I saw the movie “Night of the Living Dead” last night on House of Svengoolie. This is a remake of the 1968 George A. Romero film, which I never saw. One thing I learned from the Sven Squad is that the word “zombie” was never used in the film to refer to the wandering ghouls in the original movie.
The main characters: Tony Todd (as Ben); Patricia Tallman (as Barbara); Tom Towles (as Harry Cooper); McKee Anderson (as Helen (Cooper); William Butler (as Tom); Katie Finneran (as Judy Rose).
The action starts fast as Patricia and her older brother Johnnie arrive at a cemetery where almost immediately the dead guys show up doing the herky-jerky in slo-mo, allowing Patricia to defend herself with the aid of Walker, Texas Ranger who roundhouse kicks a whole gang of zombies because he is the sole provider of justice.
But Barbara is a fast learner, as we see when she meets Ben at a farmhouse which has a whole lot of doors which come in handy when zombies slow limp, crawl, or boogie-woogie from around the countryside. That’s when carpentry becomes the main theme of the film because they have to nail up all the doors over all the windows to keep the zombies out. It’s a good thing Bob Vila was on hand as an advisor, although he insisted on using a spirit level everywhere.
At first, Ben has to talk Barbara into getting tough because she was hysterical, mainly because the tables and dinnerware were all covered in blood and guts and there was no Bon Ami in sight. But it’s not long before she undergoes a Rambo-like transformation and learns to enjoy blowing the heads off zombies, like she’s at the carnival target shooting range.
Barbara’s idea is to simply outrun the staggering zombies because that makes the most sense. But Ben has a different plan, which is to argue incessantly with Harry Cooper who insists on holing up in the cellar and subsisting on canned parsnips with his wife Helen and their daughter, who is sick with something for which there is no vaccine.
Eventually, after several zombies get blasted, Ben, Tom, and Judy settle on a plan to find the keys to the locked gasoline tank so they can fill the truck’s fuel tank and drive to Vegas for a few hands of blackjack and hear Wayne Newton sing Danke Schoen, but that idea blows up in their faces.
Things get out of hand when a posse of shotgun-packing, tobacco-chewing good old boys show up with Bigfoot and challenge the zombies to a football game.
This is where I get off the ride, but I can say there are no real spoilers in this non-review in this so-so movie which I give a 2/5 Shrilling Chicken rating.
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