Night of the Living Dead 3D

Plot:

George Romero continues to get screwed over for not copywriting 'NotLD'.

Comments:

George Romero's masterpiece has been remade once before of course. I may be a bit of a purist, but I still enjoyed 1990 film for what it was. It is quite possible to make a fine, engaging horror film without cramming social subtext into the damn thing, and many films are all the more enjoyable if you overlook the political drivel being served up to you.
Thus I say to those of you who poo-pooed the hard and competent work of Savini et al, look upon 'Night of the Living Dead 3D' and repent.
The following review will be a first for this site; a recap of the film rather than a compartmentalized evaluation. The reason for this creative choice is simple, endeavoring to compile my thoughts on this film into a cogent essay would just end with my spitting at the monitor for 45 minutes, then uploading pictures of feces. Instead, I hope I can simply save you the price of a rental. However, if your sense of curiosity is as morbid as mine, then may God be with you.

We join our ersatz Johnny and Barbara driving down a dirt road, spewing the hoary old "We're lost. Were not lost." establishing dialogue, only somehow it comes off much more bitchy and annoying than usual. Barb says she's going to text Mom for directions, Johnny says the direction he has can't be wrong cause they're from Mapquest. (!) Because you see, this film is current and up to date, just in case, you know, you thought you were watching the good version.
When our heroes finally arrive at the cemetery, you might notice that Judith O' Dea this Barbara (Brianna Brown) ain't. In fact, most of the women in the film look as if they were recruited from basic cable porn. After all, who needs passable acting when you can be distracted by tits. The pair find the gravesite eerily blandly deserted. On his way back to the car, Johnny is attacked by shadowy figures, and drives off in a panic. Barb can only look on as he leaves her stranded alongside her aunt's coffin, a coffin that has begun to shake as its occupant seeks to tear its way out.
Now let's just take a break here in case any of this sounds like it would be frightening. True, in the hands of a good director, the aforementioned scenario could be bloody terrifying, but you'll be relieved I'm sure to learn that Jeff Broadstreet's overlit, languid style prevent any such uncomfortable feelings. Fleeing the scene, Barbara wanders into the mortuary itself, indifferently passing a priest begging her for help as he is set upon.
Ok, break time again. Here's a nice little barometer of the pod-person mentality driving this script. At this point Johnny and Barb either know they're in a crappy zombie film, or they are simply utter sociopaths.
Sid Haig as Gerald Tovar, Jr. (Ha, ha, ha… ok) tells her that this particular area is for employees only and that she should just calm down, the zombies are just a minor inconvenience, nothing to worry about. Comedy? Tragedy? I can only report at this point I was aware that the film had dragged me into its own little manically idiotic fugue state. Don't fight it, it'll go easier if you just give in.
Barb runs for a while, and the sun apparently collapses in on itself because the next scene takes place after nightfall. She leaves a desperate message on Johnny's voice mail, screaming at him to pick up. (Um, it's voice mail not an answering machine, he can't hear… ah to hell with it.) Though he choose not to pick up the phone what with being dead and all, Johnny was nice enough to text her; "Coming 4 U Barb".

So, he's a zombie that knows how to text message?
Oh God, my head.

Cue the Barbara attack! Part of the magic of this film is that two corpses can be in nearly identical states of decrepitude, yet one stumbles like Red Fox while the other runs full barrel at our heroine. (Heroin! Yeah, that's what would have made me enjoy this movie!) Despite their differences, the reanimated display a touching unity in that than both seem to be wearing the same style of loose fitting Halloween mask, not to mention fresh-from-the-laundry spotless yet "tattered" garments. Barbara is doing her best to knock around the revenants (which is surprisingly easy) when from nowhere rides in a pasty white dork on a motorcycle. Offering a weak backhand to the undead, he spirits the girl away to the safety of his friends' house. Arriving at the Cooper's (Oy) our crotch rocketed friend identifies himself as Ben.
Motherfu*ker.
Ben (Motherfu*ker!) tells Babs that they're not safe out in the open, but the Coopers are good folk that will help them.

Arriving unannounced at a remote house with a distraught (actually, more like snippy, with a hint of gassy) young blond might make for a dramatic scene in a, you know, halfway competent picture. To the best of my recollection here's how things play out here;
Ben: This girl is in trouble. 
Cooper: Who is she?
Ben: Huh?
Barbara: Listen to me…
Cooper: What?
Ben: Karen, go in the other room, I can't tell you.
Cooper: What? She's in trouble?
Ben: What? There where some guys.
Barbara: …
Cooper: Huh?
Ben: What? Yeah.
Barbara: I need to come in here.

