By Dan Cohen
George Romero is the undisputed godfather of the modern zombie movie. After his “Night of the Living Dead” sank into our conscious—a process that began in 1968 and continued for decades—the zombie went from a listless but benign reminder of the perils of eternal life to a ravenous creature with an insatiable craving for human flesh.
Keep in mind that zombies in movies like “White Zombie” (1932) were alleged to come from the magic and voodoo of island culture. To quote from the trailer of Jacques Torneur’s celebrated “I Walked With a Zombie” from 1942, “the black magic the white man never sees.” That was a long time ago.
Romero’s zombies ran rampant in a landscape where race and the war in Viet Nam were never far from the headlines and the nuclear family seemed to be coming apart at the seams. All of a sudden you had newly dead children, grandparents, and neighbors, lumbering after their loved ones then dining out on their flesh. To all that the canny Romero added a pungent comment on racial relations. Well done!
It was more than just the way he exploited gore (although that was certainly enough to send out a shock wave) because, believe it or not, “Night of the Living Dead” was first distributed as a matinee feature to children. It first gained notoriety when kids came home with stories about how they’d just seen a movie where a little girl ate her dad’s flesh.
Fueled by a lot of bad press the movie found an audience in stoners and college kids. As its reputation grew, a tender nerve was touched in the movie-going public. Romero’s terrifying vision, shot in Pittsburgh, in grimy black and white by a local crew he’d used to make TV commercials, became the subject of endless discussion—not only among horror fans, but among the legions of overseers who found the movie grossly offensive.
“Dead” was a pitiless portrayal of naked fear and its impact on group dynamics. Rod Serling had assayed this territory over and over in his seminal anthology series, “The Twilght Zone,” but never quite as mercilessly. Romero took the gloves off.
He repeated with a number of sequels, flinging endless gore at consumer culture in ‘Dawn of the Dead,” and the military in “Day of the Dead.” Horror fans responded en masse. But nothing was quite as disturbing or spontaneous as the original. The later films played more like essays than nightmares.
Scads of zombie movies arrived over the next three decades, but mostly glum derivatives that exploited the title. Romero remained one of the few to marry entrails to something (more disturbing) about the society in general.
Through all of it, the zombie remained essentially the same character: a dim witted, slow moving corpse with a sexless hunger to literally consume the life force. Eventually the idea played itself out.
Then, in 2002, Danny Boyle delivered the inspired and scary “28 Days Later” a quantum leap for the genre. Boyle seized upon our growing fear of viruses and married it to an undead with the physical prowess of Olympic athletes.
The disease in “28 Days” spread so rapidly that in less than a month society became completely decimated. Most of the film is shot in rough and tumble video style, which serves to heighten the tension and brutality. Suddenly there’s no time to contemplate the dread, because it comes with more stamina than we can summon to escape it.
Boyle’s improvements on the genre made it difficult for anyone who followed, including the director of the much less interesting sequel, “28 Weeks Later. ” Of course, other types of horror proliferated—in particular, the “torture porn” variety, which, sadly, made a niche for itself worldwide.
Then, in 2004 came “Shaun of the Dead,” a splatter comedy that owed as much to Mel Brooks as it did to George Romero. A collaboration between director Edgar Wright and writer/star Simon Pegg, it played decades of zombie clichés for all they were worth, taking particular aim at the peculiar proclivity of the Brits to “carry on” in the face of massive adversity. The picture worked.
To be fair, Peter Jackson’s 1992 “Dead Alive” (“Brain Dead”) hit a lot of the same notes, but without the all out comic conviction of Wrights’ completely realized work.
Which brings us to “Zombieland.” Smartly written by Rhett Reese and Paul, TV producers with a considerable track record as a creative team, and directed with more irony and comic panache than any mainstream American comedy this year, the movie is a complete delight for anyone not completely turned off by the genre. Understand that this is a considerable caveat, so buyer beware!
It starts out with a familiar set up. The world has been eaten alive by an outbreak of yet another unstoppable virus. Everybody save a fortunate few have taken to flesh eating as a full time endeavor. All this we learn through the Woody Allen like narration of one of the very few survivors. Quite a contrast.
Jesse Eisenberg, a low key actor with face frozen in disappointment, convincingly plays “Columbus,” the young techno nerd who teaches us the rules of getting by in a newly zombified world. His biggest problem, other than avoiding a lethal bite, is virginity, which, as you can imagine, has been exacerbated by the prevailing conditions.
Enter Woody Harrelson’s “Tennessee,” a freewheeling redneck with a reckless passion for zombie killing. Harrelson has done this type over and over, but he’s so comfortable in this skin and his dialogue is so well crafted that you forgive the familiarity and just roll with it.
After ten minutes of the requisite splatter (state of the art, with an emphasis on drool), and a funny/scary encounter where Columbus nearly loses his virginity and his life in the same night, the two team up in classic road movie fashion.
No sooner are they resigned to their differences than two conniving young sisters, (Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin) join the mix. These two have their own objectives, to get cross country to an amusement park where they hope to capture a trace of their idyllic youth.
In outline it’s all predictable, but completely right for the movie’s frequent comic riffs and consistently slap dash tone. The creators have nothing to add to the genre, but they’re not out to savage it either. And they’re consequently both shrewd and inspired in focusing on character. The four leads are surprisingly well detailed, so the pleasure comes from their company.
The movie takes a real chance, midway through, when the foursome make an unscheduled stop at the house of a world renowned movie comedian in LA, an uncredited Bill Murray. Fortunately, he goes along with the premise, and the sequence is a plus.
In its final stretch, the writers rely on the expected, but then wrap it up in a little more than 80 minutes, just like a B movie from the 50s or early 60s.
For the most part it’s one long slide on a banana peel, much welcome and much needed this fall. I recommend it as brief respite from the relentless news cycle, but with the appropriate warnings—contains scenes of gleeful gore, and other adult indulgences.
