Writer(s): George A. Romero
Starring: Tony Todd, Patricia Tallman, Tom Towles, and McKee Anderson
The original Night of the Living Dead, released way back in 1968, is one of the most frightening movies ever made. It is a masterpiece in almost every conceivable manner: Circumstance, with its gutsy (for its time) use of both a woman, and a black man, as the two main characters; atmosphere, with its stark black and white photography; simplicity, with a plot that literally unfolds almost entirely in one farmhouse; and time, as it completely caught unsuspecting moviegoers off guard, thanks to some surprisingly graphic scenes (the image of the body at the top of the stairs still sticks with me today). It is one of those rare films whose power still holds up fifty years later, and one old horror film still deserving of its “classic” title.
Here we have a remake, crafted by the director of the original, who serves as a writer, and directed by legendary effects man Tom Savini. Now, there is no shortage of successful movies that have “updated” their model with additional gore—Cronenberg's The Fly, Chuck Russell's The Blob, and in a slightly looser sense, Carpenter's The Thing all spring immediately to mind—but Night of the Living Dead doesn't have the benefit of a two-word title starting with “The”, and so judging from my examples, it's doomed from the beginning. But its biggest drawback is that it doesn't seem interested in filling the screen with gore at all, which basically eliminates the only reason one would have Savini direct anything. It's a flaccid, slow slog through familiar territory, that removes every single thing that made the original so effective. If it weren't written by Romero, this might make a little more sense; since it was, it's basically unforgivable.
The plot is taken verbatim from the 1968 version: A handful of survivors take refuge in an abandoned farmhouse to escape from an ever-growing army of the undead, and then argue a lot about how best to survive. This Night of the Living Dead at least occasionally tries its best to throw us for a loop, but at the expense of proving to us that it's ignorant to remake near-perfection. Take, for example, the very first scene, in which a woman named Barbara and her brother head to a cemetery to visit their mother. Everything is kept almost exactly the same between the old and new versions, except where the first film features a brilliant first attack, Romero tries flipping the script on those that think this will be just a straight-up re-do of his first effort, having the first shambling “zombie” that we see merely serve as a decoy for an attack that comes out of nowhere. It works in a cheap jumpy kind of way (it did catch me off guard), but doesn't nearly have the potency that made the original work (the irony of Barb's brother stating, “Oh look, here comes one of them now,” unaware that it was, in fact, the thing he was mocking, is absolutely chilling; it's lost here).
Even the cast of characters are almost exactly the same, with one notable exception: Ben remains tough and black (and is skillfully played by Tony Todd); Harry Cooper remains a selfish prick; his wife Helen is caught between the will of her husband, and her own; their daughter Sarah is still the victim of a zombie attack; Tom still comes off as a simpleton; his girlfriend Judy Rose is still a screaming mess.
The only noticeable change is in Barbara's character, where Romero takes her from one extreme to the other: Instead of being annoyingly timid, she's now annoyingly gung-ho, willing to put her life in danger for no explainable reason other than she knows she's the main character in a movie and can't be killed. Her initial scenes, as she comes to grips with the events around her, play out very similarly to the original, until she suddenly develops a lust for blood and "living life on the edge", and is always urging Ben to leave the house and run, under the justification that zombies are slow and can be outrun. The only thing missing from her plan, is an actual plan: Where would they sleep? Where would they run to? How would they get ammo and other necessities? At the very least, the house contains enough ammunition and food for a little while.
Savini's direction is pretty bad, as is Romero's screenplay. The disappointing combination is summed up perfectly by the thirty-minute scene where they cover the windows using anything wooden they can find, which goes on way too long, and with no regard for continuity: Zombies start pouring in from barricaded windows, even though half the windows are still unboarded and wide open. Good thing zombies don't make it to the open windows until the group conveniently has time to cover them first! The whole scene just feels haphazard and slapped together, with nothing even remotely resembling tension in it for the viewer, as it goes on and on. And on and on.
Then, once we make it through this, we're simply treated to shouting matches between Ben and Harry Cooper (an overacting Tom Towles), which leads to an ending of incredibly stupid proportions: Gone is the genius irony of the original, only to be replaced with an obvious one that isn't as shocking as it thinks it is.
Why was Romero adamant that Savini directed this borefest? With very little in the way of violence, many directors could have handled the material just as well, if not better. This is a zombie movie without teeth—a film too restrained to leave any sort of impact on its audience. It would have been a bad film even if it were graded on its own merits; the fact it's a remake of one of the greatest horror films of all time—and thus prone to comparisons between them—only makes it worse.
RATING: 2/10
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