Land of the Dead (2005) Review

Official trailer

Pittsburgh has been fortified with rivers on two sides and an electrified fence on the third. Inside, a luxury high-rise houses people who can afford it and the rest live in slums below. Scavenger crews drive out at night to raid towns for supplies and liquor.

The 7 is for a film with the most explicit argument in the series and the least interesting characters. Romero got his budget and spent it on a premise that’s good, and the people moving through it are functional instead of alive.

I enjoy this one more than my grumbling about the humans might suggest. The premise hooks me from the first look at that tower, Hopper is a pleasure to watch, and Big Daddy is the zombie I end up rooting for. What keeps it at a 7 is that I spend most of the film waiting for the living characters to become people I care about, and they never do.

What it does have is Dennis Hopper playing a landlord, a zombie who learns to use a rifle, and a final image that no other film in the genre has attempted.

The City Is the Idea

Fiddler’s Green is a tower with restaurants, boutiques and apartments, sealed against a world that’s ended, sold to people who can pay and defended by people who can’t.

Below it’s everything else. Gambling, prostitution, a black market, and a population kept placid with alcohol and distraction while a small crew goes outside to fetch what the tower needs. The film uses fireworks for that. That’s the best single detail in it. The raiding parties launch skyrockets because the dead stop and stare at them, and the slum population is described as doing the same thing.

That’s Romero’s thesis delivered as a mechanism instead of a speech, and I think it’s the sharpest idea in the film. Two populations pacified by the same trick, and the people in the tower using it on both. I wish more political horror trusted an image this much. He made it in 2005, two years into a war, with a story about a fortified enclave, a raiding economy and a wealthy class that’s decided the situation is permanent and comfortable.

The film also doesn’t pretend the arrangement is new. Kaufman has run the city since the outbreak, the systems are established, the corruption is routine, and nobody inside the tower can remember a time when things were done differently.

Big Daddy

Eugene Clark plays a former gas station attendant who still wears the uniform, watches his fellow dead being shot for sport, and becomes angry about it. He’s the protagonist of the film in every way that matters. The film stages the learning carefully. He works out that a weapon is a tool, teaches others by demonstration, discovers that the river can be walked through instead of around, and leads a march on the city.

Romero’s zombies had been getting smarter across four films and this is the endpoint of that progression. Bub could salute and this one can plan, organize and communicate grief, and the film treats all of it as the natural development.

The howl he uses is the performance’s best decision.

It’s a sustained cry of distress that other zombies answer, closer to grief than to rage, and the first time he uses it over a body the film has changed what the audience is watching. That howl is where the movie wins me over. My sympathy leaves the city right there and never comes back.

The river crossing is the other moment. He walks his people into the water and under it, and they emerge on the far bank. That’s a piece of problem solving no previous entry in the series had permitted the dead to attempt.

Hopper Is the Villain

Kaufman runs the city, owns the tower, controls the supply, and Dennis Hopper plays him with a complete absence of theatricality.

Kaufman is a landlord through and through. Every decision he makes is a business decision, he’s polite to people he’s about to destroy, and his whole philosophy is that the arrangement works and should continue. I could watch Hopper do this for another hour. He plays greed as mild irritation, and that’s funnier and nastier than any snarling villain would have been.

Romero reportedly directed him toward a contemporary political manner, and whether or not that’s true, the performance is a man who has decided the crisis is an opportunity and is faintly annoyed when anybody suggests otherwise.

His death is the film’s clearest joke. He’s killed by Big Daddy while trying to drive away with a car full of money. That’s exactly the ending the character had earned and the film delivers without underlining it.

The Humans Are the Problem

Riley wants to leave and go to Canada, Cholo wants to buy an apartment in the tower, Slack is introduced as a woman thrown into a zombie pit for entertainment. None of them is interesting. Simon Baker plays Riley as competent and morally sound and entirely without a flaw worth watching. His want is to go somewhere with no people in it. That’s a destination instead of a desire.

John Leguizamo does better with Cholo, whose ambition is specific and whose rejection by the tower is the film’s clearest piece of class writing. He’s done the work, has the money, and is told the apartment isn’t available to somebody like him.

What he does about it is the film’s best plot mechanism. He steals the armored vehicle that keeps the city supplied and threatens to shell the tower. That converts a class grievance into an engineering problem for the people who created it.

The film’s structure suffers accordingly. Most of the running time goes to people the audience doesn’t care about, while the character everybody remembers is a zombie who gets perhaps twenty minutes, and that imbalance loses me. I’d have cut Riley’s Canada plans to the bone and handed those minutes to Big Daddy’s march.

Asia Argento’s Slack has the same problem in a worse form. She’s introduced in a cage being used as entertainment, is rescued, becomes competent, and the film never gives her a want of her own beyond staying alive alongside people she’s just met.

The Ending Is Unique

Big Daddy’s march reaches the tower, the dead go up through it, and the wealthy are eaten in their apartments and restaurants while the slum population escapes.

Then Riley has a clear shot at Big Daddy from an armored vehicle and doesn’t take it, and says that the dead are just looking for a place to go, same as us.

That’s the only moment in any zombie film where a human protagonist grants the dead a legitimate claim, and Romero puts it in the last ninety seconds of his fourth entry after thirty-seven years of the form. Both groups then walk away in different directions. That’s a ceasefire instead of a victory.

The final image is the horde moving off across open country, unopposed, with the city burning behind them. Nothing is resolved, nobody has won, and the film’s position is that the arrangement in the tower deserved exactly what it got.

It was also Romero’s last film in the series to get a proper release, and the two that followed were made small again and are considerably worse. Twenty years of waiting produced exactly one studio picture, and then the door closed again behind him. Diary of the Dead and Survival of the Dead were both made small, both went almost straight to disc, and neither is worth the time.

Should you watch Land of the Dead?

Yes, for the premise and for Big Daddy.

A walled city with a tower for the rich, a population kept quiet with fireworks, a landlord who treats the apocalypse as a business, and an ending where the human protagonist lowers his weapon and lets the dead walk away. It’s a 7 and no higher because Romero built a terrific house and filled it with tenants I’d forget by morning. The dead are the only characters I cared about, and a film this smart deserved living people worth watching too.

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