Product: Night of the Living Dead (1990)
Rating: 5.0
Is that a corpse at your door? Gotta love zombie minimalism!
Some people don't get zombies; some people apparently think the idea of a deteriorated corpse stumbling after people is yawn-inducing. If you're one of those people, this movie probably isn't for you. . .But I am not one of those people!'Shaun of the Dead,' '28 Days Later,' and the recent 'Dawn of the Dead' resurrected the zombie genre, but each of these films modified the core principles of zombieology in order to do it. 'Shaun' camped it up, and humorized it. 'Dawn' beefed it up, gave it artillery, and made it "kick ass." '28 Days' injected it with Sartre and a heady brand of pessimistic existentialism.All three movies worked quite well, but I kept thinking, "must we try SO hard?" Let's get back to the basics!I'm a zombie minimalist, I have to admit. Zombies are scary because they represent the horror of seeing something that simply "is NOT supposed to be" stumbling without rhyme or reason into our otherwise complacent and secure bubble of existence. They're also about having to face a radically altered world apparently alone, or with only a tight-knit posse of "survivors" to unite with. Likewise, there is that concept of trying to stay "one step ahead" of a nightmare that is gradually approaching you from just beyond your field of vision."Night of the Living Dead" captures these qualities at their purest (at least in my opinion), and while the new zombie flicks are good, this re-make from 1990 is the good-old zombie minimalism that I hope is embraced by zombie film-makers in the future.P.S. - Want to learn about zombies and philosophy? Check out David Chalmers' book "The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory!"