Ah, Zombie Movies. How do I love thee? Eh. To be honest, I’ve worn my zombie-cutting scalpel pretty blunt by now, and I could probably do a passable forensic analysis without… well, without thinking. As with every other zombie movie, people take inadequate protective measures against zombies (such as neck-guards or helmets – though to be fair, the bite of these zombies seem to rip straight through leather). As usual, they split up, and fail to thoroughly search a new place before declaring it safe, whereupon zombies leap up from nowhere to bitey bitey.

It could be worse. The humans are cleverly not given a chance to demonstrate how thick they are, for the simple reason that the plot is not complicated enough to stuff up. I will admit to disappointment, however. When I heard it was partially based on the (incredibly ambitious epic, and escaped-to-internet) original script for Day of the Dead, I was hopeful. Although Land of the Dead is considerably more expensive and slicker than his previous films, the studio zombies managed to devour any brains in the script before it could get to film. It’s Romero’s least ambitious effort.

The main problem with Land of the Dead is the lack of a compelling story for the hero, Riley. His goal throughout is to leave for Canada. There are many good stories to be made from the concept of someone who just wants to leave, but can’t – there’s the common dramatic tension of loyalty vs. freedom (eg. The Godfather), and the more literal approach (Escape from Alcatraz). Red Rock West makes it a wry running joke. Land of the Dead falls into the trap of making it too easy for him. It is perilously close to being a Bunch of Stuff that Happens.

To briefly summarise: Riley does his last mission, and finds that his escape car is gone. Gazes sadly at birds in cages. Rescues a woman (whose name is – according to the imdb – Slack) from a cage, and gets tossed into a different cage for it. Gets released to retrieve a big armoured car, but with strings attached. Quickly disposes of strings, gets car, but goes back into the city anyway, ‘cause it’s being overrun by zombies (and I should point out that I have no problems at all with the zombie subplot. It is by far the most interesting and charming part of the story) and tries to rescue all those innocent birds. People. Whatever. They’re doomed, or, possibly, they saved themselves. So he goes to Canada.

And at no point do we feel tension or fear for Riley or any other character, and the reason is: they’re not being squeezed. They’re not being forced to do something they dread. The number of times they’re stuck on the horns of a hideous dilemma: zero. And the reason is, they don’t actually appear to dread anything. The moment when Riley stands in front of the Dead Reckoning (that armoured car) as the rogue team are about to blow the crap out of the city could be a tremendously tense one, except that Riley wasn’t at all scared – and never had been – of his second-in-command, Cholo (Yes, really. I looked up the spelling and everything). He was quietly confident of taking it back, and he did.

I suspect this is not accidental. As much as it’s a zombie movie and therefore by reputation scary, Romero is more interested in his heroes being competent and saying cool stuff. The tension is low, I think, by choice. And the lines are cool. But… well, I’d have preferred more scariness.

The first step in upping the scariness is to make Cholo more dangerous. As it is, he’s ambitious and unscrupulous and a little careless. At times, he’s even sympathetic – his anger at not being allowed into Fiddler’s Green is understandable, and we don’t get terribly upset at the thought of him blowing it up. Let’s make him charismatic and ruthless, the kind of person who has no sympathy for fools, malingerers or the weak. And let’s make him the leader of the expedition, and Riley the second-in-command. In the first mission, Cholo is after the booze and cigars because they are worth a lot of money – he might sneak a swill and enjoy it, but it’s not about the decadence. Riley chafes at his priorities, but doesn’t say anything, because you just don’t want to second-guess Cholo, not if you know what’s good for you. As an example, he doesn’t hesitate to shoot people who get bitten by zombies, including those on his own crew.

