Night of the Living Dead (1968)

After the disappointment that came from my first Hammer Films experience, Dracula A.D. 1972, I was in the mood for something classic, but...you know...good.  The original Night of the Living Dead had been on my to-do list for a while now, but it was nice to have a reason to prompt me to finally watch the movie that launched a sub-genre.

As the grandaddy of all modern zombie movies (a few preceded this one, but they were more voodoo zombies), Night of the Living Dead starts at the very beginning, which is a very good place to start.  Babra (Judith O'Dea) and her brother have driven several hours for their monthly visit to their father's grave; the radio has had poor reception, so they've spent the past few hours talking and not listening to reports of a bizarre infectious disease (zombie-itis?) that seems to be spreading.  In the cemetery, a pale, lurching figure stumbles toward the siblings but is not given much attention.  That's too bad, because the dude is a zombie.  Zombie tries to attack Babra, but her brother rescues her; unfortunately, he struggles with the zombie and hits his head on a grave stone, dying instantly.  Understandably panicked, Babra runs to their car and drives into the first tree she can find.  She then runs to the nearest farmhouse in this sparsely populated area. 

...but not before saying goodbye to her favorite tombstone

Nobody seems to be home, except for a half-eaten corpse.  Babra starts to run out of the house, but she is greeted by the sight of more undead creatures slowly heading her way.

L-R: late-career Brian Dennehy, Robert Stack, young Brian Dennehy, and Marilyn Manson

Babs probably would have freaked out and just let them eat her, but that's when Ben (Duane Jones) arrives.  His car is out of gas, but he is smart and capable of action.  He brings Babra inside, kills the resident zombie, and puts up some rudimentary defenses on the doors and windows.  He isn't too demanding of Babra, who is obviously deep in shock, and he does what he can to keep her safe. 

Ben, realizing that the lights are on, but nobody's home

From this point on, things start to get more complicated.  The undead continue to arrive and cluster around the farmhouse.  They could escape, since the farm has its own gas pump (that happened in the sixties?), but it is locked, without a key.  Zombies aren't the only concern, as it turns out that five people were hiding out in the basement while Ben was fighting off zombies on the main floor.  More people means more mouths to feed and more opinions on how to handle the situation, which means more fighting amongst the living that could have been spent against the dead.  So what should the group do?  Hunker down in the easily defended (but impossible to escape from) basement or fortify their shoddy ground-floor defenses?  Or maybe they should make a run for it.  They could wait and see if the authorities will show up and help them.  The beginning of the zombie apocalypse has a lot of options, even if they're not all good ones.

Bad choice: group staring contests

I have to admit that I was impressed by Night of the Living Dead.  I've seen a few of George A. Romero's movies, but have found them to be a pretty mixed bag.  This is definitely one of the good ones.  Fans of zombie movies may be surprised at some of the "rules" established in this film, though.  For starters, the first zombie shown in the film is pretty fast and is clever enough to use tools (well, a rock) to attack his target.  Both are traits not necessarily repeated in later Romero zombie pics.  Zombies are also shown to be afraid of fire, which (depending on which movie you watch) gives them more intelligence than they are sometimes afforded in movies.  One of the zombies also eats a large bug, for some reason.  Oh, and they're not called zombies in Night of the Living Dead.  If anything, they are called "ghouls."  I found that mildly interesting.  Aside from that, these are the kind of zombies that lumber around in varying states of undress and decomposition, they eat human flesh and infect anyone they bite, and they die if their brains get destroyed.  Speaking of brains, you might assume that this would be the movie that popularized the whole "zombies love to eat brains" thing, but that was first introduced twenty-seven years later, in Return of the Living Dead.  That's just an FYI; I don't want you to sound ignorant when discussing fictional infectious diseases. 

"Braaaaiiiins!  I mean, um, Ghoulie Snaaaaacks!"

