Harry here... I think each and everyone of us wants to marry a girl that would write the following... How about you?
Hi Harry,
Living Dead Girl here. After reading Conal Cochran’s review of Dead Reckoning, I felt the need to put in my two cents’ worth, since I, too, have been fortunate enough to read the script.
Allow me to preface this by saying that a) I am a Night of the Living Dead purist (although the DVD is pretty, the movie is best watched drive-in style in my back yard on 16mm going“clickety-clickety-click”), and b) Dawn of the Dead runs a close secondin the “perfection” category. (I won’t bore you with my thoughts on Day of the Dead.) That being said, I was jumping out of my skin with glee at the prospect of reading Dead Reckoning.
First impressions: I was a veritable mass of goosebumps, beginning on page seven with the “Walkers” staring blankly at a sky filled with fireworks. (No script I’ve ever read has made me as happy as this – beingable to read GAR’s exact words on the page.) And when Riley arrived at the mall at Fiddler’s Green? I was close to tears – tears of nostalgia as I reminisced about the first time I saw the Monroeville Mall hit the screen. Truthfully, that feeling of “Oh how I love a George Romero zombie movie” kept coming back to me as I read the script. I literally laughed out loud reading the montage of zombie-shots-around-town. I thought to myself, “The fourth movie is here! It’s really here!”
In some ways, Dead Reckoning picks up where Dawn left off. The shopping mall, that microcosm of capitalist society, is again the center of the universe. But here, it’s not just a hide-out for our heroes; instead, it’s the whole world – a pristine, Starbucks-and-escalators world where everyone is good looking, no one has to go outside, and the fancy people pretend that the zombie problem doesn’t exist. And speaking of escalators, when freshly-dead Mr. Bloom rides up with two other shoppers, and “Cappuccino Lady #2” remarks “Looks like he’s had a bad night”, I was just about cheering for the zombies. (Wait a minute – are we supposed to be cheering for them?)
However…
Dead Reckoning is not so much a movie about zombies as it is about a Snake Plissken-type guy who needs to save the town from the bad guys while his rich girlfriend’s father disapproves of him but ultimately needs his help. Awwww. Isn’t that cute?
The problem is, the zombies could have been replaced by rabid dogs or angry Smurfs and the same effect would have been achieved. The story focuses too much on the guerillas, on Riley, on the truck (the monster truck to end all monster trucks described in the other review)… on anything other than the zombies. They are always present, but they are not the “character” that they were in the other films. By page 67, when the Big Wigs were panicking, I was still waiting for something great to happen.
The parts that make it a good movie are good because they are parts of the old movies – other than that, there’s not much of a storyline. It doesn’t have greatness outside of those fun-filled zombies-and-fireworks moments. We don’t know how Dead Reckoning came about, or what this Kaufman guy’s problem is. Do we want a storyline in a zombie movie? Sure – weren’t Night and Dawn treatises on American life and pop culture? They had something to say. I hate to agree with Conal Cochran, but he’s right: this movie, at the end, is not BIG enough. It’s the go-between for movie #5. Not only does it not resolve the zombie issue, it doesn’t even resolve the plot points that the movie brings up.
Is George Romero still a genius? Yes. Reading the script alone is thrilling. Would I rather see this movie than just about any other? Absolutely. It’s the movie we’ve all been waiting for… but it’s just another George Romero Movie With The Word “Dead” In The Title. That, in and of itself, is good enough – but it could have been better.
Living Dead Girl
