I‘ve seen over twenty thousand films over the decades and although I’m quite generous with positive ratings, I’m very stingy when it comes to giving a film five stars. For me, the film needs to be perfect and by perfect I don’t mean “a masterclass of film making” thing, I’m talking perfect for what it is. “Schindler’s List” is a perfect “high-art masterpiece about the good and evil of humanity,” the 1988 remake of “The Blob” is a perfect film about a blob killing people in a small town.
“Night of the Living Dead” is a perfect film. It’s the alpha and omega of zombie films. It’s the one that created the zombie genre and it has never been surpassed. God know that people have tried.
It’s also, because of mistakes in post-production, a public domain film and it has been remade “officially” six times now. Tom Savini made a good effort updating a film that did not need a remake in 1990. All the others sucked badly. Most zombie films suck. They are cheap to make and people watch them, or did watch them. Between 2000 and 2020 1225 movies were made that have the tag “zombie” on IMDb. That’s ten times the amount of films produced during the same period that have the tag “shark,” and they made a lot of shark films during the first fifth of the 21st century.
Here we have the newest remake, which is called “Night of the Living Dead” or “Based on the Original Night of the Living Dead,” or “Night of the Rising Dead” It is a remake, obviously, as in it has the premise of a white person and a black person are stuck in a house during a zombie uprising. It also, which is a bit interesting, has a b-plot about that mob who lynched Ben in the end of the original one.
The mob is followed by a newscaster, portrayed by one of my absolute favourites Robert Carradine. It is one of two films after he decided to leave our earthly realm. The other one is “Sorority Shark Attack.” Bleak.
The main plot stars Vivica A. Fox and a Brittany Snow cosplayer. Their story is what you expect. A couple arrives, then a family with a kid that has been bitten who go down into the cellar. One of the things that made the original so amazing was that it was mostly a drama about people with clashing personalities in a dire situation. The tension between the Ben and the pure assholery that was Harry. The allegory nature of “the other,” with the leads being a white woman and a black man. It was magic.
There nothing of that here.
I think one scene kinds of encapsules the issue of the filmmakers not knowing why the original film was so good. Obvious spoilers ahead. In the original, Ben shoots Henry. In his dying moments, he goes down the stairs to be with his daughter before he passes. In this one, he is alive when the daughter is turned and he bashes her head in.
It also fails on the “less is more” scale. Obviously, a film made in 2026 is going to be gorier than one in 1968, but that’s not he problem. The masterful thing George A Romero manged to do with almost no budget was creating the sense of isolation and dread with pretty much one set. The characters were stuck in a house surrounded by zombies. We were right there with them. They had no idea what was happening and we didn’t either. The only thing from the outside world them, and we, saw was that TV broadcast of the lynching mob on the TV set. Having the film go back and forth between the house and the mob erases that completely.
It’s just soulless and lacks the most basic understanding of what made “Night of the Living Dead” a perfect film.
