Thread:Shanethefilmmaker/@comment-397235-20140712065858/@comment-397235-20140715001655

I've seen all Romero's zombie films with the exception of Day of the Dead (to my regret, because it's widely regarded as the best). I can tolerate Night of the Living Dead (even though, at best, it's Richard Mathison's far superior I Am Legend with more people, which completely defeats the purpose; no joke, Mathison sued Romero over plagiarism). Dawn of the Dead is far and away one of the poorest excuses for film making I've ever seen. It compounds all Night's problems (idiotic characters, poor grasp on reality, not particularly menacing zombies) and makes it all worse by being in color (and having the worst soundtrack in film history, with the possible exception of The Mist.).

Land of the Dead is even worse (Romero apparently intended it, and several lines in Diary of the Dead as "take that's toward Zach Snyder's remake and its running zombies, ignoring both that, A, runners have been around since 28 Days Later and B, if a zombie isn't scary when it runs, it's really not scary when it picks up a Stery AUG and starts very badly shooting people with it). My favorite scene in the film is Dennis Hopper lecturing John Leguizamo (which is funny in and of itself) about how much money he's spent training Philadelphia's security force, only to have this same force expend something around two or three thousand rounds of ammunition in un-aimed, fully automatic fire on a single zombie who's electrified to a fence.

Like I said, Diary is the only Romero film I own, but Survival manages to be at least as bad as Dawn (even Romero purists hate it), mainly because it can't decide if it's "serious" (in the same way LOTD was serious) or funny, in the same way the much better Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland were funny.

I've not seen The Crazies but I've seen the remake, which was...violent (something I imagine carried over from Romero's film; there are two things you can count on in a Romero film: a stupid protagonist and lots and lots of gore); I'll see if my library has it (they don't have Day so I rather doubt it).

I'm a huge zombie fan, as you can see, but I dislike very much of popular zombie culture (Max Brooks is a dullard and his zombies are boring, Romero is preachy, and...well, that about takes care of it, actually). I've had some luck in recent years with zombie fiction (the majority of which, as I told someone here a few weeks ago, is terrible); I'd recommend The Living Dead II as a good anthology sampler (the first entry is horrible: around thirty politically chosen stories which range everywhere from attacking the US's justification for the invasion of Afghanistan to banning handguns to abortion but somehow manage to forget they're actually supposed to be zombie stories). Zombies are about the only place my right-wing extremism (I say tongue firmly in cheek) comes out to play, because it's so much fun to be contrary.

"Gee, it's a good thing I have free health care. Shame everyone who got bitten by a zombie immediately trucked over to the local ER and killed all the doctors."

"Well, I respect the police and the army and all, but they're all in the state/provincial capitol/outside city hall protecting the government. I sure wish there was some magical handheld device I could use to defend myself..."

The list could go on, but I digress.

I don't mean to be offensive, in case I come off that way (I have very, very strong opinions, but I accept they are opinions and I don't get mad when I'm disagreed with). You're obviously an intelligent person, and I enjoy these conversations.