Classic: Tenebre (1982)

This write-up contains spoilers.

The titular 'Tenebre' is a murder mystery novel within the film. The novel and the way the characters relate to it provides Dario Argento with the means to address some of the discourse surrounding his films. While his films were very popular in Italy, or because his films were very popular in Italy, criticism of their violence was plentiful. Some critics accused Argento of misogyny. Others tried to find Argento himself within his films, as though the man were just waiting to snap and murder women. Others tried to draw a link between violent behaviour in real life and watching Argento's films. Still others noted the profusion of perversions. Having left the giallo genre to make his supernatural classic Suspiria and its cult-classic follow-up Inferno, Argento returns to the giallo with a sense of purpose: to put everything in the open. The intention to hide nothing is represented in the film's overall style, where the characters are not wells of perversion but ordinary people, and where every murder occurs in either broad daylight, indoor lighting, or relatively bright nights. Ironically for a film entitled Tenebre ("darkness"), very little in fact happens in the dark. The killer, at one point, all but announces he's the killer to a detective and the book, 'Tenebre', is nearly a blueprint to his murders. Everything is in the open. Similarly, what critics believed lurking in the dark of the film's subtext is here exposed in plain light.

Three theories about the novel 'Tenebre' are presented in the film. These theories are the crux of Tenebre. The first, what the novel's author, Peter Neal (Anthony Franciosa), himself tells us, is that the killer of the novel kills to remove life's humiliations and offer himself a sort of freedom he couldn't get without 'the act of annihilation.' The second is offered by a feminist journalist, accusing Peter Neal of misogyny for writing a novel about killing women. The third is offered by a Catholic journalist, arguing that the killer of the novel is ridding the world of those perpetrating aberrant behaviour. In a clever shift employing the critique that his films could make people violent, Argento allows every one of those theories about the novel to be true, not of the novel, but of the 'real life' killing within the film Tenebre.

With the third theory Argento is able to play with the claims that his films could cause violence. The journalist who proposes the theory himself begins killing, not according to the pattern in the novel, but according to his own theory about the killing in the novel. He kills shoplifters, lesbians, trespassers--anyone whom he considers aberrant. Peter Neal is only involved in the case because the killer obsesses over both the novel Tenebre and Neal himself. Ironically, the killer also targets Neal as the Corruptor, a man whose novels don't just depict the killing of the aberrant but also encourage aberrance.

Thus Tenebre contains what must be Argento's fiercest retaliation against his critics: here is the Critic-as-Killer. The critic is not satisfied merely to condemn perversion in the novel, but must also destroy the author in the most literal way. The critic's belief that others are corrupted by the novel, however, is merely a projection of his own perverse psychology. He himself is motivated to kill; in an attempt to escape guilt, he thrusts responsibility from himself to the author. He is not the pervert, he tells himself, but the novel is a perverting influence that has moved him to the destruction of the perverse. The Critic-as-Killer justifies his need to kill the artist by claiming the artist's own work forced him to do so. The Critic-as-Killer, of course, is merely a pervert, a madman who finds in books a key to his own repressed drives and a means of deflecting the guilt that must ensue.

Then the first and second theories take over with a sudden blow of the axe, as the artist, Neal, suddenly kills his would-be-killer. (With Argento's perverse sense of humour, he very likely had the English phrase "hatchet job" in mind.) The first killer's interpretation was incorrect, except about his own motive for killing. The first and second theories, however, have validity both within the novel and within the action of the film. They also allow Argento to humourously deal with the preposterous claims that Argento himself is psychotic. The second killer is Peter Neal himself. Up until the point where he kills the first killer, he has, in fact, been working out his murderous urges by writing violent crime novels. The reason he's been doing so is revealed in some stunning flashbacks. As a youth, he struck a girl he presumably liked but was disappointed to find leading three boys for a sexual romp on the beach. After striking her, the boys hold him down while she kicks him in the grown three times and places the heal of her shoe (red high-heels, an important symbol in the film) in his mouth.

