Night of the Living Dead (1968) + Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Day of the Dead (1985)
Time Out have this week published their top 100 horror films. Here is the full list. Night of the Living Dead (No13) and Dawn of the Dead (at No10) figure very high and this evening you can see Romero's truly remarkable trilogy of zombie movies at the Prince Charles Cinema all on one night.
Chicago Reader review of Night of the Living Dead: 'George Romero's gory, style-setting 1968 horror film, made for pennies in Pittsburgh. Its premise—the unburied dead arise and eat the living—is a powerful combination of the fantastic and the dumbly literal. Over its short, furious course, the picture violates so many strong taboos—cannibalism, incest, necrophilia—that it leaves audiences giddy and hysterical. Romero's sequel, Dawn of the Dead, displays a much-matured technique and greater thematic complexity, but Night retains its raw power.'
Dave Kehr
Here is the trailer.
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Chicago Reader review of Dawn of the Dead: 'George Romero's 1979 sequel to Night of the Living Dead is a more accomplished and more knowing film, tapping into two dark and dirty fantasies—wholesale slaughter and wholesale shopping—to create a grisly extravaganza with an acute moral intelligence. The graphic special effects (which sometimes suggest a shotgun Jackson Pollock) are less upsetting than Romero's way of drawing the audience into the violence. As four survivors of the zombie war barricade themselves inside a suburban shopping mall, our loyalties and human sympathies are made to shift with frightening ease. Romero's sensibility approaches the Swiftian in its wit, accuracy, excess, and profound misanthropy.' Dave Kehr
Here is the trailer.
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Chicago Reader review of Day of the Dead: 'Part three of George Romero's “Living Dead” cycle (1985) takes an unexpected turn away from satire and spectacle and into an intimate, discursive tone. The action is largely confined to a huge cavern (shades of Edgar G. Ulmer) where a team of scientists is investigating what makes the zombies tick. But months underground have eaten away at them and their military aides: the chief scientist has embarked on a series of increasingly grotesque and pointless experiments on his zombie specimens, and the chain of military command has passed to a brutal psychopath. As always in Romero's films, the minority characters—a woman, a black, an alcoholic intellectual—provide the only positive contrast to the American nightmare of power lust and compulsive consumption, yet this time the focus is less political than philosophical. Beginning from a position of absolute misanthropy, Romero asks what it means to be human, and the answers are funny, horrifying, and ultimately hopeful.'
Dave Kehr
Here is the trailer.
Dave Kehr
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