This tableau is hardly an isolated incident. Now that we are in the Cooper's house, be informed that every scene is equal parts confused mumbling and stiff milling about. A body gets the impression that in order to stretch the budget the cast were paid with expired bottles of prescription drugs fished from the trash, which they quickly downed with a quart of vodka before being told to "just wing it".
Aside from papa Henry, the other residents of schloss Cooper are his wife Hellie, Owen a giggling handyman who's currently occupied with a giant spleef, and Tom and Judy who are too busy fu*king out in the barn to be warned of the zombies or anything. There's also Karen, the Cooper's aforementioned and inexplicably ethnic daughter, who promptly wanders outside and done gets et'. This might be a good time for Barb to impress the whole importance of the ARMY OF FLESH EATING CORPSES on the head of the house. Instead, she (surprise!) stupors around aimlessly while Henry continues his five minute tour of the home. (And there's another room through here! We are haz budget!)
In all fairness, she does ask once to use the phone to call the cops, you know apocalypse and all that rot, but fuzz don't fit into the Cooper's lifestyle 'cause they're like, crazy pot farming hippies bra', and they don't cotton to the man, or some damn thing.

Meanwhile, it should be noted that the film Owen and the others are watching is the original 'NotLD'. It's truly a stunningly ironic bit of multi-layered postmodern deconstruction of both perception and reality, if by that you mean baboon shit. (Which is what anyone who uses the term "postmodern", ever, is full of.)

Since no one done anything moronic in all of 20 seconds, Cooper throws open the back door, letting in another of those rubber mask wearing zombies who proceeds in short order to bite Owen, tussle with Ben, and get a Trotsky trepanning courtesy of Barb and a conveniently placed icepick. Now it's time for everyone to shuffle about looking out the windows, forgetting of course to warn Tom and Judy, currently locked in nude dusty barn coitus, which we can all agree was really what the original was missing. Ben mentions that "shit yeah" he has guns if it comes to that.
The "ooh, ooh, ah, ah" noises of ersatz TMC porn attract the living dead to the barn. They force Judy out to seek refuge in the family truck, good n' plentys bouncing in the breeze while she waits to be torn asunder. Yeah, thanks movie, my soul was feeling much too unsoiled this week. Tom stupidly tries to wrestle the zombies and even more stupidly, it works pretty well. Then he gets eaten while driving corpses away from the pickup. Judy not realizing this might be her cue to run, stays inside the cab until, still nude and bouncy, she gets taken out of the gene pool.
Everyone watches from their windows stiffer than the damn zombies, pretending to be horrified at the bad thing they didn't lift a finger to prevent. (Remember, they have 'shit yeah' guns. Might have been a good time to go get them.) Cooper declares that even though they have something of a 'don't ask don't tell' agreement, maybe it's not that bad of an idea to call the cops. (Ba-doom, Tcsh!) Too bad the phone is out.

Since only half the cast has been eaten at this point, Ben thinks it might also be savvy to finally fetch the stash of weapons, which turn out the be a solitary pair of six-shooters. Cause it's the complete opposite of what one would think, ya see! Komedy!
The zombies begin breaking in, and the women use planks from bookshelves (Why exactly do these people have books?) to board up the windows.
Someone finally notices that Karen is missing, and her dad wants to run off after her. Ben pulls a gun on him and says that Karen's either safe or dead, and if they go they all go together. Ben is the perfect leader you see; he realizes no one should ever try to help a child in peril, and that a large disorganized group, some of which are wounded, can certainly escape more efficiently than an armed two man team. Meanwhile upstairs, the women change their shirts for some damn reason. (Yes audience titillation, but oddly enough we are not treated to leering shots of silicone crammed mammaries.) Helen drops a little exposition in that Karen isn't her daughter, but that she adopted her after Cooper helped Helen kick drugs, well except for pot. (She actually emphasizes that.) Hellie then asks Barb if she ever read 'Left Behind' (I don't remember any zombies in that, just misogynistic pilots with porn names.) and wonders why a good moral drug dealer like herself is being punished. (The whole film would have been salvaged at this point if George Romero came in wearing a glowing white robe and proclaimed, "I guess there's just something about you that pisses me off.")
Downstairs, Owen starts going into a fever state, ranting that they shouldn't have watched 'NotLD' because it put a hex on them. Does this mean I'll soon be trapped in a tacky cabin with stoned white trash? (I've always wanted to meet Lindsay Lohan!)
Karen then appears on the second floor where she teleported to after being bitten outside… somehow, and goes right for her father. Ben proves again what a hero he is by cowardly worrying more what Cooper will think of him rather than dropping the hammer before the man's life is forfeit. Now, this film is full of pant pissingly stupid moments, but this is one of the most brilliant. In order to heighten the drama (Oh, take me now St. Peter. Allah, Buddha, you too. Santa, L. Ron, Cthulhu, look anybody, I just need to get away from this film!) that old bugaboo bullet time is utilized. Of course, since this whole film appears to be some kind of tax dodge, rather than cg, the slow-motion cloud of smoke and spinning projectile are realized with an animated composite shot. Kinda' reminded me of those toon bullets in 'Roger Rabbit', you know the ones with the sombreros that yelped in cheesy accent when they were fired?