Before going on, I should say something about the depiction of women in Tenebre. Men are represented as predatory and women are represented as sly, dangerous to male security. The first woman to be murdered is caught shoplifting. She escapes charges by promising the store manager sexual favours and leaving him her address. On the way home, she's grabbed by a vagrant in an effort to rape her. She kicks him in the groin and runs away. Note Tenebre's second instance of a groin kick, a humiliating act that targets a particularly male weakness. Another girl attracts the attention of Neal's young assistant, but is later seen with a biker. The biker deposits her outside a fence where a dog beings barking at her. After hitting the fence with a stick, the dog jumps the fence and chases her. In some sense, this is the opposite of the vagrant sequence. Her insult to the (male) dog's strength gets her pursued and mauled. Both the vagrant and the biker scenes match Neal's flashbacks. In one, he strikes her for her behaviour, which seems to sexually humiliate him or offend him. She then humiliates him deeply and sexually by kicking him in the groin and stepping in his mouth. He later stabs her and steals her red shoes. The pattern established here is murder as a solution to humiliation. However, the humiliation is particularly emasculation, sexual humiliation of the male.

So the first and second theories appear one and the same. Peter Neal is not just murdering in his books for catharsis, he's murdering women in his books for catharsis. He needs the catharsis because, we learn, he's in a humiliating relationship with a woman he's too much of a pushover to dump. He knows this woman is having an affair with his agent, yet he remains engaged to her. He also has a beautiful assistant (Daria Nicolodi) with whom he has had no sexual relations for six years. Four of those years were because of his fiancee's proximity and the remaining two, after a split, are unexplained. In a film where males are so predatory or sexist (the male detective, for instance, continually pushes his female partner out of the action and farther from the lens; and Argento's framing explicitly gives greater weight to males), the handsome, famous and wealthy Peter Neal is strangely sedate. When his assistant jokes about a young girl exiting his hotel room, he's quick to ensure her, honestly, that the girl was just fixing the plumbing. He is burdened by sexual humiliation and unable to exert sexual dominance until he performs the act of annihilation, as he calls it in his novel, that removes humiliations: murder.

Consequently, after Neal's first murder, he returns to the hotel to finally have sex with his assistant Anne for the first time. He is now free. This freedom is twofold. For one, the act of murder is itself freeing for him. In this sense, the liberation he wrote of in his novel turned out to be true: life imitates art. However, the ability to murder opens up a world of possibilities. Tom Ripley, in Patricia Highsmith's novels, makes the point that moral qualms present an unnatural limitation to possible solutions. If murder is the ideal solution to a problem, why restrain yourself looking for lesser solutions? Neal has discovered just that point. He realizes he can kill his fiancee and his agent, liberating himself from the possible financial complications as well as the humiliation.

On the one hand, Neal's murders are not entirely calculating and rational. He sends a pair of red shoes to his fiancee before he murders her. Sending her the red shoes symbolically makes her the object of humiliation in his life, an objecting weighing down his masculinity; she is the humiliating obstacle that once removed will free him. On the other hand, Neal seemed to genuinely regret killing (a woman he believed to be) Anne. He no doubt intended to stop killing once his fiancee and her lover were out of the way. His killing was therefore both practical and cathartic. This point suggests that the second theory is actually incorrect. Neal is not really a misogynist, but merely defending his masculinity. He is not killing women in his book, but one woman over and over again. He actually kills four men and two women. Berti, however, kills four women and no men. If the second theory applies to anyone, it's Berti.

There is also a sense in which Neal's killings are constrasted to those of Berti. The Artist-as-Killer, Neal, claims that killing is as easy as writing a book. Murder is for him a creative act. Killing liberates him as art liberates an artist. Interestingly, the Artist would not have become a Killer were it not for the pressure of the critic trying to find in his work what was not really there. The first theory was entirely mistaken; but that misinterpretation set off the whole killing spree. The Critic-as-Killer opens the door for the Artist-as-Killer and becomes his first victim.

Tenebre is, then, Argento-as-Killer--of his critics, that is. The film subverts enough giallo traditions that it demands not to be taken superficially. Everything is exposed. Those critics who focus on the superficial points, such as violence and pop psychology, are Critics-as-Killers and Tenebre, little do they realize, is their death knell. While not the atmospheric masterpiece that is Argento's earlier Profondo Rosso, Tenebre is still one of the finest giallo films ever made and Argento's only explicit statement to the superficial critics of genre cinema--his critics: You're the perverts and you're the killers of great art.

