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Lang's You and Me is the oblique predecessor, George A. Romero has his own wholesale apocalypse to conduct. He opens with an awakening to the nightmare and a tour de force of sustained tumult, from the TV news studio to the police raid on the inner-city tenement for a startling snapshot in media res of the undead outbreak. The station producer (Gaylen Ross) and her beau (David Emge) flee in a helicopter along with a pair of SWAT commandos (Ken Foree and Scott Reiniger), pandemonium calls for adjustments: "Wake up, sucker! We're thieves and we're bad guys!" The barricaded oasis is a vast suburban mall, there the refugees become a parody of a family while the shuffling zombies stumble in escalators and slip on ice rinks, it was "an important part of their lives." (Even after death, habit remains "the most imperious of all masters.") Following the collapse of law and media, back to the Wild West amid arcade games. A panoramic view, Romero's Playtime if you will, the decade's grandest satire. Consumer goods in Godardian montage and mannequins staring in display windows, the pure human folly of setting up house in the vortex. "It's all so bright and neatly wrapped that you don't see it's a prison, too." The pregnant heroine turns down engagement rings and learns to literally take flight, male camaraderie meanwhile boils down to promising to shoot your bitten buddy in the head when he turns into a ghoul. Famished hordes with colored skin and dripping viscera, not the Other but the Self, "they're us, that's all." (In between exploding brains, a bit of offhand kindness toward the zombie caught in a door.) The updated cavalry astride motorcycles, the zesty smearing of an antiseptic shopping center. "One wonders what is worth saving..." The end of all things and the new beginning in the distance, anywhere but the Muzak Purgatory. Cinematography by Michael Gornick. With Tom Savini, Richard France, and Howard Smith.
--- Fernando F. Croce |