Land of the Dead

What’s the Story?

In George A. Romero's living-dead franchise, humans turn ruthless and hurt each other when facing dreadful fates. In LAND OF THE DEAD, the zombies have overrun the earth, such that humans' space is limited. The first humans to appear in the movie are the most numerous and least fortunate of the survivors. Others, like the wealthy corporate chief Kaufman (Dennis Hopper), live apart in a luxury fortress city called Fiddler's Green. This upscale-ish community is serviced by scrappy scavengers, including Riley (Simon Baker), Cholo (John Leguizamo), and Charlie (Robert Joy), who venture into areas now populated by zombies to bring back food, liquor, gas, medicine, and other supplies. Some humans use the zombies for entertainment: they chain them up just short enough so they can't bite, and pose for pictures, they shoot them for sport, they set them on humans in cages in order to watch the victims scream and fight until they must be eaten. A crisis arises just as the zombies are coming to a rudimentary consciousness. They're using tools and weapons, working as a team, targeting the mall's inhabitants (approximating revenge), and following a leader, a gas station attendant zombie with an apt name patch on his coveralls: Big Daddy (Eugene Clark).

Is It Any Good?

The long-awaited fourth film in Romero's zombie series is predictably gory, darkly comic, and grimly class conscious. For all its carnage and brutality then, this movie continues the living-dead legacy, in mounting a political critique of human mass and corporate culture by likening the zombies to us.