George Romero and Me

It all began on a fall evening in 1975. I and a couple of high school buddies were visiting our favorite teacher, who had left the school a year after teaching us freshman English (in a notably free-wheeling style). He and his wife lived in a cabin way out in the woods of northern New Jersey; it was pretty remote. We all chatted for hours that Saturday night and then someone noticed that the late night horror movie on one of the local TV stations was Night of the Living Dead, which all of us had heard of but none of us had seen. We decided to give it a go.

I'll never see a movie again to that particular effect. We were in the middle of nowhere, in a house that could have been the double of the one where the characters hole up in the movie. The local station showed the film uncut or very close to it, sparing of us of the trowel-stabbing, intestine-chewing, hysteria-provoking madness. The realistic manner of the film was unlike anything we had ever seen before, and in that context was completely convincing. My buddies and I had to drive home afterward, through the woods at 1:30 in the morning, and the three of us were scared shitless all the way.

That was my introduction to George Romero. I would often say, in my phase as a young buck of a critic, that Night of the Living Dead was the "best American film of the Sixties," a thoroughly silly statement since I hadn't and never will see all the American films of the Sixties -- still, it indicates my excitement, and the film is remarkable. J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum in their excellent book Midnight Movies call it "as apt a projection of 1968 as anything American movies were ever to produce" -- a much more focused and defensible characterization.

It took me a while to catch up with any other Romero features. Hungry Wives AKA Jack's Wife AKA Season of the Witch (his third film, released in 1972) I have not seen to this day -- and I'm distressed that its original 130-minute version (the Hungry Wives cut) appears to have gone missing, one hopes not permanently. (The Jack's Wife cut, which is available on DVD, runs 104 minutes, the Season of the Witch cut only 89 minutes.)

During my college film society days, I saw a 16 millimeter print of Romero's 1977 vampire film Martin -- impressive, albeit very bloody. The less well-known 1973 film The Crazies hit me much harder; in some ways it is still my favorite Romero film, and apart from Night, certainly the one I've seen the most often. My first viewing of it was in a 42nd Street grindhouse around 1979 -- the perfect setting. Normally I would not venture into one of those theaters, but this was a Romero film, I'd take my chances.

The scenario of The Crazies -- a biological weapon that provokes extreme psychological reactions is accidentally released by a plane crash into a town's water supply -- is several orders more plausible than the zombie scenario of the Dead films (as well worked out as those are). This has an interesting "side effect": the Dead films are richly metaphoric -- the zombies have to stand for something, or maybe many things -- but The Crazies isn't particularly metaphoric at all; we are watching a chain of events that could happen. In that sense, it has more in common with a contemporaneous bio-thriller such as The Andromeda Strain than with Night of the Living Dead. And part of what it shares with Michael Crichton's tale is a sense of utter futility. Only "chance" (mutation) saves the world in The Andromeda Strain; at the end of The Crazies, as open an ending as I have seen in a commercial feature, it is simply not clear how things will go down. The doctor who is part-way toward an insight into how to thwart the virus is accidentally killed; the one townsman who seems to have a natural immunity is uncooperative after seeing all his friends destroyed.

Admiring Night and The Crazies as I did, you might think I would have rushed to see Dawn of the Dead. But my "gore avoidance" reflex came into play; the descriptions sounded too harrowing. When I finally caught up with the film recently, some 30 years later, I realized that the needle on film violence had moved considerably, and that in the intervening years I had seen quite a bit worse (although the quick shock cut to the "exploding head" is still impressive). What I wasn't entirely expecting is how funny Dawn is; there is a vein of humor in Night, of course ("Are they slow-moving, Chief?" "Yeah, they're dead. They're all messed up"), and throughout Romero's work, but Dawn of the Dead, with its famously apt shopping center setting, is in some senses a zombie comedy. (Although it can be quite moving, too; the scenes dealing with the decline and death of SWAT policeman Roger are as tear-provoking as anything I've seen in Romero.) However one defines Dawn, the film lives up to its well-deserved critical and popular reputation; this is a film that just flat-out works.