We could also make Fiddler’s Green (and their leader, Kaufman) less obviously corrupt at the beginning. It was so obviously filled with yuppies just begging to be bit: it should be something (apparently) actually worth protecting. We are shown that Riley has some friends in the city, but he should have loved ones in Fiddler’s Green: his parents, ideally, and perhaps a sister and her rich husband. He doesn’t want to go to Canada just to escape; he thinks Fiddler’s Green is unsustainable and unprotectable. He wants to set up properly somewhere else, taking everyone else with him. His trip to Canada is, then, a scouting mission (and perhaps he has been on other, similar scouting missions with no success). Obviously, only a few loyal followers believe in him. He should believe that Kaufman is wrong in wanting to stay, but certainly respect him, at least at first. Cholo, of course, constantly derides Riley for being a chickenshit about the security around Fiddler’s Green. Scared of zombies, that’s Cholo’s opinion.

Likewise, the first meeting between Kaufman and Cholo (who is unusually deferential towards Kaufman – he really wants that place in Fiddler’s Green) should happen in more public surroundings. Kaufman could profess disgust at Cholo’s moral failings – his disregard for human life, obsession with money, and so on, in order to deny him a place in Fiddler’s Green. Cholo can point out that he did a lot of things for Kaufman, and leave it at that for the moment (since we, the audience, don’t know Kaufman’s actually a bad guy yet, besides the fact that he’s Dennis Hopper). But when there’s an assassination attempt against Cholo later, that’s when he goes crazy and accuses Kaufman of orchestrating it, and goes out to steal the Dead Reckoning and reap some dire revenge.

Meanwhile, Riley doesn’t have his car. He goes to the bar, and discovers Slack in the cage with the zombies. Now, this is our first opportunity to hint that all is not right in the city, and it should certainly not be a “business as usual” moment. The barker says that the chosen zombie victim will not be an animal (as usual) but instead, a convicted criminal. The crowd should go quiet at this – there should be a recognition that this is, perhaps, going too far. And then, they embrace the idea. Riley breaks it up and gets arrested. This new low disturbs the hell out of him, and he can’t believe that Kaufman would authorise it – he suspects the influence of Cholo, who has been rather tight with Kaufman lately. Kaufman (and, possibly, Riley’s family) makes a call on Riley and, when confronted with what happened in the cage fight, confirms that it was Cholo’s fault, and that furthermore, Cholo had clearly gone even crazier and was threatening to blow up Fiddler’s Green. Riley doesn’t need an order. He’s going after Cholo.

So, Riley’s journey is to save Fiddler’s Green. But along the way, he learns more and more about what’s really going on there – that he corruption runs deep, and he begins to question whether Fiddler’s Green is worth saving (while still doing it, of course). Slack is the voice of cynicism here, confronting Riley’s assumptions that the city is worth saving with her own experience. Riley has spent so much time on the perimeter looking out, he hasn’t seen what’s been going on inside. So, we discover that Kaufman is a bad man, and that Cholo is actually somewhat justified in his nasty little vendetta. Riley confronting Cholo should be a big deal, the assumption of command for the first time, rather than the resumption of an interrupted command. Riley is still just as clever and resourceful, but this time, genuinely struggling to do the right thing without quite knowing what that is.

The zombie road-trip/invasion bits can go along pretty much without change. It’s interesting that they are sympathetic characters, and that they never really combat the other sympathetic characters. It might have been good for them to kill Riley’s parents and have them become part of the ragged brain-eating band, to set up for a confrontation. Always nice to have the good guys pitted against each other, and Romero’s films were always pleasantly pragmatic and hard-nosed enough for Riley to still see that the zombies were just doing their thing, and walk away from it all – after all, if he was prepared to leave the zombies alive at the end of the film as it was, surely it shouldn’t change his mind any further if his loved ones happened to be amongst their band? That’s the kind of ending that might provoke a bit of discussion in the foyer. As it was, I had trouble remembering which film I had seen, less than 24 hours later.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 8th, 2005 at 12:24 am and is filed under Forensic Analysis, Horror, L, Zombies, shellshear. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.