The Last Days on Mars
Next up on this year's list of films about us flesh and bone types kicking about the void is The Last Days on Mars which comes to us with the promise of a quite starry cast (pun intended) that includes Liev Schreiber, Elias Koteas and Olivia Williams.
What is surprising and worth mentioning about that is the fact this got made at all, let alone with those people involved. At the front of the film, as is usually the case with low budget films with ambitious amounts of effects, there is a never ending list of production companies. The amazing thing about this is how they all read the script and gave it the thumbs up. One production company full of short-attention span morons I can buy but all 10 (or however many there were) at the head of this film stumping up filthy moola to put it into production, I just don't understand. Then you factor in the writer, director and cast and you are left, when the film ends, scratching your head thinking "wait, have NONE of you seen another horror sci-fi film ever? Did you all have your brains wiped after a bus accident and think this was a valuable use of your time and resources?"
Now, let me explain. My confusion comes because the film, The Last Days on Mars, is, hands down, the most generic, obvious and mundane film I have ever seen. Earlier in the year my friend James and I took in Stranded, a Christian Slater starring, moon set, film that had clearly been made in a shed in Skegness for the cost of some Ginsters pasties and a packet of cheese and onion crisps and even that had more going on in it than this. True, you couldn't always tell what the hell was going on and the plot seemed to revolve a lot around doors opening and closing but still it was less generic than The Last Days on Mars.
In a nutshell this is the plot: A rag tag band of bored and annoyed astronauts are finishing up their scientific fact finding mission on Mars. There's a tetchy, by the bookish, type, a pure-as-the-driven-moon-rock type who hangs around keeping a level head when all about are shitting bricks, the out-of-depth captain who makes all the wrong decisions and a roguish, mumbling engineer who happens to be claustrophobic. Rounding out the group are a bunch of nondescript nobodies who look like they've just wandered in off the set of Coronation Street (a soap opera) filming in the studio next door. There's also a European chappy we never get to know who discovers living bacteria, breaks the rules to go out and examine further, the ground gives way, he falls in and becomes an alien infected Mars zombie. He then quickly infects someone else and the two undead space monsters shuffle back to the camp to pick off the panicky, inept and idiotic crew one by one in a quick and not interesting way.
That's it.
Seriously.
That's it.
Now normally I'd be all for that because a film that is, in essence, "Infected rage zombies from Mars" with Liev Schreiber should be awesome. Should be tremendous. Should be right up my street. The trouble is, imagine that film but made by really boring people with no sense of fun. Imagine that film made by a bunch of people that think they're are being innovative and different while being wholly derivative. Who read the short story this was apparently based on and thought "hmmm I haven't heard of this before, this will be a perfect movie?" It's Contamination, Leviathan, The Thing, Alien and a hundred others like them but with none of the style, wit, charm, creativity or talent.
Don't get me wrong, it's acted fine, looks good, the effects are impressive and there's even a little bit of decent blood letting but the script is inept, the idea redundant, the score non existent and the finished film, dull.
The title sequence, long slow vista shots and weird claustrophobic flashbacks all fool you into believing this could be another Moon type scenario. An art-house space picture with good acting, some psychological and emotional depth and maybe even a decent twist. Sadly that is not the case, you have no hint, really, of who any of these people are, beyond their generic cliches and even when the alien rage beasties attack nobody really does anything. Things are tried quickly and abandoned, mistakes are made left and right like these people were college co-eds in a mid 90s Roger Corman produced slasher film and the ending is as pointless as it is dull.
I really wanted to write some praise for this but, unfortunately, all I was left with was a sense of "this got made? how did THIS get made?" Also how do you have a film like this and NEVER use the line 'Is there life on Mars?' or ANY Bowie reference for that matter! Disappointed!
World War Z
FAIRLY SPOILER FREE
When I say 'I like Zombie films' I realise, now, that I am talking about really only a handful of movies. George A Romero's original trilogy, Lucio Fulci's Zombie, The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue, Re-Animator, The Return of the Living Dead and that's more or less it. There are probably a few more I am not thinking of right now and probably a few from the genre's heyday that I haven't seen yet but I list these films merely to shed light on where and who this review is coming from.
Notice how I didn't include 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later. Both films I like very much but, to me, they are NOT zombie films. They are post-apocolyptic infection films but they are NOT zombie films. People get infected while living, the dead don't rise from their graves and the infected don't die before they come back with the 'rage' contamination.