(One logical question bugs me a little: How it is that the re-animated zombies are so physically weak in a muscular sense, yet their teeth seem five times stronger than any human teeth could possibly be? The scenes in which zombies chomp into people's shoulders are memorable, of course, but I don't think my teeth could do that....)

I missed Knightriders in 1981 -- the Arthurian twist on motorcycle gangs sounds quite original -- but I did see Romero's first Stephen King collaboration, Creepshow, in its initial run in 1982, and reviewed it. King made it clear in his excellent critical book on horror, Danse Macabre, that he admired the pants off Romero, and they have been within each other's orbits ever since. King has a bit part in Knightriders, and Romero later filmed King's The Dark Half (and planned a film version of King's suspense novel The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon which never made it off the ground). Creepshow left me cold, but that could be because I didn't know enough about EC Comics; I might feel differently today.

I didn't keep up with Romero in the Eighties and early Nineties, missing Day of the Dead, Two Evil Eyes (his omnibus film with Dario Argento), Monkey Shines, and the aforementioned The Dark Half (which, as a Timothy Hutton fan, I need to see!). Then Romero himself seemed to check out for a number of years, re-emerging in 2000 with Bruiser, which I saw in one of its first screenings, with the director present. I wrote a capsule for the IMDB, under the title "Disappointment Screams 'Straight to Video'!":

George Romero previewed Bruiser, his return to feature film-making after a long hiatus following The Dark Half, at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago. Although the audience of Romero fans was respectful in questioning the director afterward, the movie has to be considered a severe disappointment. The central conceit (which I won't spoil) comes off as thoroughly gimmicky. Romero explores the same territory that Mike Judge does in Office Space -- the malaise of modern office life -- but not very insightfully. (There is a certain similarity in the endings of the two pictures, locating "authenticity" far down the pay scale from the executive suite.) Peter Stormare contributes an over-the-top performance as a ghastly philandering boss that is the acting equivalent of nails on a chalkboard. Ultimately the picture, shot in Toronto and financed by a Canadian company, resembles nothing so much, my friend Eric Johnson astutely pointed out, as the third-rate stuff you discover on Cinemax at three in the morning.

Originally the mini-review was even harsher than that, but I later edited out some of the snarkier language. Fortunately, the Siskel Center also screened Romero's second feature, There's Always Vanilla, in the same series, and that I was able to greet with unabashed enthusiasm. There were already severely disparate reviews at the IMDB, so I jumped in:

The house seems to be divided on this one, so let me break the deadlock with a rave review: this is one terrific little movie. Funny, surprising, sharply directed, engagingly written (great movie line: "our very existence depends on that beer"), well performed, and absorbing all the way. Great title, too! (Yes, it is explained in the film.) As Jonathan Rosenbaum has pointed out, There's Always Vanilla is highly evocative of the early 70s; and like many timely films of that era, it has been unjustly neglected. A realistic romantic comedy with a deft side-take on television and advertising, it turns interestingly serious in an abortionist sequence that illuminates the era of Roe v. Wade. Lead actor Raymond Laine is a find, charming yet believable. This movie is only screened very occasionally, and the print I saw (with the less memorable alternate title The Affair) is unfortunately color-faded. But if you ever get the chance to see this, it is a must. Romero at his best.

After coming down so hard on Bruiser, I was glad to have a "balancing" reaction to this much better film. Since Bruiser (which did indeed go straight to video in the U.S.), Romero has returned to the Dead series with Land of the Dead, Diary of the Dead, and the upcoming ...of the Dead (we seem to be running out of variations). I figure I should tackle all these in the proper viewing order.

The Dead saga gets very complicated, because there are also re-makes of each of the first three films; a re-worked version of Night, with new sequences, by Romero's original collaborator, John Russo, and a sequel to that re-worked version, Children of the Living Dead; and an entirely separate series of five Return of the Living Dead films, the first of which is based on a novel by John Russo that is a sequel to the original Night. Got all that? Don't worry if you don't; it took legal action to figure out who had the rights to what. Romero can't use the phrase "Living Dead" anymore, for example, but Russo can. (Off-Dead, there is also a remake of The Crazies currently in production.)

Since my Romero gaps look easy to fill, I will be reporting back.