Good day all and welcome to Day 1 of
George A. Romero Week and what better way to start the week off right
than with his original work? I have seen this film no less than 75
times because it has been made fun of, marveled after and even used
as a project viewing for film students. From the grainy texture of
the black & white 35mm Spherical, to the wooden acting of summer
stock folk to the desolate farm house that has clearly been abandoned
and second hand furniture has been brought in, this movie put the
audience on edge about a group of strangers all hiding from the same
threat and forced to work together to fend them off. This is Night
of the Living Dead.
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| I'll set the table, you coat yourself in barbecue sauce for the zombies. |
Field Reporter: Chief, do you think
that we will be able to defeat these spoilers?
Sheriff McClelland: Well, we killed
nineteen of them today right in this area. The last three, we caught
them trying to claw their way into an abandoned shed. They must have
thought someone was in there, but there wasn't though. We heard them
making all kinds of noises so we came over, beat 'em off and blasted
them down.
Johnny (Russell Streiner of Night of
the Living Dead, There's Always Vanilla, The Majorettes and Night of
the Living Dead 1990) and his sister Barbara (Judith O' Dea of Night
of the Living Dead, The Pirate, Claustrophobia, October Moon and
Women's Studies) have trekked out deep into rural Pennsylvania to a
yearly visit to their father's grave. Barbara does not seem
comfortable around gravestones as Johnny teases her prior to be
attacked by a strange man with tattered clothes. No, it is not a
zealous hobo but in fact a reanimated body that wrestles with Johnny
before bashing his head into a gravestone. Barbara lunges for the
car after performing the flattering ankle twist and hurling herself
in the dirt which most feminists are probably irate at this point,
dives in the car and manages to wreck a slow moving car be simply not
steering worth a tinker's damn. Now in her defense she just saw her
brother murdered and a shambling weirdo chase her.
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| Jimmy Carter: the hidden drunken years. |
She flees across the countryside
spotting a farmhouse and scurries into it. A quick discovery around
the house she finds a mangled corpse of a woman and prepares to flee
yet again when a truck arrives with a man dressed in a neat cardigan
flogs a couple of zombies allowing him to get into the house and slam
the door shut. Barbara mentally checks out for a good chunk of the
film as Ben (Duane Jones of Night of the Living Dead, Ganja &
Hess, Losing Ground, Beat Street, Vampires and To Die For) proceeds
to drown Barbara in a vat of exposition to kill time while he does
his Bob Villa impression and fortifies the house... with a few nails
and boards. So instead of taking spare doors off of rooms and
barricading the windows and believe you me there are a lot of windows
in this place, we find there are more people hiding out in the fruit
cellar. Can we all get along in this time of crisis or will we all
be zombie chow in no time flat?
A few interesting facts of the film
now. 200 extras were cast to be the townsfolk as well as zombies back
to back and given how dimly lit our movie is and the makeup work did
obscure more than a handful of our extras.
The ground breaking aspects to this
film are one of the first movies to graphically depict violent
murders on screen, first film shot in Pittsburgh and the first truly
successful independent films ever made. Casting a black man (Duane
Jones) as lead role having to slap sense into a woman, being violent
and judgmental to the rest of his cast in the late sixties is
considered an edgy choice by many but Romero didn't look at this with
racist glasses as viewed it as shooting a flick with a friend.
Due to the lack of knowledge of
distribution, Romero did not see a fraction of the money the
distributors might as well just sauntered by him with the gross
takings.
George A. Romero co-wrote this with
John A. Russo who later went on to pen for The Return of the Living
Dead film in 1985 with writer/director Dan O' Bannon.
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| One step closer and your crotches are toast! |
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