David Vining's Blog, page 55

Survival of the Dead

Well, it’s not nearly as bad as Diary of the Dead. In fact, I’d call this George Romero’s best zombie movie since Dawn of the Dead. That’s honestly sad. Taking a minor character from the previous film and making him some sort of proto-protagonist in the middle of a familial feud that doesn’t actually involve him, Survival of the Dead doesn’t really work, but it’s not nearly as much of a disaster as what Romero had been putting out over the previous few years.

Sarge (Alan van Sprang) leads...

Diary of the Dead

This movie is just pure trash. The found footage subgenre is pure trash. Romero has long lost his charm, and even here, where the thematic point isn’t as stupidly obvious, he can’t create interesting characters. On top of that, he chooses the format of found footage which is anathema to tension and drama. Throw on top the continued fact that zombies are terrible monsters, only made scary by characters acting stupidly, and you’ve got a recipe for a long, tedious exercise in an old man trying ...

Land of the Dead

This movie is real dumb. I know that zombie movie fans love their gore. While this film does have some quality gore, you have to get through terrible metaphor, poor storytelling, and atrocious dialogue for over an hour to get there. This honestly doesn’t feel like it’s the work of Romero. The minimalist filmmaker who made Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead with tight focus and an eye for subtle characterization has been replaced by the overbearingly obvious and angry old man who m...

On Vacation

For those wondering at the weird response times.

That’s Maui.

Bruiser

It took eight years for George Romero to put his next film together after The Dark Half, and it ended up going straight to video. That’s just kind of sad, but the film itself is honestly just not very good. It’s got an interesting idea and visual at its heart, but the storytelling is so loose and unfocused, missing pretty much every moment it should in order to work, that it honestly kind of feels like Romero just gave up at a certain point early in production. Like, he didn’t film enough or...

The Dark Half

George Romero finally got a chance to direct a Stephen King adaptation, and it’s one of his least well known. Still, the deep misunderstandings of his raw materials in Monkey Shines get pushed aside with a much more competently assembled sense of horror and mystery in The Dark Half. I haven’t read the book, so I can’t tell if the relative gauziness around the actual nature of the threat is simply inherited from the source material, but while it does leave open questions, they’re not big enou...

Two Evil Eyes

George Romero and Dario Argento teamed together to make a pair of short films based on Edgar Allan Poe stories. Out of the two, I think that Romero comes out better of the pair, having a generally strong sense of story and character, but both are a bit overlong and drawn out. Still, as little ditties in their respective wheelhouses, they’re entertaining entertainments.

The first is “The Facts in the Case of Mr. Valdemar,” directed by Romero. It centers around Jessica (Adrienne Barbeau), w...

Monkey Shines

Trying once again to leave the zombie picture behind, George Romero spent years trying to get different projects off the ground, most notably an adaptation of Stephen King’s Pet Semetary that never came to fruition. He did eventually get his next film moving with this adaptation of the novel of the same name by Michael Stewart. It has a certain King-esque feel to it, taking something normal and what should be benign and giving it evil import, but there’s something deeply off about the execut...

Day of the Dead

I do not understand the reappraisal Day of the Dead has gotten in the years since its release. It is…not a good movie. Like, at all. It’s bad. Characters are threadbare in all the wrong ways while they posture heavily. There’s no real story. The world-building makes no sense. It was an effort by Romero to, as he put it, make the Gone with the Wind of zombie movies, but his grand budget of seven million dollars was slashed in half and he had to quickly rewrite everything in order for it all t...

Creepshow

George Romero and Stephen King were good friends and found a way to work together beyond King making an obnoxious cameo in Knightriders. They also have a shared love for the EC series Tales from the Crypt. So, without actually paying for the rights, the two came up with an imitation anthology series. Heavily inspired visually by Dario Argento’s brand of giallo cinema in Italy (and probably in no small part by Romero’s large affection for the work by The Archers on films like The Red Shoes an...