PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 6/23/05)

The only summer movie that matters this year offers profound theoretical readings of the last two decades in our sociopolitical history, from broadening class systems and average-joe apathy toward global plight to post-9/11 concerns of government distrust, home-grown terrorism, and police-state potentiality. That the film is inventively fun, raises questions via radical politics, and costars hungry hordes of rotting zombies is a testament to the intelligent and classical storytelling of horror auteur George A. Romero, who also wrote the proverbial book on modern zombie cinema with his 1968 allegory of racial tensions and Vietnam-era paranoia, Night of the Living Dead. Romero's brilliant cycle lumbered on through 1978's scathing consumer-culture satire, Dawn of the Dead, and 1985's underrated study of "science vs. military" psychologies, Day of the Dead, but it took a successful Dawn remake for the Shakespeare of flesh-chomper plays to finally get the budget needed for his next act of zombie theater.

Land of the Dead is Romero's long-awaited masterpiece, a slyly suspenseful and droll thrill-ride that expounds on both the highbrow and the chewed-off-brow concepts of his previous trilogy, then flippantly dismisses the cheap scare tactics of the control-pad generation's gimmicky genre knockoffs. Fans of the old will be pleasantly rewarded, but newcomers are elegantly brought up to speed in this newly postapocalytic American Land-scape, where survivors have banded together to form a society within a fortified city. Opportunistic fat cats like Kaufman (Dennis Hopper, a clever casting choice to play "The Man") rule the dystopian metropolis from the towering, invitation-only Fiddler's Green, becoming even richer off the vices they've sedated the ground-level citizens with: gambling, drugs, human-against-zombie gladiator games, etc. The in-betweens allowed access to both tiers are the mercenaries—such as lone wolf Riley (Simon Baker), hot-headed Cholo (John Leguizamo), and mid-movie tagalong Slack (Asia Argento, making Resident Evil's Milla Jovovich look like a sissy)—who run supply-foraging missions outside the city walls, protected from the zombie wasteland by Riley's unstoppable patrol tank, Dead Reckoning. The crowning touch is that the locked-out "stenches," as the undead are nicknamed, have become a terrifying vision of the underclass itself. As given voice (or aggressive growl) by literal monster-of-a-man Big Daddy (Eugene Clark)—a former gas-station employee that challenges Romero's signature black hero by installing him as leader of the zombie brigade—the bottom-feeders have begun using tools and rising from the depths to chew their way through the bureaucracy.

Romero knows how to shake his own ant farm for maximum entertainment, and just as the previous links in the story arc were vignettes of self-destruction under the weight of mankind's folly, so too is Land of the Dead. Resorting to digital effects only when it can't be done authentically with prosthetics or filmmaking ingenuity, Romero's imminent invasion presents enough memorably gory highlights (you'll never forget the waterfront storming of the city, or the "jack-in-the-box" zombie whose head is tethered only by a gristly neck thread) that make the recent one-note reinvention of fast-moving zombies nothing short of a cop-out. To the sound of fading moans on the horizon, the latest trend of zombie-horror mayhem may as well close up shop and go home, unless the byline belongs to the master himself, Mr. Romero.—Aaron Hillis