I expected the acting to be pretty piss poor in Night of the Living Dead, but it's actually very solid.  Despite having a no-name cast, the performances really stand the test of time.  Sure, Judith O'Dea was pretty worthless, but she was mildly attractive even while she was barely functioning.  I thought Duane Jones was pretty bad-ass as Ben.  Not only did he seem logical and brave, but he made some pretty ballsy choices as the film progressed.  His character is all the more impressive given the fact that this movie was made at the height of Civil Rights discussions in America and Jones is a black man; if this movie was made now, Jones would still be bad-ass, but it is an especially bad-ass role when you consider how little quality work was available for black men in films at the time.

Who needs to wait for Spike Lee when you have Duane Jones?

The rest of the cast were amateurs.  Karl Hardman, the ornery middle-aged man, was a co-producer of the film, while his wife was played by the wife of his co-producer.  Perhaps the most iconic actor of the bunch is Hardman's real-life daughter, Kyra Schon; her kid zombie scenes are some of the scariest in the whole film.

This film doesn't suffer from director George A. Romero's later habit of inserting heavy-handed social commentary in the story, and I definitely appreciate that.  Feel free to interpret the film as you will, but the fact that it is open to interpretation makes this far more subtle than his other works.  There is a little gore, but it is pretty tame by modern standards.  What sticks with you after seeing Night of the Living Dead is the familiar cast members becoming zombies and having the audacity to make an innocent child into a genuine monster that needed killing.  This would have blown my mind if I had seen it in the sixties, especially with the ending.  Even now, I was impressed by the lead acting and thought that the choice to make this black-and-white instead of color definitely helped overcome budget issues to make these ghouls decently frightening.  I was expecting a lot less, given how many poorly made and loosely connected sequels it has, but Night of the Living Dead deserves its classic status.

The Crazies (2010)

Let's face it: most Hollywood remakes fail to live up to the originals.  It's not always their fault; the films that get remade are oftentimes classics that are beloved by the general public.  Making an interesting remake and staying true enough to the original to please fans is a difficult tightrope to walk.  Well, if Hollywood insists on remaking a classic, it might as well be a cult classic.  The Crazies is a remake of the George A. Romero 1973 film of the same name.  Horror movie remakes usually irritate me, but there are two important differences between this remake and most others.  First, the original film is not very well known, so the new film's creators were probably not under a huge amount of pressure to keep the story exactly the same in the remake.  Second, and more importantly, George A. Romero was involved as a producer and was listed as a writer for coming up with the story.  That makes this a remake of a relatively unknown film that the orignal filmmaker was on board with.  Sounds promising.

Ogden Marsh, Iowa, is about as metropolitan as it sounds.  It's a podunk town in the middle of a podunk state. 

Side note: I hate Iowa.  Nothing good is in Iowa, it's just empty space between wherever I am and where I might want to go.  If I could remove a state from the US map and fill the empty space with some sort of travel tube technology, a la The Jetsons, I would in a heartbeat.  A close second place in that competition goes to Indiana.  End side note.  

It looks peaceful enough and there are no signs of any trouble; even the local law, Sheriff David Dutton (Timothy Olyphant) and Deputy Russell Clank (Joe Anderson), are enjoying a high school baseball game when something strange happens.  Rory, a local resident, quietly walks onto the outfield, holding a shotgun.  Sheriff Dutton hurries out to talk to Rory, assuming that the man has had a relapse with his alcoholism.  Rory does not respond to Dutton's conversation, sporting a far-away look in his eyes and making no movement until he draws his gun on the Sheriff.  Dutton is faster on the draw, and shoots Rory dead.  Sheriff Dutton's wife, Judy (Radha Mitchell), is the town doctor; a local woman brought her husband by that day to be examined for having a far-off look and a failure to respond to others.  The day after Rory was killed, that man locked his wife and child in their home and burned them alive.  When emergency vehicles responded to the fire, they found him a safe distance away, with a far-off look, humming a song.

