"...Yeah they're dead. They're... ...all messed up..."
So I'm starting to get the hang of blogging and I plan to add even more sections and move the old one's around to where they belong like making my pages into posts. There are so many zombie movies to get thru. i won't being doing all of them unless i get a request for one i have refused to watch or acknowledge as being good or a true zombie movie. This review will be a bit longer than most because it is the back-story to the modern zombie. Anyway, let us begin with where it all started:
Before 1968, nothing that involved zombies involved the zombies we know today. Mostly these movies were about magical/voodoo zombies, which either were the risen dead forced to do the bidding of the one who raised them or people under deep hypnosis. They never really ate anyone but would often kill people if ordered to. Then George Romero came along with his 1968 movie that started it all Night of the Flesh Eaters. I’m sorry what? You say you heard it called Night of the Living Dead, not Flesh Eaters? You say that night of the flesh eaters is a different movie? You are right! Romero originally was going to call his movie night of the flesh eaters but found out that this already existed, so at the last minute they changed the title card that also cut off the copyright symbol and so Night of the Living Dead had no copyright.
This was Romero's first movie and it was him and nine other people that brought it together. Co-writing the movie was John Russo who went on to do his own zombie movie series. Also working with them was Bill Hinzman who played the first zombie on screen, did some of the lighting, and would go on to make a parallel tangent movie called Flesh Eater and also be the cinematographer for another parallel Romeroverse movie called Children of the Living Dead Needless to say the 10 of them had barely any money so the movie really had no budget. That being said, the film is fantasic if you take that into perspective.
The film starts out with Johnny and his sister Barbara bringing flowers to their father’s grave which is quite a long drive from home. Johnny teases Barbara about being scared and then in irony is attacked and killed. Barbara runs into a nearby house and soon Ben (the protagonist) enters the scene. He has come from the nearby city and has seen some horrific stuff. Ben decides the safest thing to do is to board up the windows and doors to keep the things out, not realizing that the noise generated by all that will end up drawing even more zombies towards the house. We later meet the rest of the cast: the young couple: Tom and Judy, and the Coopers (Harry and Helen) and their daughter Karen who is injured. Cooper thinks the safest thing to do is go into the cellar and board up the one door and this causes a rivalry between Ben and Cooper. In the end, both are equal parts right and wrong about their ideas. I am not going to sum up the whole movie because I do not want to spoil anything.
The movie has some very hard-hitting messages some on purpose and some purely accidental ones. Romero and the other nine mostly talked about the Vietnam War (in fact Tom Savini who will later be a great part of Romero movies, was a freshman film student inspired by the Man with a Thousand Faces to do make-up and effects, wanted to work on NOTLD but ended up in Vietnam) and tried to put some allegorical stuff into the movie about pointless wars, unknown enemies, and people being forced into fighting situations, surrounded by death. The unintentional message is centered on racism and power struggles. Ben is black and the antagonist (who is not the zombies) is a man by the name of Mr. Cooper who is white. Ben tells Cooper off, states that he is the boss of the upstairs portion of the house, and is not going to take orders from Cooper. This movie bear in mind was released the same year that Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X, and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated. So intentional or not, people found symbolism in the movie the ending is also a twist and very ironic which Romero is known for but I am not going to give that away.
In the end, I give this movie 3 out of 5 stars. If you ignore the bad effects due to a lack of funding it is a fantastic movie. Moreover, if you think about just how successful it was and still is, despite their being pretty much no budget it is surprising how great it is. It could have been a lot worse. The acting is phenomenal except for Barbra who has hardly any lines, the plot is great, the idea behind it is interesting and revolutionary in its day seeing how it created a new genre of horror, and it has soci-political redeeming value.
No comments:
Post a Comment