Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Night of the Living Dead (1968): written by John Russo and George Romero; directed by George Romero; starring Duane Jones (Ben), Judith O'Dea (Barbra), Karl Hardman (Harry Cooper), Marilyn Eastman (Helen Cooper), Keith Wayne (Tom), Judith Ridley (Judy), Kyra Schon (Karen Cooper), George Kosana (Sheriff): George Romero's witty, gritty, subversive zombie film pretty much kicked off the entire genre of the walking, eating dead. 

The restored print used by TCM is a revelation. Romero's low-budget film now looks and acts more like an art-house classic than a drive-in staple. It's amazing how good the movie is, and how eccentric -- an African-American hero, a protagonist (Barbra) who slips into near-catatonia 20 minutes into the movie and pretty much stays there to the end, and those rapidly evolving zombies who quickly learn how to use tools. 

Night of the Living Dead is better than every walking dead movie or TV show that followed with one exception -- Romero's own sequel, Dawn of the Dead. Brilliant film-making, and acting by amateurs and local actors that works beautifully, none more beautifully than Duane Jones as Ben. Highly recommended.

Skeletons by Al Sarrantonio (1992

Skeletons by Al Sarrantonio (1992): This wild, woolly, and marvelously imaginative novel takes the bare bones of the standard zombie epidemic narrative and makes them new. I've always viewed Al Sarrantonio as being a much more gifted writer of short stories than novels, but this dark fantasy novel is a real treat.

One day, all the dead on Earth rise from their graves. But they do so as skeletons held together by some inexplicable, translucent force field that resembles what they looked like (and what they were wearing!) when they died. Even if they died 3000 years ago. Even if they were dinosaurs.

And the skeletons possess their old personalities with one key difference: they're possessed of an almost-irresistable urge to kill the living. When the living die, their dead flesh vanishes and they, too, become Angry-Ass skeletons. It's the new circle of life! The skeletons can be killed, at which point they disintegrate into dust. But there are a lot of them. There are even insect skeletons. Ha ha whee!

With four first-person narratives telling the tale, Skeletons anticipates Max Brooks' multi-viewpoint World War Z in its structure to an extent, though certainly not in tone or content. We may start off with an apocalyptic war between the Living and the Dead, but the narrative soon starts building another narrative within that: a mythoreligious tale of a world periodically cleansed by a flood... of skeletons. It appears that God may have hit the reset button for humanity (not to mention most other species that aren't lucky enough to be plants). And not for the first time.

Sarrantonio's myth-building is faithful to the often unpleasant ramifications of myth and legend. There's a critique here of vengeful gods and chosen ones, of religious fanaticism and stories that reduce women to super-wombs. But that critique exists within a novel that scrupulously follows the ethos it creates to its logical end.

Though there's still room for a comical gorilla, a faithful wolf, and a drugged-out music promoter who somehow finds himself still human and stuck in the middle of things as the apocalypse heads to its end. Apocalypse, meaning 'the unveiling.' What's more unveiled than a person's naked skeleton?

And one first-person narrative consists of Skeleton Abraham Lincoln's story in the New World Order. Sarrantonio anticipates all those comic horror novels involving famous people, famous literary works, and newly added monsters. Though in this case, he's Abraham Lincoln, Human Hunter. It's a swell, bracingly comic novel. Highly recommended.

Black Mirror

Oculus: written by Mike Flanagan, Jeff Howard, and Jeff Seidman; directed by Mike Flanagan; starring Karen Gillan (Kaylie Russell), Brenton Thwaites (Tim Russell), Katee Sackhoff (Marie Russell) and Rory Cochrane (Alan Russell) (2014): Competent horror thriller that uses some fairly effective narrative tricks rather than 'found-footage' for its scares. It's not easy to make a seemingly haunted mirror into a worthy antagonist, but Oculus manages this feat.

The leads are all solid, the reality-bending games are sometimes startling, and the stupid decisions made by Karen Gillan's character are totally explicable within the cinematic universe. She has motivation for how she does what she does, and all motivation in the film is suspect: the mirror manipulates people subtly as well as through illusions. If only someone had brought a fire extinguisher. Recommended.


Land of the Dead: written and directed by George Romero; starring Simon Baker (Riley Denbo), John Leguizamo (Cholo DeMora), Dennis Hopper (Kaufman), Asia Argento (Slack), Robert Joy (Charlie), Eugene Clark (Big Daddy) and Joanne Boland (Pretty Boy) (2005): George Romero's fourth Dead movie gave him a mostly name cast and a decent budget; Romero's own quirky muse caused him to use these things on what wasn't a horror movie at all, or at least not the horror movie the studio thought it would be getting.

Instead, Land of the Dead is part-satire, part-social commentary. The zombies aren't really the villains any more: indeed, they don't seem to have any interest in hunting humans until the humans piss them off. And piss them off, they do. I don't know that the movie benefitted from having known actors in some of the roles, though I am sure that this was necessary to secure funding. Dennis Hopper just seems miscast as a scheming businessman, but Leguizamo, Baker, and Asia Argento are all fine. But the real hero is the massive zombie (former) gas-station owner dubbed Big Daddy. He's the Robinson Crusoe of zombies. Recommended.