Night Of The Living Dead
Truly one of the most breakthrough horror movies of all time, Romero’s low-budget opus that came to be considered a work of art still holds up today in terms of sheer creepiness, with the surreal first 20 minutes and nightmarish final 10 minutes among some of the best filmmaking you will ever see. The early scenes with Barbra and her brother Johnny set a fine mood. Johnny’s smartass attitude and healthy skepticism mark him as the possible likely hero, until Bill Hinzman’s Cemetary Zombie comes along, proving that there are no easy answers in Romero’s world. When Duane Jones’ Ben comes into the picture, we finally meet our hero, and Jones’ acting almost seems better than the material deserves, with his monologue about first encountering the zombies a brilliant little acting nugget. The film DOES slow considerably with the emergence of the characters in the cellar, as the bickering and difference of opinion begins, as does the nonstop and overdone news reports from the radio and TV. In addition, the actor who plays the teenage lover Tom is absolutely TERRIBLE, reading all his lines as if off a cue card, though his girlfriend is one of the most underrated hotties in horror history. Once we get to the escape attempt and “hot lunch”, Romero goes back into overdrive, throwing some cruel irony into the mix as well (the Harry Cooper character was right all along, if they all had stayed in the cellar they woulda made it). Other touches include the surprising amount of graphic gore for a 1968 film, at the time unknown to horror outside the work of H.G. Lewis, and of course the fact that the main hero is a black man, a seismic step forward for cinema in general outside of Sidney Poitier. The fact that Romero claimed that this development was “accidental” is something I call bullshit on, as the ending is given an incredible amount of resonance in the age of the civil rights struggle, and is a reflection of how far we’ve come in this country 40 years later…
8/10