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 | Land Of The Dead Director: George A. Romero Rating: MA Now showing  The undead have taken over, and cities have become fortresses. The living cower inside - the rich in luxury high-rise apartments, the poor in squalor down at street level - and bands of state-sanctioned mercenaries make forays into the surrounding countryside to raid zombie-infested towns for food and supplies. One such town is controlled by evil billionaire Kaufman (Dennis Hopper) who lets the rich live in his tower, controls the flow of food and medicine, and provides the lower classes with gambling, blood sport and whores to keep them sedated and placid. (The irony of the right-wing Bush-supporting Dennis Hopper playing an evil plutocrat seems to be totally lost on him: according to the production notes he doesn't see his character as evil at all, just trying to make the best of a bad job). That's the premise of George Romero's new film 'Land Of The Dead', the latest in a series which began in 1968 with 'Night Of The Living Dead'.Simon Baker is perfectly serviceable as the leader of the salvagers, but he simply doesn't have the charisma to pull this character off. Riley is a slightly uninteresting character - he's the moral centre of the film, and as such has none of the quirks and foibles of his more villainous counterparts - and it needs a more powerful personality to make him appealing. Baker doesn't really look the part, either: he's a little bit too refined and fresh-faced for the battle-weary zombie killer he's supposed to be. Robert Joy, as Riley's brain-damaged sidekick, is fine, but the character itself rings a slightly false note. He's very much like Lenny in 'Of Mice And Men' ("Tell me about the zombies, George") except every now and then he'll pull off some amazing feat of derring-do; his stilted naif act is wearying, not moving as intended. Dennis Hopper's fine, but again, doesn't glue one to the screen. It's Asia Argento (daughter of horror maven Dario Argento, who helped finance 'Night Of The Living Dead'), as the damaged-but-resilient Slack, who is easily the most magnetic of the cast. She's plausible enough when she plays the unfazeable ice-queen, but when she gets excited her (very smooth) American accent slips, allowing a hint of her native Italian through, which is both charming and convincing. The best thing about the film, however, is the pace: at a lean 93 minutes there's no time for superfluous subplots or mawkish soliloquies, so Romero keeps the action tight from the outset. The social commentary is slightly ham-fisted (the bastion of the wealthy is named 'Fiddler's Green', an obvious reference to Nero's proverbial occupation as he watched Rome burn), not as subtle as in Romero's earlier films: but perhaps politically desperate times require desperate measures. The special effects are incredibly well done, the zombies genuinely uncanny. The choice of predominantly makeup and animatronic special effects over computer-generated is a good one: the entire film has a gritty tangibility largely lost to those films with an over-reliance on computer effects. Special effects legend Tom Savini - who has a cameo in the film, but didn't do the effects - would be proud. Speaking of cameos, Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright, who made the Romero homage 'Shaun Of The Dead', also haappear briefly. 'Land Of The Dead' doesn't have the tautness and claustrophobia of the original trilogy, but that's probably both necessary and desirable: it's more epic in scale and scope, as befits a film which transcends its low-budget horror origins and takes on a futuristic dystopia. Each of Romero's previous '...Dead' films became progressively grander, and this is a fitting sequel; and as the first part of a new trilogy in a much-loved film series, it's a damn sight more impressive than 'The Phantom Menace'.  | |
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