Halloween (2007) - 3.5/4

Filmmakers of any sophistication, when embarking upon a remake, must take firm hold of two major horns: Agon and Interest. Agon is competition, the struggle of one artist to assert his uniqueness from and superiority over other artists. Not only is the artist in competition with artists of his own generation, but also with the artists of previous generations. If he does no more than what they did, he is doomed to unoriginality. He must outstrip them. Any American horror filmmaker in the 2000s must be in an agonistic relationship with John Carpenter. Carpenter is one of the best horror film artists. Howard Hawks used to say one need make only a single great film to be a great director. Carptenter has made at two great horror films, Halloween and The Thing. Rob Zombie, one of the latest generation of horror filmmakers, has taken up agon in the most serious way possible: he's remade the greatest film of the Master, Halloween.

Taking the agonistic angle seriously is important for taking Zombie's Halloween seriously. Much discussion of the film has involved the alterations Zombie made to Carpenter's original vision. While I'm certain Zombie is respectful, even admiring, of Carpenter and his film, he's a serious artist and his relationship to the original Halloween will have to be one of rivalry. Rather than viewing the alterations Zombie made as blasphemous or an ignorant step down, it's worth seeing them in the context of a new artist asserting his own voice.

To illustrate my point, let's take an important scene from the film: Michael's first kill. Much of what is used and revealed late in Carpenter's film is given away in this early moment in Zombie's film. By 'later' and 'earlier' I don't mean merely in terms of narrative progression, but also the progression of Michael's existence. Carpenter saves most of what we see and know of Michael until he's an adult. Zombie deliberately transposes those behavioural traits to his child-Michael. Dr. Loomis (Malcolm McDowell) arrives in the principle's office to tell Michael's mom that he's a sociopath. While he's talking, Michael slips away to stalk and murder the bully who got him in trouble. While Michael slips away, the famous Halloween theme (composed by Carpenter) begins to play. The use of this music at that moment is very important. So is, moreover, the stalking of the bully, which deliberately quotes the stalking of Jamie Lee Curtis in the original film. There are a few points being made. One is that Michael's behavioural traits began young and, to some extent, chastising Carpenter for neglecting Michael's childhood. More strongly, however, we're being told that Carpenter's Michael is child's play compared to Zombie's Michael. Carpenter's Michael is totally expressed and used up in that childhood moment. Carpenter is out of the way and left behind: now let's see Halloween for grown-ups.

That message is compounded when, a little later, the boyfriend of Michael's sister wears the classic mask from Carpenter's Halloween and the teenage girl is not the slightest bit terrified. The old Michael Myers is no longer a sufficient force for terror. He has become juvenile. I doubt all of this is intended to be a disrespectful statement by Zombie; agon is, as I say, necessary in the artistic order. Zombie is asserting his vision against the Master. His is a unique authorial voice and it must be in competition with its most powerful influences.

These influences are not limited to John Carpenter's films. The sheer number of cameos from the horror and exploitation genres are indicative of an agonistic struggle with the whole of horror history. Multiple things can be true at once. If one asks, "Why is the water boiling?" the answers "Because I want tea," "Because I put it on the stove," and "Because the water has reached a temperature of over 100 degrees centigrade," can all be simultaneously correct. Similarly, claims that Zombie is adding cameos because he's a horror fan and because he wants to please horror fans are very likely true. But as a filmmaker and horror fan, he is in a position of knowing the history of horror cinema and wanting (no doubt) to be a unique presence within the genre. After all, how can one sincerely like a genre and not want to contribute something meaningful to it? His casting of cameos is in some sense his way of appropriating the horror tradition for his own voice.

So much for Agon. Interest is perhaps more important. As when a play is directed by two different directors, the look and weighting of sympathies may be entirely different, a remake naturally centers upon what interests the filmmaker. The original Halloween completely glosses over Michael's childhood and the relationship between Michael and Loomis. Zombie takes a very keen interest in both of these points and in doing so he brings out a lot of valid questions that are lurking in the back of Carpenter's Halloween. Despite opposition to questioning a masterpiece, some of the questions Zombie raises do suggest some flaws in the original Halloween. Or rather, one major flaw: depicting Michael as a supernatural evil, or 'soulless'.

For Zombie, Michael's depiction as pure evil is entirely attributable to Dr. Loomis. This is a point I had never considered in all the times I watched Halloween: that Dr. Loomis should be doubted. Why should we trust Dr. Loomis? He's a clinical psychiatrist who declares Michael the embodiment of evil and ultimately shoots him. Zombie's Halloween turns a very critical eye on Loomis. Loomis comes across as one of those 'celebrity shrinks' who take high-profile cases in order to get juicy book deals. The first frame of the film is a quote from Dr. Loomis explaining that Michael is a soul that's escaped from the pits of hell. I don't recall seeing that one in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. What follows this quote of Loomis's is a childhood that puts the sympathy on Michael. Yes, Michael is doubtless a sociopath. He's also a sweet boy who isn't getting the nurturing he needs to deal with his problem constructively. His life is full of humiliations that push him further and further within himself. The one person able to reach him and help him is his mom.

