A quick comment on Land of the Dead

[womzilla]

I left this comment on a thread on Matt Yglesias's TPM Cafe post about going to see Land of the Dead instead of Owr Leeder'z latest speech:

I think that Land of the Dead is set very soon after the events of Night of the Living Dead, almost certainly long before the events of Day of the Dead. (Possibly it's set during the span of time covered by Dawn of the Dead.) There's a sense in Land that the Fiddler's Green outpost is part of what still believes itself to be a functioning society with a zombie problem, as opposed to a post-apocalypse society. Certainly many of the technological details--the large remaining caches of petrol and ammo, the relatively unspoiled deserted towns, the functioning electrical grid and cell phone network--all point towards it being soon after things changed. In such a situation, continuing to believe in the utility of paper money is not nonsensical.

That said, Land is certainly no Day of the Dead. It's more like the made-for-TV version. I still enjoyed it, but it's not even as good a zombie movie as Shaun of the Dead (which, actually, was quite good as a zombie movie and superb as a comedy).

Comments

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

I may have to do some kind of zombie marathon soon to get all of these sorted out in my head. I know that over time I've seen a number of zombie movies, but many were so long ago that I don't recall them and of the ones I do recall, in many cases I can't remember which title was which movie.

[nellorat.livejournal.com]

One thing I noticed was that with one nice exception, Land didn't have innovative gross-out/scarey ways for the living dead to bite/eat people. A sharp contrast to Dawn, which I thought it should have been more comparable to in this way. I can't help thinking that one motive in this was going for a wider audience. I mean, it certainly has gore, but not innovative, breath-taking gore that I associate Romero with. (And Savini. Did Savini work on FX as well as doing a cameo?)

I think you have to be right about Land taking place soon after the start of Dawn, sometime while they're settled into the mall. The scavengers in Land are in a similar ecological niche to the bikers in Dawn, which implies a similar environment.

My view was that adhering to the value of money wasn't supposed to be absurd, but was supposed to be backward- rather than forward-looking. Also, it was a sign of the self-enclosed shared fantasy of Fiddler's Green, that the old kinds of power still mattered. That is, FG and those involved with it still trafficked in money by mutual consent, but elsewhere that was probably breaking down.