I hope you like cheese. This book is full of it. In this edition of Trends of Terror, film critic Steve Hutchison reviews 150 horror and horror-adjacent movies so bad they’re good, sorted from best to worst. How many have you seen?
Night of the Living Dead
A group of people chased by zombies take refuge in a vacant house.
United States1990
Feature Film
Realism:
Supernatural
Relative:
Offspring
Catastrophes:
Apocalypse
Biohazard
Explosion
Extinction
Famine
Fire
Infestation
Infected:
Contagious
Irradiated
Diseased
Screenplay:
Franchise Remake
The franchise that just won't die!
Ambiance
Editing
Effects
Released 22 years after the original, this remake is in color and is rigorously faithful. It’s well cast, well shot and is filled with friendly homages. Every event is a bit more prestigious, more intense, and gorier, with more prosthetics and other generous practical effects. The film gives us a more realistic rendition of the story that created a subgenre: zombies.
They’re not simply extras with cheap make-up anymore. Some of them look putrid or heavily mutilated. The original film was darkly lit, and the black areas where a perfect refuge for the living dead. This one uses abundant realistic lighting most of the time, instead. The photography is interesting and represents the most obvious shift in tone. People feel more real, more “there”.
It uses few locations, few actors, and it doesn't create a filler problem. Time is well spent discovering our characters and making their complex relationships evolve. The same dilemmas are posed, and the story follows its dramatic course as originally written. It is more theatrical, more violent, less emotionally detached and livelier than its predecessor, and is generally a good update.