I mention this because World War Z is NOT a zombie film (in my mind). NOT AT ALL
It is basically the story of a world wide violent rage/rabies infection seen through the eyes of one perpetually stoned, lank haired, hipster scarf wearing, former UN investigator played by Brad Pitt.
I am not sure I have ever seen a film with such massive, global set pieces that is so utterly bland and underwhelming. This is not to say it's an altogether BAD film because it's not but it's not anything special either. It lacks a sense of humour, a sense of style, a decent soundtrack, engaging characters or any cool at all.
Since zombie films and zombie film remakes became tediously the rage in the last 10 years the genre has distinctly lacked any cool. The zombie films of the seventies and eighties are still popular today because they had iconic soundtracks, great lines spoken by characters you liked, disliked or had a complex series of mixed emotions about, they had metaphor and meaning, style and substance and fantastic gore.
World War Z really doesn't have any of that. What it does have is a global scale, some nice tension at the beginning, a cameo from David Morse that could've gone on MUCH longer and some weak underlying message about how we should all just get along. It feels more like a bland alien invasion movie.
Brad Pitt is hideously miscast, misdressed and woefully haired. He was about as convincing a UN investigator as Denise Richards was a nuclear physicist (in The World Is Not Enough). He was also bland as a beige pair of slacks on a wax model of a local news anchor from Des Moines.
To improve this film you should've cast a ton of people and instead of just following 1 man, who seemingly doesn't eat or sleep for a week as he travels from South Korea to Wales and everywhere in between, you follow lots of people around the world all detailing the outbreak in their own way. That at least would allow for some characters. Say what you like about mindless tat like Independence Day or 2012 but at least they have a sense of humour and are fantastically entertaining.
The film attempts to seriously portray what it would be like if an infection took over the human race and turned us into canabalistic rage monkeys. It also attempts to have a story that wraps up in a predictable 'satisfying' way, some set pieces on a grand scale that you haven't seen before and some wishy-washy guff about how we should work together and, in that regard, it's a complete success.
The CGI is not terrible or annoying, it is shot and edited competently and at least the first act attempts some tension and the last act attempts to be a bit more exciting. It does have one scene though that proves that, even in the midst of apocalypses, mobile phones are fucking annoying.
It thinks it's way smarter and better than it is when really it's all just too serious and a bit dull. It's, also, weirdly, one of the most bloodless films of its kind in existence (obviously to capitalise on the recent zombie craze and pack em in at all ages!).
If you're still curious then it is worth one watch and maybe I am just jaded and burnt out but I was watching the film thinking, if this had anyone else in the lead and a Goblin soundtrack this would already be 10 times better.
5 out of 10 bloodless dry steaks in a beige sack
October = HORROR
Yes it's almost time for us all to fall into the scariest month of the year: October! and for all of us here at the After Movie Diner Blog & Podcast it's definitely our favourite month of the year. That annoying sun isn't around as much, that stupid heat is dwindling and it's time for us to tear into our respective horror collections with willful abandon!
To this end I have decided to present this list of a selection of my collection and ask you the listeners/readers which films you'd like to hear covered on the After Movie Diner Podcast.
My intent is to watch as many of the following films below as possible between now and Oct 31st, mainly for my own enjoyment BUT whatever films prove popular between now and October 1st, either in the comments section below, on Twitter or Facebook I will cover them either as 1 minute reviews or as main show subjects in the 4 shows I do in October.
So it's simple - read the list below and let me know what you want reviewing either in the comments section
by e-mail: aftermoviediner@gmail.com
on twitter: https://twitter.com/aftermoviediner
and on facebook: http://www.facebook.com/aftermoviediner
HAPPY HALLOWEEN!
Films (in no particular order):
Maniac Cop Trilogy
Intruder
Waxwork 1 & 2
Drag Me To Hell
Halloween 2-7
Someone's Watching Me (Early carpenter flick)
Prince of Darkness
Vampires
Candyman
Black Christmas
Terror Train
The Prowler
Night School
Slumber Party Massacre trilogy
All or Any of the Nightmare on Elm Streets
Puppet Master 1-9
Demonic Toys
Dollman Vs Demonic Toys
Dr.Giggles
The Hand
Scream 1-4
Deep Red
Sleepless (later Argento)
Eyes of a Stranger
Vacancy
Hostel
Color Me Blood Red
Gruesome Twosome
The Pit & the Pendulum (Vincent Price/Corman)
The Raven (Vincent Price/Corman)
Night of the Hunter
The Hitcher (original - please!)