That's some weird stuff, man.  What's weirder is that the first man lived in the house furthest to the north, and the second man lived next door to him...and the guy who lives in the next house has been acting kind of funny.  When a pilot's body is found in the local swamp, Sheriff Dutton recalls the town liar claiming that he saw a plane crash in the area.  Dutton and Clark head to the swamp and discover a large cargo plane submerged in the water, which is also the water supply for Ogden Marsh.  And the water is supplied throughout the town, north to south.  Hmm.  You know, there have been no news stories about a plane crash or missing planes or pilots in the area...probably not a good sign for the citizens of Ogden Marsh.

Whoa, I'm psychic.  The next thing you know, dozens of troops and workers, armed and wearing hazmat suits, descend on the town.  They tell the townsfolk nothing, they just separate the town into a group that is running fevers and a group that is not.  The fevered folk (including Doctor Judy Dutton) are taken into a tented area, and the others (including Sheriff Dutton) are bused to a truck stop out of town, where they will presumably be regrouped and relocated.  I don't know what kind of a person you are, but Sheriff Dutton loves his wife enough to go back and help her escape treatment for what appears to be a virus that makes people homicidal.  That's love, people.  It's also stupid, but that's what love is sometimes.  Of course, what's the next step after saving Judy?  There are still troops trying to contain this whatever-it-is, and they are willing to use lethal force.  Where do they go?  Who do they trust?  And how do they know that they're not sick, too?  In order, the answers are somewhere else, their friends, and um.

This may start out as a bit of a mystery movie, but it quickly becomes one of survival.  Most survival movies involve a horrific accident or outbreak, like a plane crash or a zombie uprising; The Crazies is certainly more subtle than that, but that is part of this film's charm.  As a viewer, you know, because you saw the previews or looked at the movie poster, that something bad is going to happen, but there really isn't much of a reason for the townsfolk to.  This isn't one of those stupid horror movies where the lead actress has her late boyfriend's blood all over her clothes and is crying in the dark, "Is anybody there?" There isn't even a dam bursting of horror in this movie; the government intervenes before the infected start to attack the rest of the town en masse.

For that reason, this could also be seen as a political fairytale; the government that failed to act decisively with Katrina and the BP oil spill are able to contain an town-wide epidemic before anything truly horrific happens to draw attention to the town?  Man, I have seen some dark humor before, but this is just vicious!

The acting and directing in this movie are appropriate, but nothing spectacular.  Director Breck Eisner does a good job with the movie's pacing and manages to put together a pretty suspenseful film.  I thought the action sequences were good, too; I just got stitches in my hand from a knife cut, so when one of the characters gets a big knife thrust through his hand...well, that got to me.  Timothy Olyphant has played strong Sheriffs in the past, and he turns in another solid performance here.  His actions seem reasonable (except breaking his wife out of the quarantined area) and he is sympathetic.  He's not infallible, which leads him into some trouble, but I never felt that he was acting stupid, which is a huge plus in a movie like this.  Radha Mitchell was fine as his wife, but I'm tired of her playing a "woman on the brink" of something; seriously, I've seen her in Man On Fire, Finding Neverland, Silent Hill and now this.  Can't she play a happy person?  I liked Joe Anderson as the Deputy; it wasn't a complex role, but I thought he did a good job with what he had to work with.  Danielle Panabaker has a small role that requires her to scream and look moderately attractive.  That might not sound difficult, but that's because it's not.

I really enjoyed this movie.  Maybe I just wasn't expecting much, but I was definitely pleased with what I saw.  Any movie where you are fighting both an infected group and a government group can easily turn into a dumb action movie.  That wouldn't have been bad, either, but this just felt smarter than that.  There's a point where the Sheriff realizes that the local redneck hunting buddies are infected and chooses not to attack them.  That robs the audience of gratuitous violence (for a while --- it's a movie, so you know they'll be back), but that was definitely the smart thing to do in a live-or-die situation.  The movie is not flawless --- there is no need to begin the movie two days in the future, to show Ogden Marsh in flames, and then flash back for the rest of the film --- but there were a lot of nice touches.  I thought that the car wash and nursery scenes were two of the better horror scenes I've watched in a while.  The Crazies is not a movie that is trying to be inventive, it is just a well-crafted thriller with some horror elements.