Plot Details: This opinion reveals minor details about the movie's plot.

*cue catchy jingle*

Six more days to Halloween, Halloween, Halloween.
Six more days to Halloween - Silver Shamrocks!

Welcome Boys and Ghouls to Month of the Living Dead, my thirteen (and then some) day tribute to the best holiday of them all: Halloween! Join me, wont you, as I watch the sinister and the silly, the morbid and the macabre, the violent and gruesome in a two week bloodletting that comes to a boil on the eve of all saints.

*cue thunder and lightning effect*

So sit back, turn the lights down low and get ready for today's presentation of. . . .

NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD 3D! Bwah-hah-hah-hah-hah!

*cue commercial break*

In a previous life, George Romero must have angered the gods somehow. You see, when his landmark film was running under the original title Night of Anubis, the distributor, the Walter Reade Organization, changed the name to the much more marketable Night of the Living Dead. Unfortunately the distributors neglected to include the copyright date attached to the new title card, and thanks to the way 1960's copyright laws worked, the film became public domain overnight.

So not only did George get screwed out of any money, not only does his movie show up on every horror movie compilation at every Dollar Store across the land, any two bit small town community theater group with a video camera and a group of friends can get together and remake his movie. Which would explain Night of the Living Dead: 3D - somewhere a two-bit small town community theater group decided to film one, managed to sucker Sid Haig into one of the rolls and actually somehow managed to get it released - in 3D, no less.

For those of you unfamiliar with the plot of Night of the Living Dead (all three of you), allow me to quickly sum up. FLESH EATING GHOULS come back to life and begin eating the living. Some people are trapped by the ghouls in a remote farmhouse and have to survive the night until help arrives.

That's a hard formula to screw up, and yet somehow director Jeff Broadstreet manages it.

You see, one of the wonderful things about the original - in addition to be a hell of a thriller - it also offers depth to the viewer who is willing to look for it. Those viewers looking for a visceral good time can still thrill to the ghastly situation of being trapped by zombies in a house with strangers and/or being eaten alive, but those willing to apply a little critical thought can see the subtext of taboos, social commentary and class strata in the movie.

Well, guess what - all of that pointed racial and political subtext that made Night of the Living Dead one of the most memorable movies of the genre has been pitched over the side in favor of a cheeky, self-referential "Wink, wink, nudge, nudge" attitude. Harry Cooper - the reprehensive of middle-class America (right down to the white shirt and sensible tie) - was in conflict with Ben because with the apparent breakdown of society, his place in the power structure had been lost. His plan - and his anger when the others refused to follow his lead - comes directly from his need to reassert himself in the unspoken class system.

Now, he's a pot farmer. Oi vay.

Oh, did I mention the 3D joints? Oh yes - the big bullet point on the back of the DVD box is that retro 1950's gimmick to sucker audiences in: THREE DEEEE! Shot in the eye wrenching anaglyph process (That's the red/blue paper glasses version) the director occasionally thrusts lit joints, pot smoke rings, shovels and boobies in the audiences' face. One would think that a 3D film would use the gimmick to its maximum advantage - Friday the 13th 3D was able to explode some eyeballs landing in our laps or have Jason fire a harpoon directly at the camera! Sure it had its share of gratuitous "Look! Its 3D!" moments ("It's a yo-yo and its coming RIGHT AT YOU!"), but at least with that movie, you couldn’t go five minutes without something popping off the screen at you. Here? It might as well be a flat 2D film - for shame!

I do have to admit that the 3D process looks pretty good in the brightly lit outdoors scenes. Unfortunately being that most of the movie takes place during the NIGHT of the living dead, one could imagine that these scenes are in short supply. The rest of the time it's a flat, non-3D mess.

And then there's the acting - or lack thereof. The only player of note is Sid Haig, who was pretty good in The Devil’s Rejects and House of 1000 Corpses, but between House of the Dead 2 and this train wreck, he's rapidly squandering any good will he may have garnered. The rest of the cast offers such remarkable thespians as Brianna Brown (who appeared in Spiderman 2 as "Train Passenger #3"), Greg Travis (From his stunning roll as "Magazine vendor" in Sex and Death 101), and Johanna Black (as "Bartender" in an episode of Jag). Who are these people?!? Hell - half of them don't even have photos on the IMDB!