Alone in the Dark
Society
Raw Meat
Faust
Rosemary's Baby
Demon Seed
Omen 1-3
The Prophecy 1-5
Carrie
Final Destination 1-3
Phantasm 1-4
Deadly Friend (Wes Craven)
From Beyond The Grave
The Crazies (original Vs remake)
The Dark Half
Zombie
The Living Dead in the Manchester Morgue
Return of the Living Dead 1-3
Undead
Dead Snow
28 Days Later
28 Weeks Later
Fright Night
Wolfen
Sharktopus
Black Sheep
Blood Island Trilogy
Q the Winged Serpent
The Stuff
Critters 1-4
Psycho (original - of course!!)
The Birds
Cemetery Man
Aerobicide/Killer Workout
Chopping Mall
Horror Express
Meat-cleaver Massacre
Pieces
Rats (1982)
Shock Waves
Street Trash
The Pit
The Mutilator
The Video Dead
Dead Heat - 13th September 2010
So say what you like about the 80s, the music was mostly awful, the fashion preposterous, the politics was a corporate gang-bang nightmare and the decade started with the gunning down of John Lennon and ended with the world domination of New Kids on the Block, something was clearly amiss.
Yet, despite the cold war, AIDS, Thatcher and Reagan, Exxon Valdeze and neon yellow leg warmers, there is one thing that means I will always have fondest for, what could quite easily be described as, the worst decade in the history of hair and, no, it isn't the sodding Rubik's cube or the collected hits of Spandau Ballet.
To put it simply, movies and the advent of video (although Betamax and VHS both debuted in the 70s, it wasn't till the 80s that these video formats took hold).
Ok, so the Oscar winners of the decade weren't anything to write home about, unless you're an insomniac who has grown immune to strong pills when would you ever sit down to watch The Last Emperor, Ghandi, Chariots of Fire or Driving Miss Daisy?
Looking at the top earners of the decade starts to reveal more of what I am talking about with the likes of Empire Strikes Back (the best Star Wars movie), The Indiana Jones films, Back to the future and Beverly Hills Cop but as great as these pictures are it's not entirely what makes me nostalgic for the era.
Firstly there was the fairly mainstream stuff, such as the best comedy films from the late 70s SNL crew, Stallone, Schwartzenegger & Willis at the top of their game, John Hughes flicks & the brat pack, the classic horrors of The Evil Deads, Nightmare on Elm Streets & Friday 13ths, John Carpenter genius such as Escape from NY, The Thing & Big Trouble in Little China, the good Muppet movies, the not-really-kid-friendly kids movies like Flight of the Navigator, Short Circuit, Labyrinth & the Young Sherlock Homes, American Werewolf in London, the Long Good Friday, Time Bandits, Brazil and Roger Moore and Timothy Dalton as awesome Bonds (I like them!).
I know I am missing so much but I think this list illustrates my point.
Then there were the other films, the weird ones, the creative ones, the ones you would discover on video's distributed by such companies as Vestron Video, Embassy Home Entertainment and New World Pictures. Falling into this category would usually be random stuff like Shogun Assassin, Toy Soldiers or Volunteers and horror/comedy stuff like The Burbs, Maniac Cop, Scanners, The Howling, Wacko, Return to Horror High, Ghoulies, Tremors, Re-Animator and, tonight's choice, Dead Heat.
In fact, looking at those two hefty, yet still fairly incomplete, lists, I wouldn't just say the 80s was good for movies, I would say they were damn near perfect, not a Michael Bay or a Tyler Perry in sight!
The films themselves have an indescribable quality, an inventiveness and a creativity that seems to be fairly lacking in today's CGI heavy, by-the-book, predictable re-treads of previous, better ideas. That may, of course, have a lot to do with the fact I viewed them all first on video.
I don't want to sound like an old fart and I don't have too much against modern home-viewing technology on the whole but video just had something special about it. They also had a weight to them, a certain feel, a pleasing aesthetic and they had a noise to them, the pop of the video case, the rattle of the tape and the whirr and click as you slid it into the machine, to say nothing of the frantic grinding you would hear as you fast forwarded or rewinded them. On the tapes would be loud, bright, neon logos, funny looking warnings and the sometimes lined or blurred picture quality, if watching the right film, would actually add to and enhance the picture. I don't care what anyone says Raiders of the Lost Arc looks better on VHS any day of the week, I don't know why, but it just does and horror films like Evil Dead, Nightmare on Elm Street etc. benefit hugely from video's lesser quality because it adds to the feeling that you're watching something you shouldn't, that the tape itself is evil or haunted.
