Last night I finished with Tom Savini's 1990 remake of George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, and there was a point where I was considering making this a double feature of NOTLD remakes. It was hard to resist Jeff Broadstreet's 2006 version, only 80 minutes long and starring Sid Haig. But it's been a busy week at work and of finalizing my son's Halloween costume -- he's going as the Reverse Flash -- so even an additional 80 minutes was too much.
I suppose there's some scenario where I watch a horror remake tonight, but I seriously doubt it. I'll most likely be watching something with my wife, and I need to get busy figuring out what that is.
And I have to say, it was a good way to go out. I pretty much loved this movie.
First though, Savini, who has been in my viewing life multiple times this month.
This would certainly be a name familiar to people who read Fangoria and watched a lot of horror movies when they were growing up. I didn't watch a lot of horror movies back then, but I've since made up for it. The name was familiar to me. Beyond that I was a bit in the dark.
And then I rewatched From Dusk Till Dawn, where Savini plays the hilariously named Sex Machine. They talked about him on the podcast that prompted the rewatch, The Next Picture Show, and I have since looked him up and realized he was an effects artist who worked for Romero on five of his movies, including two in the Dead series. Since he's also an actor and stuntman, it seems pretty clear how he would become an iconic personality to a certain subset of filmgoers and filmmakers tuned in to a certain frequency.
Me? I'm just getting all my exposure to him in one month.
And of course he would have had Romero's blessing to make a remake of Night of the Living Dead, whether this was something he needed or not. (I'm not currently checking Romero's right to decide who remakes that movie, but presumably he does have some right.) In fact, even more than having Romero's blessing, Romero wrote him the screenplay for this remake, a role he split with John A. Russo. Romero is also credited for the screenplay of Broadstreet's film, so whether he was happy just to keep churning out remake scripts, or was credited more as the author of the original work that was being adapted, is not totally clear to me.
But that does bring me to another point: This is a proper remake! Like, the plot is almost identical to the original! Its primary deviation is how the movie ends. This is a refreshing way to end my month of remakes, many of which were more like reboots or reheats of the original, with differing plots. Nice to finish with a pure example of the theme I set out to explore this month.
I wasn't sure what I was going to think of this film in its opening minutes. There's a lot of ADR in that opening scene. As we follow the car driven by Barbara (Patricia Tallman) and her brother Johnny (Bill Moseley) up to the cemetery where they will be visiting the grave of their mother, we hear an entire conversation between the two before we even see them on screen, with the car filmed from on high. This looks fairly cheap, or like they forgot to shoot this dialogue at the time they had the actors available on set, so they had to record it after the fact and dub it over. It was not a promising beginning, and put me in the mind of poorly made B movies like Manos: The Hands of Fate.
Never is there another moment that feels cheap in this way. Oh this is not a film with a huge budget, that's not what I'm trying to say. However, it is a well-made film that uses its budgetary constraints to forge creative solutions, which it does throughout.
You'd think you'd judge the success of a zombie film on its zombie effects (good, but maybe not standouts like I was expecting from a person with Savini's reputation) or on the kills involving the zombies (also fine but not memorable). What made the movie really click in for me was the choices made by Patricia Tallman as Barbara.
It's not clear to me that Tallman is what you would call a great actress. Of her 52 credits on IMDB, the most recent of which was in 2023, many are actually uncredited appearances in bigger films, like two Austin Powers movies and two Roland Emmerich movies. She's very pretty -- in fact, she reminded me of someone I went to high school with -- but she obviously did not make a lasting name for herself in the industry, despite some more high-profile work. (She appeared in 47 episodes of Babylon 5, for example.)
But it's not often that I've so believed a person's reaction to a sudden zombie apocalypse.
In most movies where characters suddenly have to fight off zombies, they adapt to the scenario pretty quickly. There's some initial shock and disbelief, but 15 minutes later they're like "Okay, there are zombie. What's our plan?"
Not Tallman as Barbara. She gets fucking rattled by this. When Tony Todd's Ben -- great choice, by the way, for the role originally played by Duane Jones -- has to introduce himself to her and start to get her focused on a solution to their problem, she is initially speechless. She can't even produce words for about the first five minutes of screen time after their first respite from attacking zombies. This is not to say she's weak or incapable in this situation -- she proves herself exceptionally capable, almost too capable, as the movie goes on. It's that her brain simply can't comprehend this change in circumstances, which, as far as she can tell, may apply to the entire planet, but at the very least the patch immediately surrounding her. She shakes and stares and just looks shell-shocked as hell. It's a great performance. Even after she's started using various weapons to dispatch various zombies, eventually with great skill, she still occasionally succumbs to the disbelief of this situation. After putting one particular woman out of her misery, she lets out the words "Oh God!" in this sort of rapid, involuntary shriek.
Details like this matter, and Savini gets it. It's been too long since I've seen the original to remember how well Judith O'Dea comports herself in this role, but if it were as good as Tallman does it, I think I'd remember it. Wikipedia does say that Barbara spends much of that movie in a catatonic state, which is not what this version of the character does, and it's probably right to give her a little more agency than she had in a film made 22 years earlier. So O'Dea may have done well with that, but maybe I don't remember it because there was a part of me that also loathed her for never becoming any more useful after the initial shock wore off.
I enjoyed the dynamics between the other characters who eventually arrive in the house, which seem to mirror those from the original, now that I'm fully reminding myself of those details through the Wikipedia plot synopsis. Many of those details are the same, though there's a pretty big difference in how this movie ends, which I won't spoil if anyone reading this wants to treat themselves -- and it is a treat -- to this Night of the Living Dead on Halloween. There's a very good copy available for free on YouTube.
Anyway I will say, without going into specifics, that there's something about the ending of this movie that reminds me of the ending of 28 Years Later, though I'll be vague about what that is. I wouldn't be surprised if Boyle was paying homage to Savini, in his way.
Does Savini get to be the auteur here, and not Romero? If a different choice is made in this movie than in the original, my inclination is to attribute that change to the person who was not involved with the original. Though if Romero wrote the script for both, perhaps he intentionally made the ending different, just to explore another way this could have gone.
I do think it's a bit sad that I've written this whole post about a movie I really liked and not really said much about the gore and makeup effects. They are pretty tame by today's standards, though I never thought they were less than effective. And though I'm not usually "scared" by a zombie movie, I did find some of these walking dead to be eerie and unsettling in ways that approached fear, and the way Savini prepped them for our viewing pleasure certainly had something to do with that.
Happy Halloween to you and yours.
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