Night of the Living Dead (1990) Columbia/Horror RT: 88 minutes Rated R (horror violence and gore, brief nudity, some language) Director: Tom Savini Screenplay: George A. Romero Music: Paul McCollough Cinematography: Frank Prinzi Release date: October 19, 1990 (US) Cast: Tony Todd, Patricia Tallman, Tom Towles, McKee Anderson, William Butler, Katie Finneran, Bill Mosley, Heather Mazur. Box Office: $5.8M (US)
Rating: *
As a general rule, remakes are unnecessary. If the original movie is effective enough, it doesn’t need to be remade. Of course, the prevailing attitude in money-minded Hollywood is entirely different. With name recognition in their favor, remakes theoretically could mean big bucks at the box office. It’s the only reason I can think of why they let Gus Van Sant do a shot-for-shot remake of Psycho. I know there are a different set of reasons why George A. Romero decided to remake Night of the Living Dead; it doesn’t make it any less unnecessary.
Romero wrote the screenplay for this reimagining of his 1968 scarefest about a group of people fending off a zombie attack in a farmhouse. He turned the directorial reins over to Tom Savini, the makeup artist who created the gore effects for Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead. It follows the same basic story with Barbara (Tallman, Knightriders) making a run for it after being attacked in a cemetery by one of the undead ghouls. She ends up at a farmhouse where she hooks up with Ben (Todd, Candyman) who helps her clear the place of zombies.
Not long after, they discover more people hiding in the basement- Harry Cooper (Towles, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer), his wife Helen (Anderson) and their injured preteen daughter Sarah (Mazur, Good Trouble) as well as young couple Tom (Butler, Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III) and Judy (Finneran, Firehouse Dog). A lot of the middle section is taken up by Ben and Harry bitterly arguing over the smartest course of action. Harry thinks they’ll be safer in the basement while Ben says they’d be better off staying upstairs in case they need to escape. How is this more interesting than walking corpses in various stages of decomp? It’s NOT!
The original low-budget black-and-white version of Night of the Living Dead is a horror classic. The color remake is a travesty. I hated it when it first came out thirty years ago. I felt like the makers crapped all over it by changing it too much. Take Barbara, for instance. Instead of going catatonic, she turns into a low-rent Ripley blasting away at zombies. I understand why they changed her character. The world changed a lot in the two decades since the original. Audiences wanted strong women not weaklings who crumbled at the first sign of trouble. I personally don’t think it improves on the original. All it really does is replace the racial politics addressed in the earlier movie. HOWEVER, it’s nowhere near as bad as the other story changes. In brief, they suck. And here’s where we run into the catch-22 regarding movie remakes. People complain whether they stay too close to the original or they deviate too much. It’s a no-win situation.
Remake or not, there’s plenty else I hate about this Night of the Living Dead. For openers, where’s the gore? I actually know the answer to that one. The MPAA threatened Savini with an NC-17 rating if he didn’t cut the gorier scenes. He did what they asked (at the studio’s insistence I’m sure) and what we get is a zombie flick that’s way too tame. There’s only one scene of cannibalism and it’s too dark to make out much of it. BTW, I saw the cut scenes on YouTube and they’re not all that bad although the movie would still suck with them in it. On the upside, the special effects team did a decent job with the zombie makeup.
Next, I didn’t care for most of the characters this time around. Harry is a first-class selfish a**hole whose treatment of his wife suggests he’s stuck in the age of the Neanderthal. Tom is an idiot, plain and simple. Judy is just annoying, VERY annoying. She shrieks and yells a lot. In fact, there’s a lot of yelling and shouting, too much if you ask me. I don’t remember the original characters being this unlikable. The acting is all over the place. Todd makes a good leading man and Towles makes an exceptional creep. Tallman and the others are varying degrees of terrible.
The reason Romero agreed to a remake of Night of the Living Dead has to do with him not seeing much in the way of profits from the original due to copyright issues resulting in it being in the public domain. It’s too bad it had to come to that. It’s nothing more than an inferior imitation of the original that ultimately shoots itself in the foot trying to be modern.
