The main mistakes in the Savini remake, which was pretty good, were making Barbara snap out of it and become some rippling, Sigourney-Weaver-esque She-Ra zombie killer. In the first movie, the most disconcerting thing about the invasion of flesh eating zombies is Barbara’s hysteria over all of it. Eliminate the hysteria of someone falling apart at the seams and you instantly eliminate any depth the movie has besides the cinematic equivalent of every 15 year old boy’s dreams.
Agreed on both points. The original ending is unforgettable. I can understand why they woudn’t want to just dupe it, and the Cooper substitution worked pretty well, but it wasn’t as effective as the original. The irony that Cooper’s plan was the best one, even though he was an ass, was great.
I’m skeptical the Dawn remake will ever happen, and hope it doesn’t. I’d like to see Romero finally do his 4th one though, which is off-again, on-again.
[quote]The main mistakes in the Savini remake, which was pretty good, were making Barbara snap out of it and become some rippling, Sigourney-Weaver-esque She-Ra zombie killer…Also: Tony Todd turning into a zombie.
Agreed on both points. The original ending is unforgettable. I can understand why they woudn’t want to just dupe it, and the Cooper substitution worked pretty well, but it wasn’t as effective as the original. The irony that Cooper’s plan was the best one, even though he was an ass, was great.
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Maybe it was just the style he was going for at the time, or maybe he just didn’t know better, but I thought the original felt too claustophobic. To me it just didn’t feel that scary since all the characters where cramped up in tiny corners with 10k’s shining on them. The remake broadened the house a bit and made it seem more dangerous; there were more windows to be seen, and who knows what’s in the next room?
Also Barbara didn’t really ‘butch out’, she was crying (badly) and obviously too scared to do much else but run, I don’t think she shot anything, just ran.
I DID bitterly hate when they tried to throw a message at us about how the people playing with the zombies were somehow ‘worse’ than the zombies themselves.
And yeah Cooper’s plan was the best, if you remember the banging of the hammers were what drew the zombies to the house in the first place, but I think Candyman (forgot his name) was just panicking and HAD to be doing something so he didn’t feel helpless. He was keeping his hands busy to prevent his mind thinking about the situation. Note that he also smoked, another nervous habit.
Also Barbara didn’t really ‘butch out’, she was crying (badly) and obviously too scared to do much else but run, I don’t think she shot anything, just ran.
You’re misremembering the remake. While you are right that she does freak out after Johnny is killed, she pulls herself together about thirty minutes into the film, makes a couple of ra-ra-feminism speeches, rips off her blouse to reveal bulging biceps and a wife beater underneath abd straps some pistols to her to kick zombie ass. From that point on, she’s in full Zombie-fighting Ripley mode. I think she actually punches Cooper at one point, though I could be wrong, but she definitely shoots him in cold blood at the end. She also shoots numerous zombies as she makes her “run” (she’s not fleeing) for help.
Actually, the Savini remake is probably way better than anyone should have gotten for a movie that didn’t need to be remade to begin with. But that, along with Ben’s zombification, really aren’t very good changes.
Note that he also smoked, another nervous habit.
I had never thought of Night of the Living Dead (with its thousands of flesh-addicted zombies trying to take over the world and its nicotine-addicted, eventually-zombified hero) as an damning allegory of the Tobacco Industry. But… MAKES SENSE! And, hell, all you self-righteous health pundits had to do was correlate smoking with zombies for me to start poo-pooing with you in the Non-Zombie camp. That’s way more effective than those “Truth” ads.
Ah ok, I see what you mean. But note that she didn’t leave the house until the entire thing went down the toilet, she wanted to sure, but not until she had no other choice did she run off with the cop’s gun. And, like I said, she was wailing and gnashing at the heavens the whole time, then gets EXTRA girly when finding the truck full of heads. It MIGHT have been a really half-assed attempt at a feminist statement to contrast the complacency of Cooper’s wife and the CONSTANT screaming of the girl, but I think they were going for a more ‘quiet well of reserve’ type thing.
Actually, the Savini remake is probably way better than anyone should have gotten for a movie that didn’t need to be remade to begin with.
Agreed
[quote]Note that he also smoked, another nervous habit.
