Quote Originally Posted by Yuffie514
horror movies are the best. i'm not sure about this one. all the zombie movies are just like Dawn of the Dead remakes. same here, same there.
If you're referring to the Dawn of the Dead I think you're referring to (the one that came out last year), <i>that was a remake itself</i>.

Seriously. George Romero <b>invented</b> the zombie genre as we know it in 1968 with Night of the Living Dead. Before that, anything involving zombies was strictly people controlled by powerful voodoo priests to act as servants. Romero made a sequel, Dawn of the Dead, in 1978. Then Day of the Dead in 1986. This is the first zombie movie he's made since then, so there's reason to be excited. Granted, they remade Night of the Living Dead in 1990 and Dawn of the Dead last year, but as I mentioned before, I understand that Romero was, at best, peripheral to their creation.

If Romero does another zombie movie, it'll be interesting to see what the setting is like then - his movies have most certainly not been carbon copies of each other. Night of the Living Dead takes place at the very beginning of the outbreak, and establishes the basic rules concerning them - that they eat the living, and can only be defeated by destroying their brain. He doesn't really bother to reiterate this every movie - those that didn't get it in the first one are dead in the subsequent ones. At the most there's very short mention of is while characters are discussing why this is happening. Dawn of the Dead takes place with the outbreak well underway - martial law has already been declared, television stations are being shut down, and so forth. The movie ends, I think, months later; I think even close to a year. Day of the Dead takes place somewhere between months and years after the whole thing started. He seems to have made it a point that the calendar you see at the beginning of the movie, and at the end, both lack the year, and days - they just say the month. This is the one where he introduces the idea that maybe the zombies have a modicom of intelligence, as one of the scientists at the facilty actually trains one not to attack humans, and inarguably demonstrates that it retains at least some vague memory of its life. Land of the Dead takes this further, as they begin communicating in some rudimentary way, and learn to use tools.

I'll grant that I didn't really spot much of the social commentary in Day of the Dead that you mentioned, Azar; but Land of the Dead is full of it. Fiddler's Green makes a great plot device, filled with people largely unconcerned that civilization has effectively ended, and who do not care about the huddled masses sitting just outside their door.

And, like all three of Romero's other zombie movies, this one has a really cool black guy in it. Only this time, he's a zombie.