Review of Night of the Living Dead (1990) by Jesse O — 26 Mar 2014

This is a pretty good remake. I've seen the original Night of the Living Dead, but it was so long ago that I don't even remember much of it, so that'll have to be rectified as the original film is on Netflix.

But from what I can remember, this is a pretty faithful remake with a few tweaks here and there, mostly Patricia Tallman's character almost a ripoff of Ripley from the Alien films. She undergoes a transformation throughout the film, from weak to badass, whereas Ripley was just badass right from the start.

The ending, while different from the original, still has that social commentary that Romero was known for. While the original had the civil rights struggle as the undercurrent for its ending, this film makes the use of the inhumanity that arises itself when the zombies are "defeated" at the end of the film.

The humans are just as bad, if not worse, than the zombies themselves because the humans take great pride in killing, torturing, and burning all the zombies. They're doing this completely while being completely cognizant of their actions.

The zombies do the things they do because they pretty much have no other choice, almost as if they were animals...they're just going on instinct. So I think the film captures that inhumanity quite well actually.

With this film being so faithful to the original film, even down to the very minimal gore, particularly at this point where Romero had amped up the amount of gore and films like the Return of the Living Dead were also gore-heavy, it's a credit to this film's crew to show such restraint.

Because of that, it's probably, while a good film in its own right, not gonna be as fondly remembered or as sought out because of that very reason. Not that I have anything against this restraint that was shown, because I found the stuff inside the house to actually be pretty compelling, because, while the characters themselves were one dimensional, the interactions between them were pretty interesting and seeing the struggle Ben and Mr.

Cooper inside the house to do what's best for everybody involved. Again, one dimensional, but I liked it. On top of that with the ending, that I thought was good and pretty smart, you have a pretty good, if not particularly memorable, remake on your hands.