Cinemaniacal #2: Aim for the Brain...

George A. Romero just doesn't seem to want to let sleeping zombies lie.

After Land of the Dead, Romero has followed up with Diary of the Dead, and has announced that his next project will be either Diamond Dead, or a sequel to Diary.

In my opinion, I think the whole zombie genre is dead.

At least for now.

The modern "Zombie" sub-genre really began with George A. Romero's landmark horror film Night of the Living Dead. It set what became the standard tropes of the sub-genre: A small band of survivors, hordes of flesh eating ghouls* trying to make the living into their lunch, and problems arising among the survivors (resulting from ego, greed, or stupidity) that threaten their survival. It then ladled on the blood (according to legend, chocolate syrup) some improvised gore, and served.

Many critics saw a great deal of social commentary, possibly unintended, in the original Night of the Living Dead seeing the zombies as a metaphor for conformity and consumerism, and the film's black hero Ben (played by Duane Jones) as more than just a brave and resourceful human being, but a symbol.

Romero jumped on those concepts almost 10 years later when he began production on what many consider his best film Dawn of the Dead. According to some sources the concept was born by pressure from European producers eager for a sequel to Night, and from a visit to the Monroeville Mall and saw that it had a civil defence shelter in it.

In my opinion the film's biggest flaw was it's constant hammering of the "Zombie as mindless consumer" motif. It's supposed to be a film, not a lecture, at least in my opinion. What I believe was the film's greatest strength was its unsettling portrayal of social decay brought about by people being more concerned with their own agendas.

No one in the film, outside of small gangs of people, bothers to coordinate, cooperate, or do anything outside of preserving their own butts, or interests. When faced with a world where the dead get up and kill, thus creating more undead, what do the majority of people do? They loot stores for cigarettes, liquor, and useless luxuries, not really giving much thought to how useful they would be in such a crisis, but then again, no one seems to be thinking all that well.

It's sort of like the entire world being as poorly managed as New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. Which pretty much describes America in the 1970s that I remember.

Romero followed Dawn with Day of the Dead in 1985. I haven't seen the film in literally almost 20 years, but I do remember that it was much grimmer than Dawn, unrelentingly so, lacking the moments of humour, but heavier on the sense of crumbling order and the message of military as being more dangerous than the gut munching undead.

I also remember that the "military" characters had haircuts that didn't seem all that military to me, but that may have been intentional on Romero's part as a symptom of social decay.

I skipped Land of the Dead. Mostly when it presented Dennis Hopper as the "real villain" of the sinister capitalist ruling his little fortress like a cross between Donald Trump, Donald Rumsfeld, and Benito Mussolini. I've always figured that any man who claimed to be "in charge" because he has a lot of money, when the state that backs currency was long gone and things have gone back to strength and barter, would probably be tossed out by the people with guns to become zombie chow.

Of course, the generation Romero belongs to, would never let such a thing as logical premise get in the way of making a point.

And now he's got Diary of the Dead, or as I like to call it, Flogging a Dead Zombie, a faux documentary about the beginning of the zombie uprising as seen through the cameras of a bunch of film students.

I'm not exactly excited about it the way sooo many zombie fans are, mostly because it seems to be relying on a seemingly endless stream of horror celebrity cameos (usually as newsreaders) and by a description I read in a review of one scene.

The scene I read about had "rednecks" tying zombies to trees and such, and then pumping them full of lead for kicks while a voice-over lectures about man's inhumanity to man. Gone are the jovial beer swilling zombie hunters of Dawn of the Dead who seemed the only folks capable of surviving the crisis, replaced by drooling stereotypes from flyover country concerned more with sadism than survival.

Having encountered many people who could easily be described as "rednecks" I've always figured they'd be way more practical and sparing with their ammunition when faced with a growing horde of the living dead.

And word is that Romero is going to follow it up with yet another zombie film. Either a direct sequel to Diary, or his long fermenting Diamond Dead. Diamond Dead is about a rock band consisting of flesh eating zombies, and how their living manager tries to keep the band together in the face of sinister religious fundamentalists, and their own unnatural appetites.

And in the film, the fundamentalists, are reported as the villains, not the flesh eating zombies.

I'd rather live next door to a pair of bible thumping Baptists who tell me that I'm going to hell, than a pack of zombies. Because while the Baptists may annoy me, the odds are that they aren't going to eat me.

The whole concept seems like a relic of the 1960s, and thanks to the continued dominance of baby-boomers in positions of authority in the media companies, we have had to many relics of that "shrill pointless decade" tossed at us.

I think it's time for Romero and the other zombie filmmakers to give the whole sub-genre a rest for a while. I'm not talking about a permanent, shot to the brain double-kill, but a moratorium till someone comes up with a fresh idea or at least a fresh metaphor.

Because the dead are starting to smell up the joint.

Now who is willing to bet that I'm going to be royally flamed by a horde of angry gore-hounds?

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*Traditionally zombies are mindless undead slaves in the service of some sinister wizard, while ghouls are more like the movie "zombies" being hungry undead creatures that eat the dead and the living alike. (Ghoul coming from Ghul, an Arabic word for demon)