Dead guy walks into a salad bar . . .

George A. Romero Double Feature of the Dead

Night of the Living Dead

(1968)

No, seriously, sit down and prepare for a genius pitch: while watching this, I kept thinking of that ad for Smith and Wollensky steak house in Manhattan: "Horrifying vegetarians since 1977," and I was gonna change the date and use that for my tagline, but then I had an even better idea: Night of the Living Vegan: the dead come back to life and they're not interested in ripping out human entrails, but they cannot be stopped from plundering fields, gardens, supermarket produce sections, farmers' markets . . . Producers, please make out your checks to Cheeseblab, LLC.

I forget how good this film is. Last time I saw it was two Halloweens ago, but I'd already forgotten again, and I'm not sure I'd ever noticed how beautifully written it is. Of course, Romero made it for $7.82, none of which was wasted on acting talent, but the script--particularly the radio and TV news reports--is perfect (and, oddly, scarcely diminished by the amateurish delivery most of the lines suffer).

Another thing I'd never noticed before, which I was made more conscious of as we're on the verge of electing a black president: the conventional wisdom is that the denouement of the film is a commentary on racism, as (sorry, folks: spoiler coming up, but you seriously need to have seen this flick by now--it's the same age as Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz were in 1979, and I'll bet you'd seen both of those by then) the lone African American in the cast gets drilled by a zombie-killer (a killer of zombies, i.e., not a zombie who is also a killer, which is, in any case, redundant) despite the inconvenient truth (known only to us, not to the shooter) that he remains a nonzombie.

But look: these guys have been mowing down a gazillion zombies, and the ones we see are disproportionately (exclusively, I think) white. So they can scarcely be charged with racism for serving him the same as they've served the others--they shoot him, duh, because they think he's a zombie. That's he's not is tragic, OK, but it's an understandable mistake. If it's a commentary on anything, it's on the mob mentality that inevitably converts execution of an unpleasant but necessary task into unthinking sport. So it's anti-NRA, maybe, but it's not specifically anti-Cracker.

Diary of the Dead

(2007)

This was just released in New York in February and died after earning less than a million bucks (half the reported production costs) at the box office in eleven weeks--and, more to the point, before reaching my particular hinterland. So when it came back to life recently on DVD, a Halloween-season rental was a no-brainer.

Unfortunately, it suggests that the franchise itself may be in need of a merciful bullet to the cerebellum: it's an oh-so-reflexive meditation on the life-chomping quality of modern media, where every sex act, bowel movement, and (worst of all) nap seems to be available online. Romero tries valiantly to show that the exhibitionism of this film, and the voyeurism it encourages, are different, but I, for one, find it hard to swallow.