Night Of The Living Dead – Millennium Edition (1968/Elite Entertainment DVD)
Picture:
C Sound: C+ Extras: B Film: B+
Along with Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, George
Romero’s Night Of The Living Dead is consider one of two landmark Horror
classics that took the next giant step after Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho
(1960) in breaking new ground and setting off a new era of freedom and
innovation in filmmaking overall. Sure,
Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey also arrived in 1968 and was absolutely
as important, but of the four films, Romero did the most with the least. Still the subject of endless imitators,
satires, and a third sequel in 2005, the film was a sensation when it arrived. Influenced by the look of the Vincent Price
film The Last Man On Earth and loosely inspired by its source material
(Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend),
the film comes up with a great Classical Horror moment of reference (the
brother of the couple does a Boris Karloff impersonation that is uncanny in
saying “There’s coming to get you, Barbara!”) that makes for a great joke. Romero turns this on a dime and the first of
many zombie attacks begin.
The reason the film continues to be a classic is because
it asks the question beyond Matheson’s book or the first three feature film
adaptations (the second being the 1971 Charlton Heston vehicle The Omega Man,
the third bearing the title of the book with Will Smith) of what would happen
if authority broke down and the set world as we know it was over? Note that it is never nuclear holocaust in
these films, but something biological and even supernatural.
You can read more about the first two versions of I Am
Legend at this link:
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/6388/The+Omega+Man+(HD-DVD/Warner)
That leaves just enough room for inner catastrophes to be
unleashed. You cannot buy anything, as
stores are not open, product is not being shipped in & produced, and the
owners are dead or have become monsters.
So have family members, so the security of the family, without even
going into Capitalism, heterosexuality and patriarchal order (though
applicable) because you do not have time to think about and analyze these
things when a monster is coming to kill you.
It is that idea that propels the film immediately and does not let up,
while Romero sets up juxtapositions with resonance that allows the build-up of
all kinds of horrors for the audience to see, experience and project into the film. For the home to the African American lead to
the interesting use of canted angle shots.
The film has also been often dubbed a film reflecting
Vietnam, and though it does to some extent, that is an inadequate
reaction. On one hand, it dismisses a classic
as overly simple, while those who would like to bury it dub it that because
they want to make everyone forget Vietnam.
This goes beyond Right Wing rollback groups who keep lying that we could
have “won” that “war” echoed by the Iraq situation to too much of an extent for
comfort. In this respect alone, the film
gets better with age, still being considered subversive by political forces
with nothing better to do but ruin lives and life. Maybe the monsters are just too similar to
them for comfort.
That’s not all though.
In the tradition even of John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards in John Ford’s The
Searchers (1956), who is ready to kill anyone out who becomes affiliated,
influenced or overtaken by “Indians” in their world and culture, people in this
film literally are taken over by a force like nothing Edwards could have
imagined and this amounts to a reversal of that prejudice of The Old West. Ideas of “the other” take on existentialist
new meaning here, a secret to the films success.
Finally, as all classics do, it creates a world we have
never been to before and are impressed and engulfed by because the film always
remains smarter than its audience.
Classics do this with the smartest of audiences, as happens here. The film is a hit, but some of the success
has transmuted for certain viewers as a granddaddy of slice & dice, serial
killer, reactionary Horror film fans who think this is the first film such
happenings occurred. It is much more,
with the acting being just unprofessional enough to make you think this is
possibly more real than you would have otherwise. The conclusion remains one of the most
chilling in all of cinema because the film (like all classics) exceeds genre
when all is said and done. Night Of
The Living Dead was even remade by make-up artist Tom Savini in what is now
a cult item, but it and the hundreds of films that followed never displaced it
because its Horror is still very real and self-contained. In some way, cinema and the world still has
not totally caught up with this film.
The 1.33 X 1 black and white image is the weak point here,
looking like DVNR (digital video noise reduction) was used, causing hazing and
even ghosting of the image throughout.
This is not a modern HD transfer, but was THX certified, so it should
still look better than this. This
package originated on the 12” LaserDisc format, so that explains some of the
problem. Romero shot the film, as well
as co-writing and co-editing it with John Russo at a time this was not
common. It was very graphic for its time,
but note how effectively the gore was used.
Romero is so aware of this that when he did the first sequel, he knew he
had to make it ironically comic and comic book.
The Dolby Digital 5.1 mix is also disappointing; sounding
more like it is interested in echo than enhancement and direction. Fortunately, the Dolby 2.0 Mono is good
enough, though not as full as PCM sound would have been. For that HD transfer, DTS HD and MLP need to
be done from a newer restoration and clean up of this soundtrack and its stock
score by William Loose. That music is
sparse, yet effective and Romero and crew were so in the moment and on
target. That is why the sound upgrade is
necessary, because a classic like this deserves it.
Extras include an essay by Stephen King in paper print
inside the red DVD case, stills sections with posters, photos, memorabilia,
props and a scrapbook, text about Romero’s company The Latent Image and Image
Ten (two sections), on video camera interview with the film’s co-star Judy
Ridley, a spoof, a section on Romero’s lost and incomplete film There’s
Always Vanilla, two audio commentary tracks, an original theatrical
trailer, an original TV spot, a THX optimizer that can help you adjust your
video for maximum fidelity, the original screenplay as frame-by-frame text, a
final interview with star Duane Jones, outtakes from sepia-toned The
Derelict short and eight TV commercials Latent produced for several local
companies. The exception is one for
Calgon, in which Romero and company use a mock-up of visuals inspired by the
hit Fox film Fantastic Voyage (1966) to sell the product. That makes this DVD still the definitive
release of the film to date, despite aged and problematic performance problems
with the film itself.
Romero also allows his love of old Horror films to seep
into the film. Though it is hard to see
how closely related Diary Of The Dead,
here are links to the first three sequels to his film, including high
definition versions:
Dawn Of The Dead (1978) DiviMax DVD-Video
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/887/Dawn+Of+The+Dead+(Divimax)
Ultimate Edition DiviMax DVD-Video Set
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/1416/Dawn+Of+The+Dead+-+Ultimate
Blu-ray also issued
Day Of The Dead (1985) DiviMax DVD-Video
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/622/Day+Of+The+Dead+(Divimax+set)
Blu-ray
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/6152/Day+Of+The+Dead+(1985/Blu-ray)
Land Of The Dead (2005) HD-DVD
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/4341/Land+Of+The+Dead
DVD-Video
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/2965/Land+Of+The+Dead+-+Unrated
That leaves us wondering who has the best film print of
this classic and will we see a high quality HD transfer of it. Stay tuned.
- Nicholas Sheffo
