Zombie Movie Reviews: Land Of The Dead

 George Romero has directed the 3 previous dead films Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead and this is the fourth instalment of the seemingly neverending zombie apocalypse, although this one is set in the future we don't exactly know the timeline, because that's not important, it's all about the zombies and we see some colourful zombie characters in this film.

Like other zombie films this one has the great novelty of getting to see some zombies dressed up in vaious guises from office workers to butchers to even a clown, but perhaps the main thing about this film is that the zombies have a lead character in this film, who sort of takes charge against the living as it seems all they want to do is just live their undead life in peace, but not in this film.

In this film we see the zombies evolved to handle weapons a bit better and this is something that is played quite well I think because the nature of evolution is to adapt and so the zombies have done that and probably want to live their own lives, just going through the things they did when they were alive.

There are some classic zombie moments when the dead rip peoples throats out and bite huge chunks of flesh out of the foolish and sometimes downright ignorant and blank canvas personality of characters that we see in this film, of course the main characters are slightly interesting, but the focus is on the zombies for a change and at certain points in the film you almost feel sorry for them when the humans come in a slaughter half of them.

The main part of the film is the zombies fighting back with guns and whatever weapons they can find and try to use, although they are best at biting and ripping off some arms and entrails.

Most of the effects are handled by Greg Nicotero who has done many films of horror and there was a great zombie effect in the film, although you only see it for less than a minute and he is a zombie that has his head hanging off and it's only just attached to the spinal column and it turns up and you think "hey where's it's head?" and then it jumps forward and the head flips forward too biting someones arm....classic horror!!

Just like the previous zombie films there are moments in the film were the zombies are shown having a good old munch on some very realistic body parts, although you think they must wear a napkin because they make a right mess, but then you realise zombies don't give a shit!

This was a great film, although it had a larger budget than most of the others, there was a few nods to some of the other zombie films, like the classic bub zombie make up from the Day of the Dead in the 80's and for those who can't remember bub was the zombie character that was almost trained to act like a human and did in some respects.

Following Land of the dead there was also Diary of the Deadwhich was lower in budget but still had some classic zombie killing moments, but all in all this was a great film that brought back the memories of watching lots of zombie films as a kid and making my granny cry as she wasn't a fan of these video nasties!