Unfortunately, Dr. Loomis prevents Michael from spending any significant time with his mom. Michael repeatedly tells Dr. Loomis that what he needs is to go home. Dr. Loomis not only ignores him, but begins to attribute Michael's worsening condition to something sinister within him. Dr. Loomis's major problem is that he takes his failure as a psychiatrist personally. This is typically masculine. The more some system doesn't work, the more aggressively a man will apply it to make the thing obey. Of course, the mind doesn't work that way. Rather than question his training, Dr. Loomis questions Michael. If Loomis is failing, Michael must be something Other, something evil that the system isn't equipped to handle. When Michael decays, Dr. Loomis doesn't take this as proof he has been mistaken in his treatment, but as proof of what he's been saying all along, that Michael is a monster. When Michael becomes pretty much untreatable, Loomis abandons him and writes--wouldn't you know it?--a bestselling book declaring Michael pure evil hiding behind angelic features. He uses a photo of Michael, a sullen-eyed boy (Daeg Faerch), to prove that Michael has no soul behind his eyes. Really, all one sees in the picture is a tired and lonely boy. The evil is purely in Loomis's mind. That is what Rob Zombie brings out and it is a brilliant point.

Michael is not, however, a totally sympathetic character. Zombie's decision was simply to show that he is a sociopath demonized by a crackpot psychiatrist, not a demon psychologized by a decent psychiatrist. Michael's behaviour certainly doesn't earn us much sympathy. Quite the opposite, Zombie is careful to let us see he is a merciless killer. We just understand that he's a product of human stupidity, not of satanic intervention.

Nearly an hour into the picture, Michael finally escapes from the mental institution and the events of the original Halloween take place until the showdown with Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton). If the moments of Agon I described are promising a more gruesome, more frightening, more horrific picture, they are only partially correct. Certainly Zombie's Halloween is more horrific. Michael is described as a sociopath who enjoys watching things suffer. The camera of this film is like Michael: it lingers upon the sufferings of the characters. Carpenter's kills were quick. Zombie's kills, much more realistically, are protracted and agonizing (no pun intended). There is a lot of blood and the violence is unpleasant. The film is also quite scary where it ought to be scary. The problem is that the film is also, in these moments, tedious. I have no idea what it's like to be in such a frightening state of affairs and I hope to never have an idea, but I do know when I watch such scenes I prefer heroines who know how and when to stop whimpering, saying "please," and making typical horror movie mistakes. I won't go into them: if you've seen stupid horror movie behaviour, you'll have an idea of what to expect in these protracted chase/kill scenes. Where Zombie may have gone wrong is in trying to make these scenes too protracted, to the point that he must continue to provide excuse to keep the action going.

Coming from a musical background has also given Zombie a few additional talents. The film's sound is exceptional, occasionally realistic, occasionally ironic, and occasionally expressionistic. The use of diagetic music, such as KISS's "God of Thunder," Nazareth's "Love Hurts, and Blue Oyster Cult's "Don't Fear the Reaper" provide ironic yet insightful commentaries on the action or emotional states. For instance, Michael sitting alone on his front step is intercut with shots of his mother at her stripping job while "Love Hurts" plays. Sometimes the sound effects will stop altogether, distancing the audience from the reality of the action and creating a certain discomfort. Michael's mind has taken over the audio at these moments. In his moments of cruelty, he no longer hears the outside world. Perhaps this is what's happened to him permanently after years of Dr. Loomis. He can no longer even hear the pleas of his victims.

If Zombie wanted to distinguish his voice from Carpenter's and take on the Master, he can certainly be admired for putting up a good fight. His Halloween may not be quite as good or timely as the original, but it is on its own merits a damn good horror picture that provides some thoughtful critique of the original. (Godard discovered the role of critic and filmmaker could be merged by making films critical of other films. Zombie's Halloween is in that tradition. Halloween is about horror movies as much as it's about horrific events.) By this point, it's fairly safe to say Zombie has appropriated the horror tradition for his own authorial voice. But agon never ceases and complacency is never rewarded.

