Night of the Living Dead

Night of the Living Dead (1990)

Directed by: Tom Savini
Written by: George Romero, based on the screenplay by Romero and John Russo
Starring: Patricia Tallman, Tony Todd, Tom Towles, McKee Anderson, William Butler, Katie Finneran, Heather Mazur, Bill Mosley

I was really looking forward to this movie. A colour remake of Night of the Living Dead directed by legendary make-up man Tom Savini? What could be wrong with that? Well, Tom Savini's a make-up man and not a director.It's like he didn't really bother to direct it, his mind was competely on the effects. The acting is poor, the pacing isn't very good, and (sorry Georgie) the charcters just aren't good enough to hold their own. This could have made an eye-popping FX extravaganza, with buckets upon bucket of stomach turning gore. But it wasn't. It was a dull, kind of excruciating look at people yelling at each other in a house.

Besides, it was hardly differant from the original, and just made me miss Romero's directing skills. He may write shitty characters, but he's a good enough director to make them work. Okay, so Barbara's a tough, 21th Century, feminist biotch, which is cool, I suppose. I sort of preferred her as crazy and blond, but whatever. Katie Finneran gets to go crazy in this one.

By the way, Katie Finneran (as I just dicovered ten minutes ago) played Sharon on WonderFalls, a TV show by the same people who made Dead Like Me, which is just about the best show ever. This was her first movie.

Um... where was I going with this... oh yeah.

What I find really sad is that the element of racism has lost none of it's potency in 22 years, aand this has even more hints than the original, like the whitetrash rednecks lynching zombies.

I kind of liked the guy who played Ben, he was cute anyway, but I kind of like Duane Jones better.

At least it still has the line "They're coming to get you Barbra, bwahahaha". Cracks me up every time.

Other than that, I can find very little that makes this worth it. It's not especially well written, directed, acted. It's not artistically interesting, nor are the FX half as interesting as they could have been. I liked the zombie that was sort of stuck of the side of the road with it's legs twisted around backwards, but they killed it off pretty fast. In the end, I didn't really care if the charcters lived or died, unlike in the original, where I would have liked to see Barbra get away. Poor old Barbra.

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