Between the flashy, kick-ass remakes of the 80s and the reboot monsoon that washed throughout the horror genre during 2000s, there lies Night Of The Living Dead; George Romero and Tom Savini’s attempt to update the former’s, game changing, zombie classic for modern audiences.
Fans of Romero’s flesh crunching, loping, undead metaphors couldn’t believe their luck as having Savini at the helm surely meant that the former effects guru who stunned the world (not to mention censors) with the gruesome gore of both Dawn and Day Of The Dead would no doubt have the screen awash with the red stuff.
Savini, however, had other ideas – I mean, just because the guy provided such convincing bloodbaths for movies like Friday The 13th and The Burning, it didn’t mean he wanted to film it himself. No, instead he collected a group of character actors while Romero tweaked the original script and instead aimed to deliver a tense performance piece rather that aiming the camera at a wet, dripping gore-de-force.
Siblings Barbara and Johnny bicker as they finish the 200 mile commute to rural Pennsylvania in order to pay respects to their recently departed mother, but while Johnny torments his sister with endless teasing, the two are suddenly beset by a snarling ghoul that signifies the rather alarming phenomenon of the dead coming back to life. While Johnny doesn’t exactly fare so well, Barbara manages to flee this onslaught of the dead and stumbles upon a seemingly deserted farmhouse, but.after being menaced by yet more loping corpses, she’s saved by the arrival of Ben, a man simply passing through when this rotting disaster hit.
After clearing the house, Ben and a hysterical Barbara soon come across a group of five survivors who has been cowering behind the locked door of the basement who contain well-off couple Harry and Helen Cooper, their wounded daughter, Sarah and two local yokels, Tom and Judy.
From the very instance they lock eyes, Ben and Harry obviously do not like each other and immediately draw lines in the sand to build dominance over the other; Harry insists that holing up in the basement is the only way to go while Ben counters that the basement is a death trap and fortifying the windows is a far better bet.
However, while the two men engage in their apocalyptic pissing contest, Barbara, who has risen above her panic, realises that their might be a third option: to leave immediately before the number of zombies means that they can’t take the advantage of their lumbering speed any longer.
However, her ideas are drowned out as Ben and Harry’s hate-off intensifies and if the group isn’t careful, their rivalry will drown out the danger of the zombies too, whose numbers are steadily increasing with every passing minute.
If I’m being honest, Night Of The Living Dead 1990 should probably filled next to “honorable inventions” rather than lumping it in with such superlative extravaganzas as The Thing, The Fly or The Blob as it trades far too heavily on the original script to actually stand on its own two feet. Romero’s script technically isn’t much more than the legend taking the bits of the original that obviously he wished he could change and then flipping it a bit.
To be fair, a lot of the changes work and even cause some interesting ramifications on the well worn plot as a whole. For example, the divide between Ben and Harry is made far more interesting when it’s not only made apparent that Ben probably has the far worse plan of the two, but people choose to follow him because he’s far nicer than his nemesis who truly seems dead set on scoring a Dickhead Of The Year Award – even more interestingly, the script clearly states that the hammering sound caused by Ben’s actions are directly responsible for attracting yet more flesh eaters.
Elsewhere, the most dramatic change is that of Barbara who, as horror fans might recall, spent the majority of the original movie as a gibbering, catatonic wreck. Romero, plainly wanting to rectify this now has the character gradually go from a panicked screamer to someone more akin to Sara Connor, Ellen Ripley, or even Lori Cardille’s Sarah from Day Of The Dead. However, the fact that her risky, but forward thinking plan to simply leave is dismissed by everyone, including Ben who assume she’s still panicking manages to inject in some of that good, old fashoned Romero social commentary.
However, from here it’s all minor changes to a very familiar narrative as the script merely nips, tucks and tidies up all the hits. The bullshit with the locked gas pump goes smoother, the initial attack in the graveyard is punched up with a neat little bit of misdirection and the movie gets to the point way quicker than before. Unfortunately, despite all the good stuff, the remake not only is just to similar than the original, but it eventually takes a near-fatal head shot when it tries screwing around with one of horror’s greatest endings. Taking the soul crushing sight of sole survivor Ben mistakenly shot by zombie hunting rednecks and making it an overly complicated series of rug pulls that switches everyone’s fates around; NOTLD 2.0 simply screws the pooch as it clumsily fucks with perfection. Elsewhere, the resurrection of Sarah is nowhere near as horrifying as the original screeching trowel murder and the sight of people simply walking past the loping dead does sort of provide a great argument that fast zombies are, in fact, potentially scarier than their unhurried forerunners
Still, Savini does a decent job with directing, choosing to forgo gore in favour of staging everything almost like a theatre production and having the picture’s colour bleached to give it an eerie look that seems just a smidge off black and white except for the red of Barbara’s hair or the glare of fire. His zombies are far more creepier too, flavouring the pallid, misty-eyed look of the actual dead, rather than the exagered, comic book stylings of more 80s born fare.
The cast is also remarkably solid, is made up of bunch of familiar genre faces (Tom Towles, Bill Mosley, William Butler) and is headed up by the Candyman himself, Tony Todd, who gives a magnificent turn as Ben. However it’s Patricia Tallman’s new and improved Barbara and her advanced survival skills who proves to be the most memorable here.
Less a gutsy reimagining and more of an exercise in Romero fixing the bits that always bugged him, Tom Savini’s swing at equalling an unabashed classic was always going to be a fool’s errand, but for those less familiar with the legendary source material, it shuffles along just fine.
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