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Romero's 'Dead' May Rise Again
Fri, Jun 24, 2005, 02:06 PM PT
By Daniel Fienberg
LOS ANGELES (Zap2it.com)- "Land of the Dead" arrives in theaters this week almost 20 years to the day after writer-director George Romero seemingly ended his zombie trilogy with the underfunded and underrated "Day of the Dead." It's a sequel that horror fans, industry insiders and even Romero himself assumed would never come.
"Whenever we talked about other projects, everybody always said, 'Do you want to make another zombie film?' and George didn't," says Romero's regular production partner Peter Grunwald. "Not because he wasn't interested in the genre or in the other films -- actually, the other way around. He loves his fans. He likes these films a lot. He just didn't want to do one until he felt he could do it well, until he had something that would make it fresh."
One of cinema's true independent spirits, Romero spent the years after "Day of the Dead" either dedicating his time to interesting, but inferior projects ("Monkey Shines" and "The Dark Half" have fans, but only a handful), or trying to fund a number of more original ideas (like 2000's nearly unreleased "Bruiser").
"I missed the '90s," Romero candidly admits.
At the 21st Century dawned, Romero finally had an idea for a new zombie epic. He wrote it up and sent it around Hollywood, but his timing was off. Just as the script hit studio desks, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 temporarily changed the way the entertainment business was run, sending Romero's script back to the shelf for nearly two years. After Romero made several minor changes (and after the zombie movie was revitalized by tenuous entries like Danny Boyle's "28 Days Later"), he tried again.
"There a lot of studios that were asking the question, 'Does George still have it?'" recalls producer Bernie Goldmann. "And frankly the only studio that didn't ask that question, that jumped right on board, was Universal, which couldn't have been more thrilled to work with George."
Equipped with a stable and healthy budget (still a bargain basement sum under $20 million), a cast of recognizable faces (including John Leguizamo, Simon Baker and Dennis Hopper) Romero revved up production on "Land of the Dead," which was then rushed into a prime summer release date. After 30 years of revisionist realizations by mainstream critics that the original "Dead" trilogy was a collective masterwork, Romero's "Land" has been earning some of the strongest reviews of his career. After the lengthy delay between zombie movies, Romero sounds prepared to jump back in.
"If this opens strong I might be in a situation where I might have to do another one of these or would be asked to do another one of these right away," he says, a maverick filmmaker somewhat ironically dependent on commercial returns for the very first time.
While early discussion of "Land of the Dead" has lumped it in with "Night of the Living Dead," "Dawn of the Dead" and "Day of the Dead," transforming the sacred trilogy into a sprawling quadrilogy, Romero and his creative team are actually approaching this as the start of something new.
"This film establishes a new set of characters, a slightly different world, and you could actually go from chapter to chapter, from 'Land' to a new one, to a new one, and -- taken as a whole -- those films, the new films, would be one big story," Grunwald says.
As might be expected, "Land of the Dead" ends with a selection of the main characters carrying on the good fight and myriad zombies still roaming the land in search of sweet, sweet brains. Baker, whose brooding mercenary Riley may or may not survive the film, is confident that things are left wide open for "Lake of the Dead" or "Nation of the Dead" or "Our Dead Neighbors to the North."
"Who knows what's going on inside George's head?" Baker ponders rhetorically. "He's probably go things already put together, ideas and stuff. He's Mr. Mysterioso. He doesn't really let too much on. He's a pretty special guy, so I think there's obviously room for it."