Say what you like but there is nothing scary or interesting about modern slim, shiny technology, you think the Poltergeist would come out of your big 50 inch plasma or the girl in the Ring possess a blu-ray disc? just sounds crap doesn't it and I would go as far as to say that any film that uses a mobile phone or the internet as a plot device is a big pile of steaming dung.
I mention all of this because it all applies to the enjoyment and somewhat unique brilliance of the film Dead Heat which is an 80s zombie cops & robbers horror/comedy written by the writer of Lethal Weapons' brother Terry Black, starring Treat Williams and the guy nobody talks about or remembers from the not very funny series of SNL in the 80s, Joe Piscopo, it features one of the last screen appearances of Vincent Price and a fantastical, hysterical and disturbing scene in the back of a Chinese takeaway that includes re-animated duck heads.
I first saw this back on video, way back when and thankfully the DVD transfer isn't so pristine that it spoils this rare and bizarre film which definitely falls firmly into the category of films that people just don't seem to have the sense of humour or fun to make anymore.
Ok, firstly and quickly, the things that are semi-wrong with it are that it's not as funny as it could be or thinks it is, which is mostly down to the distractingly weird looking Joe Piscopo, some of the film lacks pacing, there isn't that great 80s synth-pop soundtrack it so desperately craves and, apart from the toupee sporting, hand ringing and suitably manic villain who is excellent, most of the supporting cast are spectacularly wooden and bland looking. Oh and it could do with a lot more zombies.
Apart from those fairly typical B-Movie style complaints, this movie does everything else right. It spends all its money on the over-the-top set pieces which include a street shoot out at the beginning, the previously mentioned, infamous and rather gooey dinner-comes-alive sequence, a clever make-up and special effects piece in which a human decays and the ambulance sequence that leads to the big climatic action scene.
Treat Williams has more and more of a blast as the film continues, including a tremendous tour-de-force revealing-the-villain scene that harks cleverly back to the style of Bogart detective films and the more make-up he's wearing, towards the end of the film, the more he hams it up to great effect behind it.
The film is also directed simply but suitably well with good editing and, apart from the odd joke falling flat and while it's no Lethal Weapon, the script keeps its tongue firmly and pleasantly in it's cheek and never resorts to commenting on or trying to make too much sense of what's going on and instead opts to just go happily with the flow. It, also, isn't afraid to stop the wackiness for a minute and have genuine, serious character moments.
Yes it is ultimately throw away and it's no Maniac Cop but it's an interesting, creative and well intentioned attempt to make something exciting, crazy in the best way, weird, wonderful, different and fun.
If you can, find it in the back of an old junk shop selling VHS, take it home, invite a few like minded friends over, pop it into the old creaky player, switch on your ancient, large, CRT television and sit back to watch a film, the likes of which we may never see again.
6 out of 10 still quacking duck wraps
Points from The Misses 6 out of 10 still quacking duck wraps
George A Romero's Survival of the Dead - 2nd September 2010
I hate to say this, as I am unapologetically a huge fan of the (slow) Zombie genre, but it maybe time to go up to ol' Georgie and scream 'Enough with the damn dead already!'
Ok, so that's not entirely fair, there were things that I liked about Survival of the Dead but you got the impression from the sloppy, lazy use of CGI to the unlikable, thinly drawn, lackluster characters that the enormous spectacled, beardy one's heart just isn't in it anymore.
The trouble is, they won't give him money to make anything else it seems.
Back before Resident Evil (the movie) and a certain remake of Dawn of the Dead, that everyone else tripped over each other to praise but which I thought stank like a trolley filled with rancid pickled fish, there wasn't much happening in the world of the Zombie. The 90s had come and gone without the usual, once-a-decade offering from Romero and they had re-started every other type of horror film from slasher to monster movie but the undead, it seemed, were yet to poke their gnarled hand through the earth of a graveyard. All that changed of course with the release of the three big hits, the aforementioned, Resident Evil and Dawn remake and Shaun of the Dead. After that, all manner of movies featuring the brain hungry hordes spewed forth on to the screens, ranging from the sort-of good to the spectacularly awful. That was until, all of a sudden, the fans were left standing around scratching their collective noggin thinking, whatever happened to George A Romero? In fact apart from Wes Craven and the success of the Scream trilogy, on the big screen at least, the other horror directors were decidedly absent.
Then word must have filtered through Hollywood that any studio to be the first to drag Romero, really now at the height of his fame, back to the genre he invented, would not only be able to claim an original superiority over the others but also would, hopefully have a walloping great hit on their hands.
