Review of Night of the Living Dead (1968) by Riff J — 09 Dec 2018
When it comes to watching old films, it's important to have an awareness of how you would have viewed the film at the time it was made. I try to do that, but I'm not great at it. This is a slow film that I enjoyed in parts, and the fact that it was such a groundbreaking film when it was released is interesting to me, but it doesn't speed the film up.
It's incredible how much of the film still has echoes in zombie films of today, in the humans being just as bad as the zombies, getting info from radios, and zombies changing how dangerous they are depending on what the script requires.
If this film doesn't exist, The Walking Dead doesn't exist (indeed the makers of TWD use the first zombie seen in this film as the speed indicator for every zombie they have on that show). See how much I'm talking about the significance of the film and how little I'm talking about the film itself? It's one of those.
It's shot in a stylized way for large parts of it, with expressionistic lights and crazy shadows, and the main hero is very easy to get behind. It suffers from the main female character being as useless as it's possible to be (yes, I understand some people would just go catatonic in such a situation, but when that person is 50% of the characters on screen for 20 minutes, that makes me hate her).
It's not terrible, but it's not amazing.
This review of Night of the Living Dead (1968) was written by Riff J on 09 Dec 2018.
Night of the Living Dead has generally received very positive reviews.
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