the best way to discuss the 1990s would be to parallel them to the 1960s, and that is exactly what he does here. The events and characters’ names in the two films are more or less the same: Ben (Tony Todd here) and Harry (Tom Towles) battle for lordship over their shelter while Barbara (Patricia Tallman) and other characters look on and the dead gather in number outside; however, the story are characters are used to produce far different ends that strike entirely different notes than the original film. Consider the women in both versions. In the 1968 film, they feel obligated to side with either Ben or Harry. In the remake, Ben has been deemphasized and Barbara is now the protagonist, and while the two men snarl and hiss at each other like small children, she takes her own initiative and leads the other women characters in barricading the doors and windows of the house. Ben still wants to fight upstairs and Harry still wants to take everyone down into the basement, but Barbara is able to come up with a far more intelligent solution as she observes the zombies from outside the window: “They're so slow,” she notes. “We could just walk right past them and we wouldn't even have to run. We could just walk right past them. We have the guns. If we're careful we could get away.” Harry and Ben will have none of it, and continue their arguing. What insight, after all, could a woman have? Character-wise, this Night is a clever mix between Romero’s Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead. The women characters are smart, resourceful, and pretty much how real people under similar circumstances would act, as are the characters in Dawn. The men are immature, overly-protected, and more similar to the caricatures of Day. The result is a film that both channels feminism and also demonstrates men’s reactions to the new and powerful modern woman. These men seem obsessed with the fact that the resident women need their assistance and, in fact, are incapable of making a decision without them. In truth, the women would probably function better if the men were not present. As Barbara tries to convince Ben to aid her in escape by running faster than the zombies, his attempts to sooth her come across as degrading and belittling. After a frightening shock, Ben tries to console Barbara, but when he realizes that she doesn’t need his encouragement, he tries his tactic on another female. In the meantime, Barbara figures out how to use the gun and begins to formulate her own means to escape, as the men inevitably (as in all of Romero’s Dead films) turn their weapons on each other. These men are determined to be superheroes and protect their women, but they are in an environment in which the women are quite comfortable with protecting themselves. As a result, the men only come across as obstinate and absurd—exactly how many men probably came across to every woman in the 1990s taking a job that traditionally went to males. Also consider the nature of the house. In the original 1968 film, Ben was able to barricade the doors and windows early on, and it kept the zombies out for most of the film, until the dramatic ending when the dead find a way in. Thus, while the ending demonstrates that they were never really out of danger, for much of the original, there is at least a false sense of security. Here, zombies are crawling in through every opening in the house faster than the humans nail any window or door shut, and one character observes, “This is definitely not going to work.” Again, this change demonstrates a key difference in the societies that each film represents. In the 1960s, Americans panicked over possible nuclear destruction, but they falsely believed that a bomb shelter could save them. In the 1990s, there was no false sense of security over the AIDS virus—even as scientists scrambled to find a cure and isolate the disease, no one felt safe from it. By stripping these characters of their belief that they will be safe within the house, Romero turns the zombies into a metaphor of human panic against a disease that no one understood. Curiously, this Night of the Living Dead lacks the graphic violence displayed in Romero’s earlier films in this series. The zombies are still hungry for human flesh (and they look as putrid as ever), but there are only a few notable moments that we witness any cannibalism, and they are relatively tame. As the other films grew progressively violent, I expected his fourth film to be the grossest of them all, and I was very surprised that the role of gore has been dramatically toned down (which will disappoint all Lucio Fulci fans, I am sure). However, we are given a few scenes that indicate why this is the case: In the film’s final moments, we witness some rednecks using captured zombies in a chilling display of savage entertainment. They pit two against each other in a bull-pen. They hang other zombies up by the feet and use them for target practice. These images pack quite a visual punch, but in reality, they are probably not that far from how a desensitized society would react to such an epidemic. At last, Romero doesn’t need graphic violence to point out society’s depravity; society has grown depraved enough. Tom Savini, George Romero’s makeup artist for Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead, directs this update, probably so that this remake will not mirror Romero’s original vision too much. Nevertheless, Romero produces and scripts this new version, and it is his film just as much as the preceding three. He includes many clever touches that series fans will find amusing (in each previous film, a different possible explanation of why the dead are rising is given. At one point in this remake, a television reporter mentions all of them). More importantly, as in his other Dead films, Romero successfully uses a zombie-apocalypse scenario to observe the nature of society and to paint a chilling picture of humanity that challenges the viewer to consider themselves and which role in the film represents them. At one point, Barbara observes, “They're us, and we’re them,” and the ironic twist is that Romero has so successfully mirrored society with this film that Barbara could be referring to the audience just as much as the zombies. Now a new decade is upon us, and another one of George Romero’s wonderful social commentaries is due. At the time this review was written, he was currently working on two more zombie films: Diamond Dead will parody the music business and the public’s obsession with celebrities. A sequel to Day of the Dead, tentatively titled Land of the Dead, is also in the works, which is will feature a society apathetic to the living dead. No doubt these films will continue the tradition of his previous Dead films in presenting the viewer with a statement that challenges the personality of recent society. If either film is as inspired as his previous four ventures, then we’re all in for some healthy steps on our toes. Click
here to continue onto my review of Land of the
Dead. Cast: Columpia Pictures presents
a 21st Century Film Production. Directed by Tom Savini. Written
and produced by George A. Romero. Rated R, for violence and language.
Running time: 89 minutes. Original United States Theatrical release
date: October 19, 1990. Questions? Comments? E-mail me: danel_the_tinman@hotmail.com |
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