Sadly life doesn't work like that because while Land of the Dead, I thought, was pretty damn good (and actually improves the more you think about it), anticipation for it rose way too high, it was badly marketed and the clever allegory that Romero's films usually carry were lost on a mainstream audience used to mindless crap like the Dawn remake.
I remember that the critics were not kind to it and seemed to hold it up to an impossible standard. That's not to say it wasn't financially successful, just a quick glance on BoxOfficeMojo shows it to have trippled it's budget in takings worldwide and it did pretty good on DVD too. Quite why George Romero didn't get the chance to continue a studio career is a mystery, maybe he didn't want to, but what he did get to do was to continue his Dead series on smaller budgets up in Canada.
Possibly realising that he couldn't really take the story of the evolving flesh eaters much further than he had in Land or possibly realising it would be cheaper another way, he started a whole new series of films with Diary of the Dead, the premise being that it's the 21st century, digital HD cameras and the internet exist and what would happen if a zombie outbreak happened right now.
I avoided Diary for a long time because I didn't like the idea of the first person camera perspective, as it sounded wholly unoriginal. That was, actually, a mistake. When I finally saw the film I actually liked it a lot more than I thought I would and there were some genuinely good ideas, some creepy situations and the usual band of Romero characters.
So that, pretty much, brings us up to date and Survival of the Dead.
The basic premise is there is an island off the coast of Delaware where two rival Irish families are dealing with the zombies in their own way. One, an old sea-dog looking crazy believes you go round killing as many as you can, even if it means shooting any humans standing in the way and the other who believes zombies can be cured, or at least chained up and put to good use. Both of them are quite obviously barking mad.
The bald one finally kicks the bearded sailor one off the island and banishes him to the mainland where, meanwhile, a group of soldiers, we first encountered in Diary, are still milling about indiscriminately robbing people and often killing them too, just for good measure. Through a series of contrivances they end up at the dock where the old beardy islander has set up a thievery post of his own, in a security van, with a safe full of cash, zombies all around (even in the water) and Captain Birdseye, with his rag tag band of miscreants, taking pot shots at them from their cunning hideout, which appears to be a shed. The survivors of shoot out at the dingy docks all wind up back on the island, where through a series of events, everyone ends up out for each other's blood (in the case of the zombies, literally).
Now the idea of the humans struggling with petty vendettas while the world goes to hell or turning into psychopaths in the name of continuing the race, some trying to solve the problem and others trying to kill it dead are all themes which Romero has dealt with before and, in many ways, hark back to the original Night of the Living Dead. There are also overtones of the struggles that take place in Day of the Dead which is probably Survival's closest cousin out of all the films, albeit better written, more original, better acted and with a more kick ass soundtrack. The difference, however, this time around is that the zombies play fourth fiddle to three different groups of grotty humanity, each despicable in their own way, and a tacked on after thought about whether zombies can be taught to eat animal instead of human flesh seems redundant and out of place without someone like a Dr.Frankenstein type character from Day of the Dead walking around muttering quotable dialogue, rolling his eyes and generally being madder than a box of luminous cheese graters.
The zombies, too, have always been a reflection of ourselves, some metaphor for society and also have always been fairly sympathetic, comical even in some cases. There is none of that here. Nondescript shuffling figures in the shadows, presumably because they couldn't really be bothered to make most of them up, are dispatched quickly with ridiculous sound effects, poor CGI and little or no regard. It's almost like they have nothing to do with the film Romero is trying to make but because, I imagine, they have to be there in order to get funding for the film, they end up being a confusing and sometimes, even, annoying distraction.
There are great satchels filled with suspension of disbelief needed to get over some of the convoluted plot points that are only there because of the zombies, it feels like the whole thing could've been a different and maybe better film if it just played out as a strange rival-families-go-psycho-from-too-much-inbreeding-on-an-island-movie. Sometimes you get the feeling or the hint that Romero is trying to make a point about humanity or something but hasn't quite decided what that point is and if he has, he isn't telling us clearly enough it seems.
All of this is not to say there aren't enjoyable moments in the film, there are and maybe on a second or third viewing, like Day, these will grow on me and shine through. The acting, by a cast of complete unknowns, isn't awful and when the cinematographer eases off the blue night filters, it's on real locations and George focusses on the plot for a moment it doesn't look and sound half bad either. The script is not particularly strong though and there are not many of the trademark one liners that Romero likes to write.
