Creepshow (1982)

CreepShow

George A. Romero’s “Creepshow” is almost a spit in the face of everyone who decried comic books a sheer stain on humanity and the youth, blaming the colored pages for the evaporation of morality in the fifties and sixties. “Creepshow” is an absolute celebration of horror comics and a love letter to the EC generation who had their stories robbed by hack psychologists who blamed comic books for homosexuality, crime, murder, and drug use. “Creepshow” is a joint effort from many people just filled with talent that simply can not hold this entire film at times. An absolute orgy of laughs, scares, and thrills, “Creepshow” is one of the finest, if not the finest anthology horror film second only to “Black Sabbath.”

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Night of the Living Dead (1968)

notld68posterI spend a lot of time debating and exploring “Night of the Living Dead” to an almost obscene degree. While today it’s been passed around more than a bong at a Grateful Dead concert, has been included in every horror boxed set imaginable, and has been remade, reworked, and rebooted to a sickening degree, somehow George A. Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead” has managed to survive it all. It still stands, feet planted, in the ground and taking whatever the film world throws at it. A lot of horror geeks say Romero gets too much credit for “Night.” I mean, in the end isn’t it just a retread of the novel “I Am Legend” and “The Last Man on Earth”? And surely, it’s not the first genre picture to star an African American man in a dominant role. But still, “Night” is just art in motion. It’s still a rich and deeply effective indictment on humanity, and still possesses themes about the inner monster that ring true even in the digital age.

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Day of the Dead (1985)

dotd3So the zombie apocalypse came and went and guess what? We lost. Miserably. After the world has been consumed by the cannibalistic walking dead by the hordes, there are really only a few dozen living humans on the planet. And they’re struggling to maintain the lingering shreds of sanity they still possess. Once upon a time, a long time ago, “Day of the Dead” was considered the lesser of the Dead trilogy from director George A. Romero, and it’s quite shocking considering “Day of the Dead” is a masterpiece. In fact it’s every bit as good as its predecessors “Night” and “Dawn” with just as much thought provoking material as the former titles.

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Zombi 2 (1979)

For the uninitiated, back in 1978 when George A Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead” was released in foreign countries, it was renamed “Zombi” and re-cut for Italian audiences sans the dark comedy. When the movie became a hit, Lucio Fulci took it upon himself to direct the “sequel” entitled “Zombi 2.” Basically, Fulci’s “Zombi 2” is not actually a sequel to Romero’s “Dawn” but unofficially his horror film acts as a pseudo sequel/prequel for “Dawn.” So basically “Dawn” has two sequels, one official, and one unofficial. I of course prefer “Day of the Dead,” but Lucio Fulci’s “Zombi 2” is not without its merits. It’s a terrifying and often haunting zombie film filled with such effective gore and grue that you could smell the stench of the walking dead permeate off the screen at times.

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Night of the Living Dead (1990)

Much like almost every horror fan out there, I’ve seen “Night of the Living Dead,” and had my cherry busted by it when I was five. Since being in the public domain, Romero’s movie has been open to many, many re-workings, one of which occurred in 1990 when his protégé Tom Savini got the wild idea to remake “Night of the Living Dead,” and you know what? It wasn’t bad. In fact his remake stands as one of the better remakes of a Romero film to date, and Savini enlists much of the same dread and horror and instills it with a bleak tone of greens and dark blues to invoke a film that’s quite gritty, bleak, and hopeless even in spite of changing a lot of character actions and increasing the tension. It also helps that he enlists the talents of special effects guru Gregory Nicotero to turn the walking dead in to shambling harbingers of death that I still have difficulty looking at to this day. The song is almost like what you’ve heard in the original.

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Mike Schneider Gets "ReAnimated" with "Night of the Living Dead"

NotLDThe latest iteration of “Night of the Living Dead” is not a remake, but a re-visioning, the same classic zombie film from George A. Romero except seen through the eyes of dozens of graphic artists, animators, and the like, all of whom have come together to form a moving painting and ode to George A. Romero and his lasting legacy of a zombie epic involving a group of mismatched survivors in a farmhouse one fateful night trapped wall to wall with the walking dead anxious to feast on their flesh and guts. Combing the talents of many people, Mike Schneider is an artist and curator who speaks about this latest project that brings a new dimension to Romero’s film.

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Night of the Living Dead: ReAnimated (1968) (DVD)

Since George A. Romero’s seminal 1968 independent horror film was released without a copyright, the horror classic we know as “Night of the Living Dead” has been in the public domain for literal decades. Since then it’s been remade, re-released, re-dubbed, re-edited, restored, colored, chopped, extended, spoofed, satirized, animated, prequelized, sequelized, novelized, sampled, and so on ad nauseum. Much to Romero’s chagrin, “Night of the Living Dead” has been the Mr. Potato Head of the horror world upon which independent film directors can switch and mix without worry of a lawsuit.

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