Zombie Week Begins: Ranking the Romeros

It's Zombie Week here at Macabre Republic, and I'm going to kick things off with a post ranking the six films in director George Romero's ...the Dead series, from worst to best.


6.Survival of the Dead (2009).  Ridiculous melodrama 
concerning feuding Irish-American families on an island off the coast of Delaware.  Playing like a bad Western, this one could have been dubbed Gunfight at the O'Shea Corral.  The indisputable nadir of the series.


5.Dawn of the Dead (1978).  A much-too-long film whose single-note satire (of American consumerist greed) quickly grows old.  There are also some jarring bits of slapstick (pie-faced zombies!).  Most laughable of all, though, is the blue-pancake makeup on the undead extras.


4.Land of the Dead (2005).  Unfortunately, Land is riddled with three major fault lines: the attempt to depict zombies as a sympa-thetic proletariat; the equipping of the undead with handheld weapons (a decision that distracts from the distinct threat posed by zombies--their sheer voraciousness); and the casting of John Leguizamo (whose putative acting could ruin any movie) as one of the leads.


3.Day of the Dead (1985).  All that bickering between the soldiers and scientists grows wearisome, but the film has a great premise (research experiments are being conducted on captured zombies at an underground base) and some brilliantly graphic special effects.  The shift to a sunny Florida setting also makes for a nice change from the first two, Pennsylvania-based entries in the series.


2.Diary of the Dead (2007).  Surprisingly effective, this one modernizes the living-dead film by adopting the camcorder viewpoint/pseudo-documentary format so prevalent in 21st Century horror cinema.  It also reboots Romero's series by setting its action at the time when the zombie outbreak has just begun.  The bits involving the student film (featuring a shambling mummy) are fiendishly clever.


1.Night of the Living Dead (1968).  More than four decades later, the original remains the strongest film in the series.  A groundbreaking (not just in graveyards) work whose apocalyptic scenario and ghoulish violence are rendered even more haunting in stark black-and-white.  The claustrophobic, house-under-siege setting has furnished the template for countless future horror flicks.  Night's dark and bitterly ironic final scene constitutes one of the most memorable endings in the history of the genre.