It is definitely the weakest of six films but when you think of other series or franchises that lost steam way before they reached film number six, that's not a terrible thing to say.
George A Romero remains a master and innovator of this genre and if he makes a 7th then, yes, I'll watch it but I can't help wandering that, despite my love of zombies, it is the hordes of shambling corpses that have kept him down, kept him from making varied, interesting films about a whole slew of topics and if studios had a little more guts (them undead get hungry!) they could've got more from this true original.
a disappointing 5 out of 10 macaroni cheeses
Points from the Misses 3 out of 10 macaroni cheeses
I avoided Diary for a long time because I didn't like the idea of the first person camera perspective, as it sounded wholly unoriginal. That was, actually, a mistake. When I finally saw the film I actually liked it a lot more than I thought I would and there were some genuinely good ideas, some creepy situations and the usual band of Romero characters.
So that, pretty much, brings us up to date and Survival of the Dead.
The basic premise is there is an island off the coast of Delaware where two rival Irish families are dealing with the zombies in their own way. One, an old sea-dog looking crazy believes you go round killing as many as you can, even if it means shooting any humans standing in the way and the other who believes zombies can be cured, or at least chained up and put to good use. Both of them are quite obviously barking mad.
The bald one finally kicks the bearded sailor one off the island and banishes him to the mainland where, meanwhile, a group of soldiers, we first encountered in Diary, are still milling about indiscriminately robbing people and often killing them too, just for good measure. Through a series of contrivances they end up at the dock where the old beardy islander has set up a thievery post of his own, in a security van, with a safe full of cash, zombies all around (even in the water) and Captain Birdseye, with his rag tag band of miscreants, taking pot shots at them from their cunning hideout, which appears to be a shed. The survivors of shoot out at the dingy docks all wind up back on the island, where through a series of events, everyone ends up out for each other's blood (in the case of the zombies, literally).
Now the idea of the humans struggling with petty vendettas while the world goes to hell or turning into psychopaths in the name of continuing the race, some trying to solve the problem and others trying to kill it dead are all themes which Romero has dealt with before and, in many ways, hark back to the original Night of the Living Dead. There are also overtones of the struggles that take place in Day of the Dead which is probably Survival's closest cousin out of all the films, albeit better written, more original, better acted and with a more kick ass soundtrack. The difference, however, this time around is that the zombies play fourth fiddle to three different groups of grotty humanity, each despicable in their own way, and a tacked on after thought about whether zombies can be taught to eat animal instead of human flesh seems redundant and out of place without someone like a Dr.Frankenstein type character from Day of the Dead walking around muttering quotable dialogue, rolling his eyes and generally being madder than a box of luminous cheese graters.
The zombies, too, have always been a reflection of ourselves, some metaphor for society and also have always been fairly sympathetic, comical even in some cases. There is none of that here. Nondescript shuffling figures in the shadows, presumably because they couldn't really be bothered to make most of them up, are dispatched quickly with ridiculous sound effects, poor CGI and little or no regard. It's almost like they have nothing to do with the film Romero is trying to make but because, I imagine, they have to be there in order to get funding for the film, they end up being a confusing and sometimes, even, annoying distraction.
There are great satchels filled with suspension of disbelief needed to get over some of the convoluted plot points that are only there because of the zombies, it feels like the whole thing could've been a different and maybe better film if it just played out as a strange rival-families-go-psycho-from-too-much-inbreeding-on-an-island-movie. Sometimes you get the feeling or the hint that Romero is trying to make a point about humanity or something but hasn't quite decided what that point is and if he has, he isn't telling us clearly enough it seems.
All of this is not to say there aren't enjoyable moments in the film, there are and maybe on a second or third viewing, like Day, these will grow on me and shine through. The acting, by a cast of complete unknowns, isn't awful and when the cinematographer eases off the blue night filters, it's on real locations and George focusses on the plot for a moment it doesn't look and sound half bad either. The script is not particularly strong though and there are not many of the trademark one liners that Romero likes to write.
It is definitely the weakest of six films but when you think of other series or franchises that lost steam way before they reached film number six, that's not a terrible thing to say.
George A Romero remains a master and innovator of this genre and if he makes a 7th then, yes, I'll watch it but I can't help wandering that, despite my love of zombies, it is the hordes of shambling corpses that have kept him down, kept him from making varied, interesting films about a whole slew of topics and if studios had a little more guts (them undead get hungry!) they could've got more from this true original.
a disappointing 5 out of 10 macaroni cheeses
Points from the Misses 3 out of 10 macaroni cheeses