"Land of the Dead" Review

When "Night of the Living Dead" was first unleashed upon an unprepared America in 1968, Roger Ebert famously described the effect it had on an audience in his essay/review which was published in Reader's Digest.

"The kids in the audience were stunned... The movie had stopped being delightfully scary about halfway through and had become unexpectedly terrifying. There was a little girl ... sitting very still in her seat and crying. I don't think the younger kids really knew what hit them."

The director of that brilliant cinematic nightmare was George Romero, who went on to film the successful sequels "Dawn of the Dead" and "Day of the Dead," and who created an undying sub-genre of horror films based on the mythos of his ghoulish zombies.

As a zombie-hunting splatter-fest, and as a human flesh-eating spectacle, this latest chapter in Romero's undead chronicles delivers the goods. It's in the creation of a believable, post-apocalyptic society that this tale feels stilted and stale, in these stretches of needless exposition feeling more like a mediocre John Carpenter film than classic Romero. At least in Carpenter's "Escape from New York," the character of Snake Plissken was an engagingly bad-ass hero.

In "Land of the Dead," Simon Baker, last seen in "The Ring 2", is too goodie-two-shoes by half, as the tough but sensitive leader Riley. By the end of the movie, he's even showing compassion for the zombies, a compassion that Romero himself seems to have acquired in his 25 years among them.

In the final reel of "Land of the Dead," the zombie leader Big Daddy is presented as a sort of undead Moses, leading his people to the Promised Land: a luxury high-rise condo called Fiddler's Green. (As a character in his own right, Big Daddy is a classic, like a cross between the cover-ghoul of Lucio Fulci's Zombie and a Uruk Hai General from "Lord of the Rings.")

The title of Roger Ebert's essay was "Just Another Horror Movie - Or Is It?" Of course, "Night of the Living Dead" was not just another horror movie. Unfortunately, "George A. Romero's Land of the Dead" is.