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An antiseptic room is a short-lived dream in the visceral world, a shock multiplied out of Polanski's Repulsion brings it to an end. Amid the leftovers of a city is a newspaper headline summarizing the situation ("The Dead Walk!"), an alligator guarding the deserted bank and a flurry of discarded bills give a sense of the surrealism at play. Hopelessly outnumbered, survivors huddle in an underground bunker divided between science and the military, brain and sinew. A mammoth tombstone for civilization, "with an epitaph on it that nobody gonna bother to read." Unhinged commander (Joseph Pilato) on one side and jovial "Frankenstein" (Richard Liberty) on the other, stuck in the middle is the tough doctor (Lori Cardille) braving frayed nerves and spilled innards. No cure for zombiedom, only attempts at domestication, the grunt turned ghoul (Sherman Howard) is leashed in the lab and given earfuls of Beethoven in hopes of jogging his human memory. "They're fucking dead, and you wanna teach 'em tricks?" George A. Romero's supreme distillation of existential splatter, thrifty and vast, furious and melancholy. Harmony for single-minded flesh-eaters, discord for the living torn asunder by barbarity and bigotry. The body has no stomach left but keeps on snapping, the persistence of "primordial instinct" and the need for new beginnings, a humanistic proposition. (Not for nothing does Terry Alexander's helicopter pilot paraphrase Renoir's dictum: "People got different ideas concernin' what they want out of life.") MacDougall's The World, the Flesh and the Devil is a salient model, Ulmer's The Cavern is subtly indicated. The chain breaks, the fence comes down, the salute goes out to a pile of guts. "Choke on 'em!" The Promised Land at the close is a mirage in the Romero wasteland. With Jarlath Conroy, Anthony Dileo Jr., Gary Howard Klar, Ralph Marrero, John Amplas, Phillip G. Kellams, Taso N. Stavrakis, and Greg Nicotero.
--- Fernando F. Croce |