The follow up to the much beloved Romero classics. It never gets as much love and adulation as Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead. Hell, is it even the third best of Romero’s “of the Living Dead” franchise? I’m going to say no, I’d probably rank it fourth. But it is still good.
The story takes place in an underground bunker with military and science personnel. According to one of the doctors, Frankenstein, he says the dead may outnumber the living 400,000 to 1. On the military side of things, you have Captain Rhodes and his underlings like Steel, Rickles, Miller, Torrez, and Johnson. Steel is really the only underling that you get to know well. Rhodes is a hardass who wants to prove how much he is in control, by any means necessary and is sick of losing men for these scientists who are not making any progress. His reasoning isn’t terrible, but he becomes slowly unhinged. On the science side of things, we get Sarah, Frankenstein, and Fischer. Bill is a radio operator and John is the pilot and they tend to side with the scientists. Sarah is the moral lead of the film, and has most of her conflict with Rhodes. Frankenstein is trying to domesticate the zombies and has made huge progress with one of his subjects, Bub. Things obviously go to shit, as they tend to and this leads to most of the characters dying.
Oddly enough, out of the 6 films, this one has the weakest main black male character. Notice how strong Ben, Peter, and Big Daddy (zombie) are in the first four films. John is not a strong role, in my opinion. He’s one of the better characters in this film, but he’s not the lead, nor is he a good leader. They made Sarah the lead and she was incredibly average and vanilla. Rhodes, Frankenstein, Steel, and Bub were the only characters with much personality. Still, this was a really good story about how much should be sacrificed in the name of science versus militaristic survival.
I loved the Bub character because it made some sense considering what we know about the zombies in this world. Later on, you will see the evolution of zombies more and more, it becomes an important theme.
While the acting wasn’t the best, it was a surprisingly good and simple story. Compared to most of Romero’s films, this was actually a surprisingly good and small-scale story that was told beautifully. Slightly better lead characters and this could have been just as good as Dawn.
Rating: 6.0 – Great story but weak lead characters and not much charisma tend to balance each other a bit. Still, I think this was a very good movie, but there are things to nitpick.
All the pictures used in this blog are for review purposes. They are the property of:
- United Film Distribution Company (UFDC) (presents)
- Laurel Entertainment Inc. (as A Laurel. Production)
- Dead Films Inc.
- Laurel-Day Inc.
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