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

*cue catchy jingle*

Fifteen days to Halloween, Halloween, Halloween.
Fifteen days to Halloween - Silver Shamrocks!

Welcome Boys and Ghouls to Month of the Living Dead, my thirteen day (and then some) tribute to that most wonderful of holidays ever - 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! Bwah-hah-hah-hah-hah!

*cue commercial break*

Oh man, where do I begin reviewing a movie like Night of the Living Dead? Honestly, what can I bring to the table that hasn’t been said a hundred times by people far better suited to wordsmithing than I? The odds of my being able to say anything both fresh and insightful is pretty damn improbable.

Ah, screw it - this movie is so damn good that I'll say it again.

Night of the Living Dead was pretty much the birthplace of the modern horror movies. Oh, sure there were zombie and supernatural undead films before Night came on the scene - The Last Man on Earth, truckloads of Hammer Horror films, Bela Lugosi's White Zombie, the infamous Plan Nine from Outer Space, all the way back to Dracula and Frankenstein in the early 30's - but it wasn’t quite a horror movie as we know it. Once you get past the dead guys walking around, it usually falls to the mad scientist or witch doctor that created them to be the heavy of the film, to bring the supernatural (or scientific) element into play and put the fear of god into Our Hero(es). Meanwhile the undead shuffle about in the background pretty harmlessly, intermittently providing muscle as necessary.

Night of the living dead took that whole premise, that gave it more of a vaguely vampire bent and turned it loose as a ghoulish plague monster than the supernatural machinations of some nutjob wanting to use the dead as unskilled labor to work the cotton fields. Unstoppable, relentless, no matter where you go or what you do, they will find you. They will EAT you. They will turn you into one of them.

That, my friends, is a whole lot more scary than something that shuffles around picking cotton.

Anyway let me bring you up to speed, just in case you've been living under a rock:

Johnny and Barbara have come to a remote cemetery in the isolated Pennsylvania countryside to put their annual wreath on their father’s grave. As they do, Johnny begins trying to scare his sister. "They’re coming to get you, Barbara" he says with best Boris Karloff impersonation, delivering possibly the most memorable line in horror history. "Look! Here comes one of them now!" he says, pointing to the only other person in the vicinity. Pity he turns out to be right as the other man turns out to be a FLESH EATING GHOUL! The ghoul (strangely, they never identify them as Zombies as such - ghoul is as close as they get) savagely clobbers Johnny on a tombstone and gives chase to Babs who seeks refuge in an abandoned farmhouse.

Fortunately she encounters Ben (the iconic Duane Jones, probably the best thing in this already amazing film), who also came to the house for shelter from the ghouls that overran the roadside diner he was at and massacred the patrons.

As Ben secures the house and locks the doors, more and more weird-looking, shambling people are gathering outside and surrounding the house. As they learn of the wide spread epidemic of slaughter on the radio, we meet the last refugees of our little drama when two men burst forth from the cellar. The older of the two is named Harry Cooper. He, his wife and daughter fled to the house after their car was overturned by one of the mobs of flesh eating ghouls. The last two are Tom and his girlfriend, Judy.

And it's here that the meat (if you'll pardon the usage of the term) of the movie begins, in a clash of wills between Ben (who advocates staying upstairs and making their stand against the siege with room to move, routes of escape and so on) and Cooper (who wants to retreat behind the single door into the impregnable windowless room, simplifying the task of defense). Both of them have very good logical arguments, but Cooper is such a dick about it that it totally undermines his side and Ben wins out. And so the human conflict plays out while the army of undead ghouls grows and grows until a series of unlucky events unfold, the human's stronghold crumbles, the ghouls overrun the tiny sanctuary - and even worse: it turns out that Ben was wrong, that Cooper was right all along. Unfortunately this knowledge comes at a very, very high price.

It's a very bold stand to make - that Ben the hero, an upstanding protagonist that Hollywood has groomed us to believe that He Is Always Right, can completely and utterly screw the pooch. He’s smart, he’s courageous, he’s a man of action, and his plans make good sense. On the other hand Cooper is a bully, a coward and a noisy windbag full of hot air and bluster - Hollywood has trained us to hate him, or at least his archetype. The thing is, if everybody had listened to Cooper and hid in the basement, everyone would have live to see the next morning (whether they’d have been safe from the trigger-happy posse the next morning is another matter . . . ). However in listening to the sensible Ben every single one of them died a horrible, gruesome, and occasionally grossly unfair death. Even Ben.