I had never thought of Night of the Living Dead (with its thousands of flesh-addicted zombies trying to take over the world and its nicotine-addicted, eventually-zombified hero) as an damning allegory of the Tobacco Industry. But… MAKES SENSE! And, hell, all you self-righteous health pundits had to do was correlate smoking with zombies for me to start poo-pooing with you in the Non-Zombie camp. That’s way more effective than those “Truth” ads.[/quote]
EXACTLY! And you know what the spade represented in the original? Big Tabaccoo getting it’s ‘digs’ into yet ANOTHER victim!!! And the blood spattered on said spade in the remake WASN’T a cute wink to the original, but the director saying ‘OK you proud health saviors, I give up my filthy habit! THANK YOU for saving me!!’
Anyway, back to reality. I bet, when thing’s get tense, you bite your nails, the whole ‘boarding up the windows’ thing was his proactive fidgeting. He HAD to keep moving to keep his sanity. Plus the movie would have been an hour and a half of them bickering in the basement before the little girl changed.
And you know something? The FIRST thing I would have done is head upstairs and searched for an attic.
Where the fuck can you get ahold of an Italian zombie movie? Is some kind of “keep spreading the tapes” cult, um, spreading the tapes? If so, somebody hook me up, because I really want to see that airplane landing scene.
I think the “Return” series is just a bit too goofy to say it’s the best zombie movie ever. This is the same movie where the boyfriend becomes zombified and somehow convinces his girlfriend that letting him snack on her brains is a good idea – and she finally agrees!
Don’t get me wrong, it’s funny and I like the movie, but I’d put any of Romero’s trilogy before the “Return” series for sheer zombie terror.
I’m just killing time while waiting to get my flight out of Utah, but I wanted to say that I think Danny Boyle has closed the book on zombie movies for a while.
28 Days Later is as good as it gets. Faithful to the genre without being stale. It’s faster, meaner, better. I don’t think I can take seriously anymore Romero’s shambling ghouls with their arms held in front of them like Frankenstein monsters.
The movie will be distributed domestically by Fox Searchlight. I don’t think the release has been scheduled yet, but they have a challenge ahead of them considering the title and the British-ness. The main problem with be the lack of star power to draw the young audience required to make it successful. But you guys will get to see it and I’m predicting warm fuzzies all around.
Right on. And if you’re going for goofy zombie movies Brain Dead beats Return dead on.
I’d also classify the original Night as the best film with zombies (although I’m surprised we don’t have more Fulci boosters here) and Dawn as the coolest in a 10th-grade-say-wouldn’t-it-be-cool-if-we-were-trapped-in-a-mall sort of way. You fly-boys crack me up.
I’m interested in this 28 days later movie though.
The movie I was looking forward to the most at Sundance was 28 Days Later – in fact, being able to see it was one of the primary reasons I made a last minute decision to attend Sundance. Assessment: worth each and every of the 60,000 frequent flier points I dropped to zip to Utah.
It’s a great movie, which is very deferential to the Romero Dead movies (there’s numerous homages to each of the 3 Dead movies). The audience of 1300 people that Tom and I saw the movie was very into the movie, in spite of it not being a very typical Sundance film – you could have heard a pin drop in the theatre during the film.
Much as I love the Romero films, 28 Days Later is a much better film than any of that trilogy, primarily because it has a more capable director and far better production values – Boyle may not be able to match Romero’s creative vision, and the movie definitely duplicates (deliberately) some of the less plausible yet typical elements of films of the genre, but 28 Days Later is a first-rate action, or horror, film, and one of the best “end of world” films ever.
I think the “Return” series is just a bit too goofy to say it’s the best zombie movie ever. This is the same movie where the boyfriend becomes zombified and somehow convinces his girlfriend that letting him snack on her brains is a good idea – and she finally agrees!
Erik, Tom and I agreed too, in a guttling orgy of mutual skull-crunching and brain-sucking, leaving us the lurching intellectual zombies you currently see before you. Why else would we recommend a series of movies (especially the stinky Return of the Return of the Living Dead) that were so terrible that even the bipartisan Zombie Lover/Haters held hands outside of Congress to sing a song reaffirming the goodness of humanity that those films had so fundamentally shaken?
