Their Later Films (Vol. 1)

Vol. 1 – George Romero.

At one point, several years ago, when The Dark Half was becoming an older film and Bruiser was still a developing thought in the mind of the director of Night of the Living Dead, George A. Romero was my all-time favourite film director. His scripts, to me, were brilliant in their social and societal observations, and his knack for lively and down-to-earth characters resonated through nearly all of his films. Of course, the spectacular gore was a draw, and after all, this was one of the so very few horror movie directors that had actually managed to change the entire landscape of genre cinema not once, but twice in the first third of his phenomenal career that wove through maverick independent filmmaking and high-budget studio productions. In a strange way, those landmark films of Romero's – Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead served to set his own bar so high, it would become, sadly, impossible to leap over for a third time in his filmmaking career. That is not to say in any way that his other films are not worthwhile – in fact, exactly the contrary. Knightriders (1981) was actually the film that cemented him as my favourite director for many years (I'll nod to Martin here, as well), but what astounded me was that Romero's later films could not achieve the cult status as those films of the first two-thirds of his career. Post-Day of the Dead, with his moderately-budgeted studio films Monkey Shines and The Dark Half, Romero seemed to be letting his trademark visceral panache drain from his horror filmmaking ideals, which was physically changing the way he was making his genre films. Romero himself had even said, “Monkey Shines and The Dark Half were basically just exercises in style for me”, meaning he was fucking around with a studio's budget to experiment with horror storytelling. Fair enough. But when he seemed ready to implement these

studio stylings back into his own original horror tales, there was no longer the large genre audience he once had. Romero had changed just when the video market had changed (Bruiser going direct-to-video) and the tastes of the horror audiences had changed, and not in Romero's direction. Which is such a shame – upon reflection, it is actually two of his “Later Films” that boast some of his best, most energetic scriptwriting – I'm talking about the tragically ill-fated Bruiser and Land of the Dead. 

 

The overall premise of Bruiser is a cause for celebration in and of itself – put-down corporate dreg (Jason Flemyng) wakes up one morning without a face. His features have been seemingly permanently obscured by a plain white Venetian mask mould, which triggers off a series of revenge fantasies that Flemyng can finally act upon now that he doesn't have to look himself in the mirror any longer. He is the anonymous put-upon corporate dreg, now, visually and physically emulating how most of us wind up feeling after years through the corporate grinder. The script is insanely witty, but as per usual with Romero, also completely lacking any subtlety or subtext – everything is thrown right in our faces. A Romero fan like myself loved it, with nearly every actor chewing the scenery. But what is really different here, as with Land of the Dead, is that Romero is no longer relying at all on his indie-filmmaking maverick instincts, instead, he's relying heavily on his production staff, from the cinematographer to his editor to his art directors to his special effects team, something which he has become increasingly disconnected with since 1985's Day of the Dead. Bruiser is the new Romero, the Canadian Romero, the Grunwald-Productions Romero. But if Bruiser was an underappreciated piece of script-writing, Land of the Dead, Romero's next and final big studio movie, was actually something of an unheralded masterpiece. Now, before I get too far into the celebrating of Land of the Dead, I should note that after years of discussing Romero's films with many friends and colleagues, I have found that I am absolutely in the minority on my opinion here. If not the solitary holder of said opinion. Still, it's an opinion, and I do have it – Land of the Dead is one of the best horror scripts ever written. It's particularly amazing to me that it holds so many fresh zombie-movie ideas within after the author has already brought three cinematic zombie blockbusters to the big screen and had even re-written one of them for a 1990 remake. You'd think anyone would have been tapped out – instead, Romero brought out the big guns (literally, in the case of “Dead Reckoning”, one of the films' showpieces of anti-zombie weaponry and lead metaphor regarding the importance of war technology to the rich and the right-wing white people) and delivered one of the funniest, insightful, thoughtful, poignant, entertaining, and engaging of all of his films. The dialogue cracks and the action moves fast. Once again, apart form the scriptwriting, Romero is distanced from the technical aspects of his own film, leaving it up to the studio professionals to help him create a great zombie movie on-screen. But this distancing from the other creative aspect of making his film (the last time Romero cut one of his own movies was Creepshow and the last time he'd been involved in any sort of art direction or lighting was Dawn of the Dead. Land of the Dead was filmed nearly entirely in a green-screen studio, leaving computer graphics artists to render the settings, backdrops, and a lot of the special effects). Still, Land of the Dead stands up almost because it was also a studio production, adding on-screen value to Romero's dark vision and providing strong actors to handle and deliver his clever & ham-fisted dialogue. Land of the Dead also marked the closing of a gargantuan horror series that had been helmed by one of the genre's best and most groundbreaking directors, infusing zombie-dreams and ideas that Romero had been holding onto for a decade and a half; whereupon he was finally able to purge these final images from his mind onto the big screen for one last glorious time.