George A. Romero Poster Gallery

NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968) #1 - US poster

NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD #2 - Italian Poster

NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD #3 - West German poster

Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Dir: GEORGE A. ROMERO
Country: USA

In a tribute to utter pointlessness I present yet another review of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. I’ll get all those predictable words like seminal, legendary, and landmark out of the way now. No review of this film would be the same without them. Unfortunately I don’t believe that Romero’s film is seminal, legendary or a landmark, but that is probably besides the point. Three other adjectives do spring to mind though - amateurish, crude, and rudimentary. I’m not one to herd the sacred cows of the horror genre into the slaughterhouse just for the sake of it, but neither am I party to the sort of unthinking and mindless worship of a film on the say so of a bunch of ex hippy critics and academics who were around at the time of the films release. Histories are written retrospectively and its rarely mentioned for example that Night of the Living Dead was not a major success when it was first released. Instead the film languished for three or four years before it became a success on the Midnite Movie circuit. One version of history will have you believe that Romero’s film distilled all the anxieties of the day and was a white hot rebuke to mainstream American culture up there with Easy Rider (1969). The fact is all these qualities were drawn out of the film retrospectively. Therefore the much lauded allegorical dimension of the film was only appreciated when the time had passed. However Romero did have an effective metaphor for consumerism in his depiction of a zombie horde stripped of the mystique of voodoo.

Season of the Witch (1972)

Dir: GEORGE A. ROMERO
Country: USA

aka:
Jack's Wife
Hungry Wives

In the wake of Night of the Living Dead (1968) George A. Romero found his career as a filmmaker stalling. It would be three years before his second film - the bland and indifferent drama There’s Always Vanilla (1971) saw the light of day. This has rightfully become a forgotten obscurity and the same fate befell his third film Season of the Witch (1972). It seems Romero was intent at this point in his career in distancing himself from the horror genre in an attempt to maker serious films with a ‘message’ for an artier audience. Unfortunately the results are boring and tedious. Although he uses the generic device of witchcraft for his third film one shouldn’t be fooled into thinking this is a horror film. It is in fact a very tepid domestic drama that lacks the vitality and energy of his landmark debut film. It does improve on Night of the Living Dead in one key area though - this is a far more professional production. The editing is intriguing and interesting and the sound design is less clunky. The acting is also far superior, but these aspects add mere decoration to a slow moving and rather preachy stab on Romero’s part to make some kind of half assed feminist statement.

Two Evil Eyes (1990)

Dir: GEORGE A. ROMERO & DARIO ARGENTO

Country: ITALY/USA

aka:
Due occhi diabolici

This uneven and insipid anthology horror film would have rightly vanished into the ether were it not for the fact that George A. Romero and Dario Argento collaborated on it. Romero and Argento had first locked creative horns over a decade before and the result was Romero’s enjoyable but somewhat overrated zombie opus Dawn of the Dead (1978). What a difference twelve years can make? The best days of both filmmakers were far behind them and this production smacks of opportunism and a kind of desperation to return to the good old days of the 1970’s. Even for 1990 this feels like something of a throwback and this hasn’t helped it to date particularly well. The slump in fortunes experienced by both directors would continue into the 1990’s and beyond. For Argento it has become a terminal decline, but Romero has managed to belatedly engineer something of a creative comeback - if only he would move on from the dead end of his zombie obsession - he might once again claim the mantle of being one of the most important makers of horror films.

Diary of the Dead (2007)

Dir: GEORGE A. ROMERO
Country: USA

aka:
George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead

After the grossly bloated and highly compromised dross Land of the Dead (2005), the ponderous symbolism and allegory of George A. Romero returns again for the fifth entry in a saga that began in the age of civil rights and Vietnam. Each subsequent instalment of Romero’s Dead series has addressed the cultural anxieties of the day. Diary of the Dead doesn’t let the series down - the allegorical backdrop to this film being the changes wrought on America by the ‘war on terror’, reality TV, surveillance culture and the overriding sense that without documented footage an event doesn’t exist. With this in mind Romero’s extremely low budget works as an advantage (it has to be noted that few filmmakers could switch from a $15,000,000 budget to $2,000,000 with such ease) as he incorporates public domain newsreel footage, and grainy internet documentary material.