Oh, actually, wait. We weren’t endorsing the series - just the first one. Which is totally great and Barsoom to ROTLD2’s Pellucidar in terms of their respective heights of talent, writing, horrors and humor. Don’t forget that the writer and director of Return of the Living Dead was the man who wrote Alien.
I agree, though. The other films sucked - I still remember that Michael Jackson joke in the second one with a nauseous heave of dismay for man’s artistic cruelty to fellow man.
28 Days Later is as good as it gets. Faithful to the genre without being stale. It’s faster, meaner, better. I don’t think I can take seriously anymore Romero’s shambling ghouls with their arms held in front of them like Frankenstein monsters.
Glad you liked it, Tom. To be fair, Romero did a zombie film five years before he did Dawn of the Dead that in some ways is very similar to 28 Days Later (biological agents turn an entire community into insane, murderous “zombies”) called The Crazies. So actually, Boyle is taking his cue from a Romero zombie film that was made even before Romero defined the zombie genre with Dawn of the Dead - making its forumla even staler than Dawn!
Although I have some problems with 28 Days Later - especially its completely implausible “bicycle courier single-handedly takes out an entire army batallion” finale - some of the writing is absolutely chilling. The story about whatsisface losing his family in the middle of a crowd that was rapidly becoming infected is absolutely chilling - even more so because it is conveyed all verbally, without any flashbacks. Brendan Gleeson’s completely unexpected infection-through-the-eye scene and his subsequent “turning” as he tries to chase his daughter away from him was also incredibly well done. And even though I just complained about the finale, I understand what Boyle was trying to get at with it, and it is an interesting twist on the “dead shall walk the earth” genre.
28 Days Later is a first-rate action, or horror, film, and one of the best “end of world” films ever.
Agreed. Though I still think “Miracle Mile” is the best end of the world film ever.
Damn, guess I should have said Brain Dead (Dead Alive) here since someone was bringing up the other Brain Dead earlier.
That’s okay, because I saw Dead Alive for the first time when the brain splatter at the beginning read “Brain Dead”. Also, I was confusing Brain Damaged, which has the Peggy-Lee brain-sucking worm, with another great movie called Braindead.
Completely undescribable, absolutely bizarre, you either love it or you hate it movie as Bill Pullman is dragged down into madness. It was written by Charles Beaumont who, along with Richard Matheson, wrote most of the best Twilight Zone episodes. As near as the plot can be described, Bill Pullman plays a neurosurgeon who has come up with a surgical technique to alter people’s sense of reality. Bill Paxton saunters up and convinces Pullman to use the technique to extract a number from an insane mathematician’s head. After that, Pullman is hit by a car, and after that, it is hard to tell what is going on. I haven’t seen it for years, but the directing, writing and editing is incredibly clever, with all sorts of subtle inconsistencies within scenes that emphasize Pullman’s tenuous hold on reality and his fluctuation between pseudo-realities and completely insane dreams. Pullman and Paxton are more tolerable than usual, as well.
I’m not up on my end of the world movies, but I do remember being scared absolutely shitless by The Day After on ABC when I was a kid, even though I didn’t see much of it (parents made me go to bed). I’m guessing it actually wasn’t that all that: anyone seen it?
I was confusing Brain Damaged, which has the Peggy-Lee brain-sucking worm, with another great movie called Braindead.
Don’t forget that Braindead also stars the now perpetually grizzled Bud Cort. And whatever happened to Frank Henenlotter? He made three awesome movies - Brain Damage, Basket Case, and Frankenhooker - and then just disappeared.
To be fair, Romero did a zombie film five years before he did Dawn of the Dead that in some ways is very similar to 28 Days Later (biological agents turn an entire community into insane, murderous “zombies”) called The Crazies.
The Crazies has a terrfying opening scene, but I was pretty disappointed with everyhting after the first 5 minutes.
[quote=“DrCrypt”]
I still think “Miracle Mile” is the best end of the world film ever.
That’s a great one. I used to live right off Miracle Mile, so it always held a fond place in my heart. I don’t know whether it would beat out The Rapture, though.