Huh, what? Oh yeah, back to the movie. At this point Sid Haig runs up to the Cooper's beaning the undead with a shovel. (I think it speaks much about the film's pacing that every other sentence in this review contains either the words "at this point" or, "finally".) This really did surprise me; given the level of production and Haig being the only name star, I would have thought he'd be awol after his thirty second appearance at the beginning. He sits down pleasantly and asks for cup of tea, water if they're out. The assembled amadans react by coldly staring at him, as if somehow this odd inhuman action were more retarded than those several thousand that preceded it.
He confesses that this whole thing is his fault. His father used to handle the cremations, because Tovar has a fire phobia. He has a sneaking suspicion the neglected dead may be peeved with him. You see since the old man kicked off he's been simply (duh, duh, duh!) storing the bodies like that crazy guy in Georgia. (The Georgia what now? Oh right, everyone's forgotten about that distasteful three-ring media circus. Thank you again movie, for dredging it up.) Of course it's not just desecrated corpses, Tovar was also disposing of medical waste. And it wasn't just regular hospital stuff either but some really weird mad science experiments got dumped. In addition, some of said science goo leaked onto his embalming equipment… somehow. (Also, he dumped them all in an old Indian burial ground, then stole an Etruscan urn, tried to explain away voodoo, bred Sumatran rat monkeys, read aloud from the Book of the Dead, kneecapped a Knight Templer, brewed some bad moonshine, voted for Nader, wore white after Labor Day…)
Tovar warns that Owen may be acting like he's sick, but those bitten by zombies come back to life quick, chatting a wee bit before their mind shuts down. Cue Owen attack, which Haig ends quickly, decapitating the stoner by gently placing a cutaway shovel against his head. (In 3-d!) They figure it's time to get moving, as they can't call the cops or anything. They ask Tovar how he knew their phone was dead, and he says he noticed a pole downed by a wayward motorist.
Hey, why are you giving him grief? He's only an odd, inhuman man with an obvious oedipal derangement who himself admits he caused the zombie plague. It's not like he's gonna turn out to be untrustworthy or anything!
The last of the undead break in, and while Ben, Barb and Tovar escape, the Coopers retreat upstairs, where they commit suicide.
During this scene, I felt nothing couple. A loving couple carry the body of their dead child to her bed, then take their own lives, and we are allowed to feel nothing. May this be the ultimate and everlasting testament to the screaming, unfathomable lack of talent on the part of everyone who made this film.

Walking down the road, Barbara tells Ben that she found a wad of bills in his jacket, and now knows that he's a pot dealer. Thus occurs what can only be described as a Jr. Highschool hissy fit, as they snipe at each other that 'Ohmygawd! You should have told me!, Ohmygawd! I can't believe you care about this now!, Ohmygawd! You're a criminal!, Ohmygawd! I'm just making money for college!' Then Haig shoots Barb's zombie family, and we're supposed to feel all weepy for the self-absorbed little princess.
Our merry band find a car by the side of the road, but it turns out, you'll never guess this… Sid Haig is bad! Oh my heart, will the deathly shocks of this film never end? Tovar kabongs Ben and locks him in the trunk, then drags everyone back to the mortuary to introduce Barb to his zombie dad. Turns out pops is surprisingly flammable, and in between 3-d camera punches and pseudo-biblical blather, Barb shoves Tovar into a crowd of zombies, releases Ben, and gets them both out to iconic safety of a parking lot. …Where it is reveled that Ben has been skewered with a tire iron, and only has enough time to tell Barb to shoot him before his contacts cloud over and he is zombified. (But he was neither bitten nor embalmed by the tainted equipment, so why should he… Oh never mind!)
Barbara stands her ground, for no reason really, as the garage door opens and the undead approach her. Exit Barb, and her faulty 'fight or flight' brain patterns. Cue closing credits and accompanying shitload rock song.

Oh my soul.
A few things you should know about this film; the 'Dr. Terror's House of Pancakes' 3-d effects apparently don't even work right, and consensus is that the glasses give the viewer a migraine. Also you should know, if you don't have a serious problem with this movie, you probably made it, and are a whore.
A man, no matter how strong, cannot approach this film seriously and retain his humanity. However, the film manages to avoid any neutron of humor no matter how lame or self-referential it gets. It's as if someone crossbred Uwe Boll with box turtle, pumped the resulting homunculus up on pure thc, then set it in front of a digital camera. Apparently all those old episodes of 'Dragnet' are true; stoners are paranoid, listless wastes of skin that are more than willing to defile the name of a piece of genre history for, one assumes, more pot money.

Me? The old marajahoobie's not strong enough for a soul that has to view something like this. I'm thinking maybe a cocktail of absinthe and paint thinner might get me through the night…

 0.5

| Home | Reviews | Faqs | BogBlog | Links | Misc. |