Land of the Dead

I like how Romero morphs the zombie metaphor into a new commentary with each iteration he does. Night of the Living Dead was his response to the madness of the Vietname era. I’m not sure what the second movie was about. The third riffed on consumerism and mass marketing. This fourth movie in his oeuvre (sp?) takes the living dead and illustrated class struggle in a post-invasion landscape.

Dennis Hopper plays the BMOC of a shiny ivory tower called Fiddlers Greens. The rich and white live in isolated luxury and make time for tennis and cocktails. Down below in the city is a Mad Max/Total Recall nightmare of proles ambling about their daily lives cooking up money with gambling, drugs and protitution. Outside the city is a world over-run by the undead. It is these three classes of humans that struggle for victory.

Matt and I went to see and both enjoyed it. There’s a few evolutionary steps that the zombies take and it is sort of cool – like when you realized the velociraptors in Jurassic Park were displaying pack behaviors. A lone zombie makes a tiny synaptic connection between cause and effect and realizes the power inherent in the gun is holding. Little mutations like that made the film fun.

Of course John Leguizamo is good and so is the other guy.

Know that if you look for movie times that it is probably under G for George Romero’s Land of the Dead. It is like Clive Barker. Or John Carpenter. Or Dick Cheney.

I finally started reading Snow Crash this week and Burbclaves are on my mind – gated communities as the provinces of the future. In this movie, the Fiddlers Greens are the haven for the wealthy and powerful away from a world that is literally devouring itself.

Favorite gross out: A woman zombie reachs to grab at a metal wall and her fingernails snap off and she scrapes them down the metal. Matt and I both shivered on that one. 


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3 responses to “Land of the Dead”

  1. Andy Avatar
    Andy

    With my fear that Simon Baker might actually find this on Google – I have to amend. ‘The other guy’ is Simon Baker. Sorry d00d.

  2. Andy Avatar
    Andy

    Update #2: Dawn of the Dead was the mall one (that recently had a remake).

  3. big sis Avatar
    big sis

    Snow Crash is excellent! So is Diamond Age by the same author. Oryx and Crake also has similar concept to “burbclaves” called “compounds” which are suburbs/living compounds entirely guarded and supported by one particular corporation which rules the lives of those people within it. Creepy.

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