Film Summary DCCVIII (Land of the Dead)


Land of the Dead is too darn stupid to dislike.
I watched it years ago and didn't pay it much mind at the time.
In one ear out of the other, thought it was dumb.

But then I saw a bunch of people on the internet talking about it, and the way they go on. ''It's the worst thing ever made. Its horrible, it has a bad message, it's completely nonsensical and you should hate it."

But honestly the movie knows what it is.
It's just having fun with dumb people in a stupid scenario.
A bunch of Rich weirdos living in a big tower, with a bunch of poor people living around them. Who are themselves surrounded by zombies.
The premise is stupid but it's not like a never pretended to be anything better.
And then you see review shows like redlettermedia depicted it as the worst thing ever made with disgustingly bad early CGI.
Which isn't all that accurate.
There's a scene where a zombie's head gets knocked off, but still connected partly by the neck.
It falls behind and you can tell that it's a bad computer animation.
They (RLM) tried to pretend that the entire movie was like this and that it was this awful put together effects production.
But most of the effects are fine. It uses CGI blood a few too many times but otherwise the zombies are well put together.
They use a lot of the same makeup and design as all the other Romero movies.
The character acting from the zombies it's pretty good to.
It's a lot better than what people presume it is, especially if you only listen to idiots on the internet.

My only complaint with the story is that the secondary antagonist (played by John Leguizamo) has a really stupid motivation at the end of the movie.
He wants to extort the people living in the tower out of 5 million dollars because they refused to let him live in said Tower.
And the whole thing comes off as ridiculous, as the money is only valuable in the tower.
The rest of the world is still a fallen apart apocalypse where money is only good for kindling. But he's adequately insisting that he gets his $5000000*.
What does he expect to do?

March back into the tower after threatening to blow it up. And just assume the people will let him live there.
It really is the dumbest part of the whole film and it's the only part I take issue with.

Otherwise everything else is fine.
The underground zombie fighting ring, the little man acting as a pimp, the silly Irish man who's talking about rebellion against the big bad Tower. It's all dumb and over-the-top ''commentary'' on one thing or the other.
But it doesn't get in the way of what the movies about.
Which is zombies taking siege  on a city and inevitably destroying it.

In fact it kind of makes the main characters pointless.
Human characters have always been dis-interesting in most zombie flicks. You don't really care if they live or die. You just want to see what happens to them when they get mauled by the zombies but in this movie that extra true.
You have no connection to anybody. heck, I was on Leguizamo side most of the time because he seems the only person that gave a damn about anything.
Oh and of course the sentient zombie.  He's flat-out the main driving force of the movie and I wish we had an film based entirely on his perspective.
How cool would that be. A completely dialog free movie we are just following the adventure of slightly intelligent zombies and seeing all the different escapades they get up to. I think you could make for some pretty interesting stories out of that.

Some people complain that the premise around this movie is completely unrealistic. That you wouldn't have this Tower full of extremely rich people with poor people living beneath them in a zombie apocalypse. And I don't think you'd get it like this either in real life but I do want to remind you that the United States has more empty homes that does homeless people.

Towards the beginning of the movie Leguizamo's character opens up a humidor for cigars. He then precedes to dump out a lot of the cigars and take the humidor.
Before looking over at one of his associates and telling him to pick up said cigars on the floor, so they could sell them on the market.
Than that guy gets his hand bitten while reaching down for the cigars.
All I can think about in this entire scene was how Leguizamo throw out a bunch of cigars without a second care.
All of those cigars are ruined now.
They're cracked, broken or dented and they aren't really suitable for smoking.
So that one guy ended up turning into a zombie for absolutely no good reason.
This has nothing to do with the movie or anything of importance. It's just something that sticks out in my head.
Also why did the one guy dumped out of the cigars out to begin with. Cigars aren't that heavy, if you can hold up the humidor without them. You could certainly hold it up with them in it.

*It's like living in the Mesozoic age and finding a crap ton of Nazi gold. It's cool and it's technically valuable, but what the hell are you supposed to do with a chunk of useless metal in an age were Raptors are roaming the earth.

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