Thanks to post modern horror films like Scream and it's progeny satirizing slasher film conventions, everyone knows the "rules" of a horror movie: sex = death, beer = death, never separate when the lights suddenly go out and the like. Night of the Living Dead gleefully turns all those conventions on their ear and throws them in your face. Just look at what happens to Cooper's young daughter. When not even the child is safe, what the hell chance do the other characters have? Taboos like Cannibalism, matricide, politically charged hot button issues, and an overreaching statement about real-world social ills of the day - all this and more finds their way into the film.

And it's just a hard core film. Take for example, the infamous Zombie Barbecue scene. After a failed escape attempt, the army of undead descends on Tom and Judy’s charred corpses. For the next several minutes, we get an unbroken string of ghouls feasting on limbs and intestines, fighting over the best parts all in close up and agonizing, unflinching slowness right in front of the camera. Forty years of Jason and Michael and Pinhead and Freddy slaughtering teenagers has made such exhibitionism quaint and old-fashioned, but back then nobody - and I mean nobody - had ever done that before.

Sure the movie has flaws (low budget and some moments of overacting, mainly), but honestly, I can't praise this movie enough. It's an icon of horror films, a dark moody piece, and one hell of a scare ride. Well done on all points.

TOTAL BODY COUNT: Eight
MOST MEMORABLE KILL: The abrupt, brutal ending when Ben is gunned down by his saviors.
GALLONS OF BLOOD USED: 3
SPRING LOADED CATS: 0
THE MORON OF THE MOVIE AWARD GOES TO: Judy for freaking out and accidentally inviting her boyfriend to a double BBQ.
BREASTS ON DISPLAY: 1 (kind of - a full on butt shot and a side boobie)
BEST LINE: "They're coming to get you, Barbra!"

THE DVD -
Night of the Living Dead is an odd duck. Thanks to a bookkeeping snafu there was no copyright date included on the prints, and copyright law back then required a proper notice for a work to maintain a copyright. As a result, at last count there were at least 23 versions of Night of the Living Dead on DVD and 19 on VHS. With so many versions on DVD, you can imagine that the quality is all over the map. Releases range from the badly dubbed from a 20 year old VHS master to a crystal clear re-mastered print - and all points in-between. For the purposes of my collection, the best one I found was the Millennium Elite edition. Gold Standard as far as Night of the Living Dead is concerned (the one with the tombstone cover).

I'll also take a moment to tell you which ones to avoid - the 30th Anniversary Edition includes 15 minutes of brand new footage shot 35 years after the fact and unnecessarily bolted on to the beginning and end of the film. I'd also stay away from the colorized version that sports a commentary track from MST3K alumni Mike Nelson. NotLD is pretty poor territory for rifting, and frankly I'd sooner punch Nelson in the face than listen to him rip into a classic.

Anyway - the Millennium Elite Edition NotLD is presented in its original aspect ratio of 1.33:1, and is the crispest, cleanest transfer to date (done from the original negatives). The black and white is perfect, with just a hint of grain. The audio is either Mono or a 5.1 remixed soundtrack. I've had bad experiences with 5.1 mixes on other older films, so I was just a hint reluctant to give this one a spin. Fortunately the 5.1 is nice, subtle mix that doesn’t offend. I'd still go with the original mono soundtrack, mind you - but it's not as bad as I thought.

THE EXTRAS -
It's a cornucopia of extras! We get a commentary track from George Romero, John Russo, Carl Hardman, and Marilyn Eastman, and then a secondary track from Bill Hinzman (the cemetery zombie), Judith O'Dea, Keith Wayne, Kyra Schon (the little Cooper girl), Russell Streiner, and Vince Survinski. Both commentaries are a lot of fun and worth the listen.

Also included are a few trailers for the film (with some really creepy voice-over work by the narrator), and a parody short called Night of the Living Bread. We get two interviews with stars Judith Ridley and Duane Jones - the last one recorded before his death in 1988. Following that are a few clips from the Romero film There's Always Vanilla, featuring Judith Ridley again.

Also included on this second disc are some commercials, as well as a history of the Romero's studio, a handful of outtakes from a short called The Derelict and a scrapbook with well over 160 posters, stills, props and more from the film. Finally we get the originalNotLD treatment/script and some liner notes by Stephen King.

Wow.

THE BOTTOM LINE -
Its strangely comforting that after everything that has happened in the world that someone like George Romero can still deliver a scary film with a social political charge to it, witnessed in the forthcoming Diary of the Deadjust recently debuted at the Toronto Film Festival. It shows that he was relevant then and relevant now.

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: Better than Watching TV
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age