Continuing a series that celebrates the fifty-fifth anniversary of Night of the Living Dead with a look at the classic zombie film and its many follow-ups.
2005 gave us a high in the form of Land of the Dead, but it also gave us lows in the forms of Day of the Dead 2: Contagium and the Return of the Living Dead revival. The following year gave us still another low in Night of the Living Dead 3D. This was not a case of the original film being retooled for 3D, as happened to The Nightmare Before Christmas the same year; the film is instead a complete remake.
Night of the Living Dead had already been remade back in 1990; and while that film was hardly necessary, it was at least easy to sympathise with John Russo and company’s desire to earn a bit of the money they had missed out on because of the first film’s copyright lapse. This time around, however, none of George Romero’s collaborators were involved. Night of the Living Dead 3D was a case of director Jeff Broadstreet and screenwriter Robert Valding taking advantage of the original film being in the public domain, thereby allowing anyone to remake it. And, indeed, the general impression given by Night of the Living Dead 3D is that anyone could have made it.
The film opens with the familiar business of Barbara and Johnny heading to the graveyard, although we soon run into a few twists: caddish Johnny now drives off alone and leaves Barbara to fend off her own zombified mother. This is, if nothing else, at least a little more coherent than the jumbled opening to the 1990 remake; but any hope of this being a worthwhile return trip soon vanishes when Barbara is rescued by Ben and the two arrive at the farmhouse.
Instead of finding the owner killed by zombies, and a group of survivors bunkering down in the basement, the pair run into an alive-and-well family who refuse to believe that the dead are rising from their graves and try to talk sense into the two protagonists. All immediate threat evaporates as we are treated to the stunning spectacle of people hanging around a living room bickering about whether or not zombies exist – in glorious 3D.
The film never succeeds in rebuilding its lost tension. When zombies break into the house, the survivors simply block off another door and return to their conversations, with no sense of the stakes having been raised. Tragic fates, such as characters shooting themselves out of desperation, lack any sort of emotional weight and merely pop like soap-bubbles into nothingness. The overall mood is summed up by a late scene in which Barbara, outside the house, sees two approaching zombies; her response is to throw a twig at them and say, “Go away, I’ve had enough of you.”
There are those who would argue that any film calling itself Night of the Living Dead 3D has no aspirations beyond serving as a theme-park thrill ride, and to chide it for a lack of emotional depth is to miss the point. Perhaps so, but the lack of tension makes this film simply too boring to work as a thrill ride. Even the 3D becomes easy to forget amidst the samey interior sequences, and the feature only comes to the fore in such clumsy moments as Ben’s laughable sub-Zack Snyder CGI slow-mo gunshot. The inescapable impression is that the film was shot in 3D merely to distinguish itself from the two earlier, superior versions of Night of the Living Dead.
Most painful are the vestigial remnants from a stage of development when Night of the Living Dead 3D still had the potential to evolve into something worthwhile. Take the characterisation of Mr. Cooper, for one. The obvious update would be to turn him into a Bush-era Republican; yet the film takes the opposite tack by making him the patriarch to a free-loving, pot-smoking post-hippie household. At the same time, he retains some of his precursor’s bull-headedness, refusing to allow anyone to take mobile phones onto his property (they cause cancer) and harbouring a deep mistrust of the police (as rather a lot of cannabis is lying around the house). All of this makes for both a novel twist on his character while also explaining why nobody whips out their phone and calls the cops: in short, just the sort of thoughtful revision that would benefit a remake.
Dotting the film are various other glimpses at what could have been. Before she reaches the farmhouse, Barbara runs into a mortician who gives her a politely formal, “employees-only” order to leave even as he bonks zombies on the head. This signals that the remake is going to be a tongue-in-cheek campfest — but afterwards, any humour turns out to be spread thin The Cooper household is introduced watching the original Night of the Living Dead on television, which stoner hired-hand Owen later identifies as a premonition. So, is the remake a Scream-style self-aware deconstruction? Well, no: at no point does the film build on this element.
And then we have the reinvention of the young couple, Tom and Judy, who spend almost their entire screentime naked. They are introduced having sex in a barn, get interrupted by zombies, and end up running around the property without getting dressed. All of this looks like nothing so much as leftover footage from some sort of Night of the Living Dead porn parody – yet even a porn parody would have had a stronger sense of purpose and a clearer personality than what we end up with here.
In its third act, the film gives up trying to find a new spin on old material and instead comes up with new material. The mortician who was introduced as comic relief near the start – and, being played by genre stalwart Sid Haig, features prominently in the film’s publicity – turns out to be the main villain. In a vaguely Return of the Living Dead-esque twist, it was his disposal of secret government experiments, along with his botched cremations, that caused the zombie outbreak. Moreover, he turns out to be keeping his dead father at home in a zombie state like a post-Romero Norman Bates, and so has a vested interest in keeping events under wraps.
Does going so drastically off-script improve the remake? Or would Night of the Living Dead 3D have been better off following the conclusion to the original? It matters little. By that stage, the film has no tension, no characterisation beyond the broadest strokes, and no reason for existing.
If nothing else, Night of the Living Dead 3D recreates the sense of futility and despair with which Romero and Russo ended their film. The trouble is, this sets in a lot earlier than it should have done.
Next: A date for your diary…