Survival of the Dead (2009) - 3.5/4

Throughout Romero's oeuvre, there have been two persistant themes. One is generational conflict and the other is the need for cooperation. In the Dead movies, it is cooperation that has been especially emphasized. I argued elsewhere(1) that one of Romero's major contributions to cinema is his expert and highly-realistic depictions of arguments. There are arguments in so many of his films because so few characters in his films are able to cooperate. In Night of the Living Dead, Ben and Cooper, the two alpha males, won't cooperate. In The Crazies, the townsfolk, the military, and the scientists all have difficulties cooperating with each other. It's perhaps most pronounced in Day of the Dead, where the soldiers and the scientists rarely cease yelling at one another. In Romero's films, only those capable of cooperation stand a chance at survival. Hence the few survivors of Day of the Dead. The zombies are a frightening and offensive contrast to bickering humans. However stupid, the zombies all share a single goal: eating living humans. They never interfere with one another. Humans, presumably, have a shared goal of survival; but, as is Romero's point, it never goes down that way.

Survival of the Dead is in the tradition of Romero's previous invectives against non-cooperation. The story concerns a small island where two Irish families, the Muldoons and the O'Flynns, have lived side-by-side, with a history of contention, for a good many generations. Six days after the zombie infection begins, O'Flynn has taken to shooting all zombies in the head and Muldoon has taken to preserving them in the hopes of finding a cure. Outnumbered and banished from the island, O'Flynn advertises the island as a safe-haven via the internet. The ad catches the attention of a small group of soldiers, with whom O'Flynn returns to the island to destroy both zombies and Muldoons.

There are a lot of ideas going around in Survival. One gets the feeling that Romero brainstormed and threw everything that interested him, concerned him, had him thinking into the soup without much concern for how readily they can be resolved. To beat the metaphor, it's a delicious if decadent soup. The visual and dialogue ideas are fun. The thematic ideas are interesting if at times a little confused. Some are followed through; some aren't; and many conflict.

For one, there's the issue of sentimentality. All throughout Romero's Dead films, the question has been lurking: Could you kill your friends or family as zombies? Survival addresses the question more directly than Romero's previous pictures. The first scene of the film is of Sargeant Crocket (Alan van Sprang) trying to make a superior officer 'mercy kill' a zombified soldier. The officer's inability to do so sends him directly into the clutches of a zombie, while Crocket coolly dispatches all the zombies. Yet, a little later Crocket and his team encounter a group of men who have placed several living zombie heads on sticks. Not only is Crocket apalled at the cruel treatment of the zombies, but Romero makes all the zombie heads African-American and the perpetrators white rednecks. Although it's possible Romero only wanted to make these men sufficiently unsympathetic for us to not mind if Crocket kills them all, it also seems that Romero is stipulating a racist element to the mistreatment of the living dead. So sentimentality toward the living dead seems to be a bad thing, yet mistreating them is also depicted as morally depraved.

This confusion extends to the conflict between O'Flynn and Muldoon. The first we see of O'Flynn (Kenneth Welsh), he is demanding the zombified children of a Muldoon family be killed. When the mother refuses, she, a living woman, is killed by his men. O'Flynn thus appears highly misguided, if not an outright villain. But it's O'Flynn who represents anti-sentimentality. Muldoon, on the other hand, starts out very sentimental. He doesn't want a single zombie to be killed because they may just be curable. His position appears, initially, reasonable and noble, if somewhat too soft-hearted (the zombies are, after all, trying to eat everyone living). However, the more we get to know O'Flynn, the more likable he becomes. His strength, surety and wit make him an extremely sympathetic character, despite his heartless approach. Muldoon, on the other hand, comes across as inconsistant, aggressive, and frankly perverse. His home is filled with portraits of family members taken after death along with, most prominantly, a gun-toting self-portrait. He loves dead things just a little too much. Once the film is over, it's still not clear how Romero feels about sentimentality. He seems to admire the practicality in Muldoon's position, but not the sentimental motivation or the necrophiliac personality. Muldoon is willing to kill living outsiders, but not the dead; his perversion tends toward a necropolis. O'Flynn, however, seems a bit too cold, even eager, about killing the zombies. The point, again, is cooperation. Both Muldoon and O'Flynn take extreme positions. There's no reason why some zombies can't be killed and some kept in hopes of a cure. The inability of the two island patriarchs to compromise and work together is what brings ruin to the island.