Now sure, Duane Jones (the original Ben) wasn’t exactly tearing up the screen in his post Night career, and Judith O'Dea (Barbra) managed to land an acting gig ten years later - in fact the only actor to come out of the movie with a career was Bill Hinzman (the Cemetery Zombie that attacked Johnny at the start of the movie), who went on to play zombies for the next 20 years. Everyone else pretty much fell off the film making radar after this outing. But despite their lack of experience, they brought a certain rough, low budget quality to the film that these new hacks lack.

I'll freely admit that a horror movie does not need Sir Laurence Olivier as a star, but when the bulk of your script involves endless scenes of your community theater group rejects standing around and talking - and precious little zombie action - you know things are in trouble.

"What? No zombie action?!? How can this be!" I hear you cry. "Even the low budget original Night was able to serve up some ghouls feasting on the flesh of others from time to time. Surely a modern version can do the same!" But oh no - with the exception of one or two kills, the majority of the slaughter is off-screen, in the shadows or in the distance, and most of the zombie deaths are simple shots to the head with some minor blood splatter.

What zombies we do get are pretty lackluster - typical white eyes and some pale make-up round out the FLESH EATING GHOULS. Although to be fair, Dawn of the Dead just some extras slathered in gray body paint for a great majority of their zombies - so holding that against the Night '07 is terribly unfair. Besides, I have oh so much more to hate the movie about.

Did I mention the text message "coming 4 u barb" from Johnny? After he's been zombified? Or tell me how someone fails to notice a tire iron sticking through their chest for five bloody minutes? Or how about that the besieged humans don't even bother boarding up the windows and fortify the house, as typical of normal zombie defense - despite having just watched the original movie! Also, I should point out that when making an inferior product, you should NOT REMIND PEOPLE OF THE BETTER VERSION IN YOUR FILM!

Really, I could go on and on about how mind numbingly awful this flick was, but I’ve wasted enough of my time (and yours) over it already.

Occasionally horror movie remakes do work - the 2004 version of Dawn of the Dead - while generally inferior to the 70's original - was pretty good in it's own right. And of course Hitchcock went back and remade two of his earlier films with great success. But Night of the Living Dead 3D? Yeah, that's the sound of my teeth grinding as I fight the urge to fly to Hollywood and beat the holy living hell out of whoever was responsible for this mind numbing travesty of a movie with a Laserdisc copy of the original Night.

TOTAL BODY COUNT: 10
MOST MEMORABLE KILL: The Fat Naked Zombie eating the priest
GALLONS OF BLOOD USED: 1 (barely)
SPRING LOADED CATS: 0
THE MORON OF THE MOVIE AWARD GOES TO: Me, for renting this lame ass thing. (Even worse - I was a day late returning the rengal. I had to pay TWICE for this damn thing)
BREASTS ON DISPLAY: 2
BEST LINE: "You ready for Revenge of the Splif!"

THE DVD
Oh man, but the video print is a disaster. Quite literally, this is the most painful DVD I've ever watched. The red side was way too dark, and the image was full of ghosting, fringing and was generally very ugly and blurry. Shots which might have been pretty cool, like squirting blood, were almost impossible to even make out in this red/blue nightmare.

THE EXTRAS
We get an audio commentary from Jeff Broadstreet - which, sadly, does NOT consist of an hour and a half of him begging for George Romero's forgiveness. There's a brief Behind the Scenes featurette, a "The Making of Night of the Living Dead 3D" featurette, a production Interview where we get questions and answers with Jeff Broadstreet (sadly, "What in god's name possessed you to screw up a classic movie so badly" was not one of them), some trailers and a theatrical Trailer and two television spots.

THE BOTTOM LINE -
It's a sad, sad world where George Romero has no control over his film and that any hack with two brain cells and a video camera can make their own Night of the Living Dead film - and make more money at than he did it doing so.

Join me next time for another journey into the macabre. Until then. . . pleasant SCREAMS! Bwah-hah-hah-hah-hah!

*cue thunder and lightning effect*

My Month of the Living Dead reviews:
* THE EVIL DEAD
* NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD
* PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE
* THE FOG
* REVELATION OF THE DALEKS
* DAWN OF THE DEAD
* THE LAST MAN ON EARTH/HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL
* DAY OF THE DEAD
* RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD
* THE OMEGA MAN
* NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD 3D
* THE INCREDIBLY STRANGE CREATURES WHO STOPPED LIVING AND BECAME MIXED UP ZOMBIES
* LAND OF THE DEAD
* MASTERS OF HORROR - HOMECOMING
* 28 DAYS LATER
* WHITE ZOMBIE
* HALLOWEEN



Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Good for Groups
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age