Night of the Living Dead (1968) vs. Night of the Living Dead (1990)

Back in 1968 a movie of unspeakable terror came out that helped change the face of horror movies. While this movie is no Dawn of the Dead, 28 Days Later or Dead Alive, without this film there would be none of the others. A lot of the movie is pretty crappy (which I’ll get to) but what really matters is the vision of George Romero, which stays with you much longer than the crappy acting does.

The story is classic horror. A woman goes to the cemetery with her brother to pay their respects to a dead parent, to which the brother greatly resents having to drive so out of his way to do so. He then starts teasing her (“They’re coming to get you Barbara!”) when one of the walking dead comes up and attacks them. They are coming for her! The brother dies, but Barbara gets away to an abandoned house where she becomes trapped with a bunch of different people with different ideas on how to handle the zombies. Cue social commentary…here.

What’s great about this movie is that it isn’t really about zombies, per se, but about crisis management. (This movie would be great to screen for businesses to show what can really go wrong when you panic and don’t work together as a team.) Barbara goes loony. Ben (the black guy) tries to take charge and handle the situation correctly, but he has to deal with the batty Barbara and the extremely annoying Cooper who feels their best bet is staying in the cellar, and ONLY in the cellar. Then you got the willing to help, and yet extremely dumb, teenager, his hysterical girlfriend, Cooper’s “I’ve had it up to here with you!” wife, and their daughter, who has been bitten by one of the zombies. They do an alright job boarding up the house, but when it comes to making an escape attempt everything goes to shit. That’s when the dying starts.

This great idea coupled with Romero’s excellent directing are what makes this movie great. Black and white is used extremely well, with both the film stock and the race relations. One of the things that made this movie really revolutionary when it came out was the fact that not only was the black guy the hero, but he was also the only one with a brain on his shoulders. The actor who plays Ben is also the best of the bunch, which gets me to the problems of this movie.

A couple of the actors are really bad. Barbara, for instance, you want to die almost immediately. She’s so annoying. You want someone to just slap her and say, “Get a hold of yourself, bitch!” Ben does slap her, but it doesn’t do any good. Everyone else (other than Ben and the delightfully bitchy Cooper’s wife) is pretty bad, which distracts you from the good movie they are in. Unfortunately, the good that the movie does in making the black man the hero, is lost when you see what little it does for the women in the movie. For the most part they are extremely weak and submissive to the feuding males, with the sole exception of a few snide remarks that don’t really go anywhere from Cooper’s wife. Otherwise your main female protagonist is Barbara, who spends most of the movie in shock not saying anything unless it is something crazy.

Also the score is way over the top, making the film feel like a cheesy 50’s drive in horror movie, when the movie was actually made in the late 60’s. There are also some silly script mistakes that probably could have been cleared up if this wasn’t the low budget first movie it is. Otherwise it is pretty great, and I give it a B.

Romero somewhere along the line lost the rights to Night of the Living Dead and therefore has made next to no royalties from the movie. Just like when It’s a Wonderful Life used to be on every channel all year long, different versions of Night are everywhere. Just check out Night of the Living Dead on Amazon.com and you’ll come up with like, 11 different DVDs. Because of that you probably won’t notice that one of those DVDs is of the 1990 remake version of the film. I think most people other than the hardcore zombie movie fans don’t even know about this version. I didn’t know about it until I saw it on some zombie movie webpage.

In order to make some money off of the Night of the Living Dead name, Romero decided to update his original script and let Tom Savini (of the Friday the 13th movies) direct his first feature so that he could finally see some royalty money coming in. It’s unfortunate that he didn’t put any more time and effort into it than that, because if handled right the remake could have been one of the greatest zombie movies ever made. Is it is, the remake is only so-so.

What’s better? The script, for one, is more detailed, makes more sense, and makes some interesting changes to the original movie. This time around Barbara isn’t shell-shocked (thank God) and becomes the kick ass protagonist that Ben was in the first movie (although it is still debatable as to whether or not watching her brother die did still make her crazy). Ben’s character is subtly changed so that he is now just as bad as Cooper, even though appearing at first to be the same rational guy he was in the first movie. His temper flares up a little more and he’s a little more bossy, which helps explain his fate in the biggest change of the movie, the new more dramatic ending (although the first movie still packs more of a punch). I won’t ruin that for you here though.

The makeup is also much better. These zombies actually look dead, unlike in the original where they just looked like people walking funny. There are lots of great zombies where you can tell exactly how they died, which I always think is a pretty good deal.

Where does the movie go wrong? Well, the acting still sucks for the most part. The music is worse than in the original because it’s all midi orchestra, which sounds like ass. And the greatest strength of the original, the visionary direction, is probably the biggest weakness of the remake, since Savini isn’t a very good director, and the fact that it is now in color (with way too much lighting) keeps any creepy atmospheric stuff from entering the picture. This places way too much of the weight of the picture on the writing, which is good but can’t hold up the rest. The end of the world dread is also missing, unfortunately.

I’m not really sure why they didn’t try for a big studio release for this movie. The budget could have been bigger, they could have gotten more talented people on board, and since the script is so good and because of the classic status of the original I don’t think it would have flopped at all. Instead it just feels like they were trying to make a quick buck with this one (or any money at all, in the case of Romero). It’s still good, but it could have been a lot better. I give this one a B-.