Patriarchy is another part of the problem. It's the problem of generational conflicts Romero has been emphasizing since Jack's Wife (1972) and Martin (1977), if not Night of the Living Dead (1968). O'Flynn and Muldoon each occupy another age, another way of doing things, that involves tribalism and conflict. The younger characters, such as the soldiers and O'Flynn's daughter, albeit rather mercenary in character, are able to cooperate and reach agreements. Even Crocker, the team leader, functions more like the leader of a democracy than a chieftain. Zombies, Romero has explicitly stated, are a previous generation rising to destroy the current one. Survival as a whole depicts the disorders of older generations destroying the budding one. Muldoon's major perversion is his obsession with past generations. O'Flynn, at least, is a progressive, but still a tribal leader. He is viewed almost as Ulysses, the aged patriarch who returns home to take the throne and finds his once-beautiful land in a fallen state, an apocalyptic world in decay. The ulyssean solution to retake the throne and re-establish his patriarchal authority is, for Romero, no solution at all. The ability to get away from patriarchy and its tribalism, to cooperate, is the only salvation for the newer generations, and indeed for the few survivors of Survival.

One interesting feature of Survival is the dialogue. Or rather the whole approach to the narrative, in which the dialogue falls, that could best be characterized as 'coolness.' That's polite for 'cliche.' Ready-to-hand coolness is usually cliche, because coolness is created on screen before it is instantiated in life (2); it involves a considerable degree of contrivance. The dialogue and mannerisms in Survival seem so calculated for coolness, particularly amongst O'Flynn and the soldiers, that it reaches a new level--that other area of linguistic contrivance--poetry. Perhaps my favourite exchange occurs when we see a hauntingly beautiful zombie (Kathleen Munroe) ride by on a horse, the Boy (Devon Bostick) exclaims, "She's beautiful!", Crocket responds, "She's dead," and O'Flynn concludes, "She's my daughter." Elegant tricolons don't occur so readily in real life, but it sure makes a beautiful rhetorical stroke on the aural canvas. Similarly, the first we see of the character Tomboy (Athena Karkanis) is mid-masturbation in public. However liberated and coarse she's supposed to be, no woman is going to do that. It's utterly contrived, but in the overall tone and cool vibe of the film it's another stroke of poetry. Such contrivances can be annoying, as it is evidently manipulative; but at this extremity and with this mastery, it's pure poetry. The highly cinematic dialogue and mannerisms of these characters is something to be savoured.

Perhaps it's due to this cool and cinematic approach that Survival has another peculiar feature: Whatever is out of frame in Survival is usually invisible to anyone in-frame. However sharp Crocket's senses, he is totally unaware of a zombie right beside him until O'Flynn kills it. This move happens again and again. Anything could be occuring right out of frame and we don't know until a character reacts or it is brought into frame somehow. Survival is as far from the stark realism of Night of the Living Dead as the Dead series has gotten. Romero has dashed headlong into a brazen popular expressionism. It will work for some viewers and it won't work for others; for this viewer, it proved a very charming development.

Survival also boasts some of the finest performances Romero's ever gotten in one of the Dead films. While Romero has gotten good performances in non-zombie films like Martin (John Amplas) and The Dark Half (Timothy Hutton), his Dead films tend to have weak performances, with Day of the Dead containing the worst. Kenneth Welsh gives an excellent and energizing performance as the impish tough-guy O'Flynn. Welsh's quick way with words, charm, sly looks, and deceptively hobbled walk communicate a good deal about the character. The other truly outstanding performance comes from Athena Karkanis. While the other actors in the film tend to embody their characters a little too hammily, everything Karkanis says and does seems utterly natural, despite its poetic contrivance. She moves through the picture like a sexy, female David Hemmings.

So that's Survival of the Dead, a hodgepodge of Romero's late-in-life experiments with ideas and styles both old and new. For any who think Romero has long been over the hill, perhaps the final image and words of the film will draw a cynical nod. For myself, it drew an appreciative smile: Romero's creativity is alive and well, and Survival of the Dead may just be the most lyrical zombie film ever made.
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(1) - I argued in my out-of-date essay, "What's So Great About George Romero?", that the essence of Romero's films is in the arguments amongst the characters. At the time the essay was written, I hadn't seen all of Romero's films. There is much wrong with the essay, but the claim that conflict is essential to Romero's oeuvre remains, I think, a valid one.

(2) - "The Film, the World, and the Fantasy"