Zombie maestro George A Romero "delivers the walking dead goods" in flesh-eating horror Land Of The Dead. While aficionados of the genre felt it wasn't as original as Romero's early B-movies, it still offered plenty of gory fun for paying dead heads. Thanks to this loyal cult audience, it broke even on its $20m budget.
Dead And Loving It
A director’s cut of the film runs at four minutes longer than the theatrical version and is entirely unbound by the censors’ standards of taste and decency. Of course that’s good news for hardcore horror fans, but added gore doesn’t address the criticisms of those Romero devotees who felt the story lacked substance. Nonetheless the director is elevated to hero status on this DVD.
"He created the genre," boasts producer Mark Canton, "He’s the icon, he’s the Hall Of Famer and he’s the standard" blah, blah, blah... But between all the shameless backslapping, Undead Again offers some keen insights into the film’s subtext. Romero himself recalls an early meeting with Dennis Hopper; "He said, ‘I’ll play him like [Donald] Rumsfeld’ and I said, ‘That’s exactly where I’m going with this! This is the Bush administration!" Naturally Hopper and the rest of the cast are on hand to explain their sides of the story. Sadly, Rumsfeld and Bush declined to comment...
John Leguizamo takes us on a whistle-stop tour of the set in A Day With The Living Dead. The highlight is a nose around the special effects trailer, but there’s a more detailed and much gorier dissection of the zombies in Bringing The Dead To Life. Effects geek Greg Nicotero takes perverse pleasure in exploding fake brains over a wall and tearing chewable flesh from a plastic carcass. A montage titled Scenes Of Carnage pays homage to Nicotero’s dark art while three minutes of deleted scenes are made up of rather bland cutaways. Oh, except for the bit where a kid gets snogged by a zombie and has his lips ripped off!
Pressing Flesh
In a quirky addition to the package Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright (the brains behind zombie spoof Shaun Of The Dead) record a video diary of their experiences filming cameos in Land Of The Dead. Understandably, they embarrass themselves with gushing sentiment on meeting Romero before spending hours in makeup and then getting chained against a wall for endless takes. "We're having an absolutely wonderful time!" coos Pegg.
Producer Peter Grunwald and editor Michael Doherty join Romero for a jarringly serene audio commentary. There's more explanation of the zombie-as-Republican metaphor, but Romero also gets into the nitty-gritty of the effects and his enthusiasm for the genre shows no signs of abating. He talks about having to ditch a scene featuring undead rats because it was too elaborate, but this prompts the question: "Can there be zombie animals?" The director mulls it over and gleefully decides, "It's a topic I might just have to visit!" Watch this space...
Filling out the bonus menu is a rather unimpressive CGI demo reel along with a storyboard showcase and a creepy zombie dance animatic. Altogether it's not exactly a clinical dissection of the film, but zombie fans have plenty to chew on.
EXTRA FEATURES
