“I’ll set us down. But I won’t leave my seat and I’ll keep the engine running. Now the first sign of trouble, I’m going up. If you ain’t on board when that happens, you’re likely to have a lousy afternoon.”
A deserted metropolitan lingers in the tropics, signs of turmoil and carnage still linger. Garbage is strewn about, shadows wash past walls, and piles of money brush in to the air like hurricanes, unclaimed, and now merely just paper. After calling out to the city with a bullhorn looking for survivors, there is an answer, but not the answer Sarah and Miguel were looking for. From the corners of the city, the walking dead begin seeping in. The air is no longer filled with sounds of the ocean, but of the horrific moans and shrieks of the dead. The darkness is now filled with the motion of dozens of shambling corpses, and for miles all the pair could see are the cold, pale, snarling faces of defeat slowly creeping in on the couple, hungry for their flesh.
With the “Definitive Document of the Dead” you have to take the good with the bad. It completely glosses over Romero’s production of “Day of the Dead” to where it’s almost an irrelevant foot note in the legacy of the Dead films. Yet, the documentary does go back to Romero years after “Day” to where he’s directing “Land,” “Diary,” and “Survival” implying that they’re all valid and relevant projects of Romero’s career. Difficulties in Hollywood and the studio system are side stepped, and often times the documentary can never decide if it wants to be a Hollywood inside look or a fandom tribute, so it tries to be both.
