Review #122: Land of the Dead (2005)

This review was originally written in October 2021.

October 2021 Horror Movie Review #8- Land of the Dead (2005)

I... did not like this movie. This was probably the most uninteresting and boring movie that I've watched this month, and I'm including the original Night of the Living Dead. At one point I asked myself, "How did they manage to make a zombie movie this boring?" and the answer was, of course, obvious: Just take out the zombies.

Because really, this isn't a zombie movie. Yes there's the backdrop of a zombie apocalypse, and there's a couple plot points that involve zombies, but by and large, for the majority of its runtime, this is a movie about class warfare in a post-society setting. It's a story about the fat cats living in luxury while the working class keep everything running, and the people who get beaten down and dream about seeing how the other half lives. You could replace "zombie apocalypse" with any kind of post-catastrophe setting and the majority of this film would remain untouched, because of how little it has to do with zombies.

To date I'm not positive on whether this was meant to be a sequel to Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead remake, a sequel to Day of the Dead, or a sequel to one of the many lesser-known sequels or remakes that I skipped. (According to the IMDB trivia, the story for this movie originally started as part of the script for the original Dawn of the Dead, but was trimmed down for time. That doesn't clear anything up, though.) I feel it would have been important to know this going in because really, it feels like I've skipped something. In all of the previous Dead movies, we were watching and learning how difficult it was for people to even get by with some semblance of peace after the zombie outbreak; Dawn showed us that even the biggest and most well-stocked of hiding places still have their weaknesses, and Day showed us that even when you have a safe place to live, you're still doomed unless you're trying to make progress (and even then, your progress is likely to get you killed, possibly by your fellow man). Then this movie just starts right from jump with a hugely secure, incredibly fortified settlement where at least some people get to live in peace and luxury, and I have no idea how we got there. Isn't the journey from here to there what would have been interesting to show? Instead, we just get this third or fourth chapter of a story where we're supposed to care about the characters and their goals and struggles, without even knowing who they are or how they got to where they are. Dennis Hopper's character has one line about an hour into the film that sort of starts to get into this, but then it's gone as quickly as it began.

I just didn't care about anyone in this movie, largely because it felt like I was coming in halfway through a story where all of the interesting bits were front-loaded in the first half. I'm hoping the next couple films take the step back that this one desperately needed, but we'll see.

Overall Rating: 3/10 Really Long Walks By A Zombie

Surprise Cameos: Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright as two zombies in the photo booth!