Romeo + Juliet (1996)

This week, to celebrate a review that's been years in the making, my friend Tony and I did a podcast talking about our history with this movie and what we thought about it. Check it out:



William Shakespeare is always a tough one to tackle when making a movie, because there are so many things that can go wrong. You really just need the best actors and the best understanding of drama possible, because otherwise you could end up churning out something rather misguided or silly.

And when you don't feel like even trying, you can always just make something like Romeo + Juliet.

Director: Baz Luhrmann

Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Claire Danes

IMDb

Co-written with Tony and Michelle.

Yes, this is the 1996 Baz Luhrmann film that some people like and other people wonder why those people won't share their illegal drugs. Seriously, guys, it's bad. I respect any opinions to the contrary, and I know it won a lot of awards, but there's no mincing words or dancing around the point here. This is a bad movie.

We start off with a TV news report talking about the Capulets and the Montagues in their ongoing strife in a big city. I guess the idea is kind of clever, but it's just done in such a goofy, cartoonish way. Hearing Shakespearean dialogue coming out of a bunch of news anchors in suits on a TV screen just doesn't fit. It's like wearing sandals with socks.

And the directing is just so god-awful. Everything is done in sped-up cartoony pace, with lots of exaggerated movements and over the top flamboyance. It's annoying as shit. Everything happens super fast and there's just no room for the film to breathe. Like, really, even before the characters actually come in – you get tons of quick shots of the city, and things burning, aerial shots that are supposed to represent the chaos between the two families.

Maybe they'll report on that King Lear fellow next town over, too, and his familial drama.

You'd think the National Guard would step in, seeing as this IS supposed to be modern times and in the United States, and these families are seemingly wreaking havoc on a whole entire big city. But I guess that wasn't important – fuck actually doing work with the stupid ideas and themes you came up with, right? "It's an artistic decision" isn't a catch-all for bullshit, guys.

And, apparently, this is now a Full House style sitcom. Because the movie can't make up its mind on fucking anything.

The very first actual scene is perpetual bad movie machine John Leguizamo as Tybalt and a bunch of other idiots as the Montagues, fighting at a gas station. I bet Shakespeare envisioned his classic work this way when writing it – idiots with Hawaiian shirts and dyed pink hair and cowboy boots fighting with guns and blowing up cars in the middle of a crowded traffic hour. THAT'S the Shakespeare I know and love!

Shakespeare!

This isn't a fucking ballet class. In real life you'd have been shot by now.

I think I finally know the real problem with these sorts of scenes. In the original story, yeah, it was two packs of young, testosterone-filled morons fighting in the streets. Fine. But you're updating this to the modern day. It really doesn't make sense to have them fighting and shooting guns at each other in the middle of a crowded city. In any modern society, they would be stopped and arrested for this. Why not just have them meet on a sidewalk somewhere in some shitty neighborhood and fight there? There's just no need for this much theatrics.

You're making Skittles look like they're all black and grey. Jesus Christ.

The more and more I watch, the more I'm convinced Luhrmann put all this over the top wackiness in there because he thought the audience would be bored by the dialogue, and so he wanted to make it so grotesquely goofy that the Looney Tunes' conflicts look like Casablanca in comparison.

Leguizamo's acting in this is so bad you can see it from outer space. The aliens are laughing at us, and this performance is why they haven't made contact yet. Every scene he's in, he's screaming, doing weird motions with his eyebrows, baring his teeth like a rabid dog, and dancing around everywhere. His wardrobe seems to be a collection of clown clothes picked out by a blind person.

The only love of Leguizamo's life...

So then we get Romeo, played by Leonardo DiCaprio. Give him credit, he tries – but him exchanging Shakespeare's beautifully written dialogue about longing for young love while hanging with a bunch of dude-bros with surfer haircuts and Hawaiian shirts in a pool hall is fucking eye-gouging, ear-raping terrible.

Meanwhile, Juliet, played by Claire Danes, is in her house while they're getting ready for a party. She's probably one of the better actresses in this, but her mother played by Diane Venora is probably the worst performance in the movie (well, next to Leguizamo). It probably wasn't even her fault – I blame whoever directed her to emote every line like a woman who was just in a car crash and is screaming for the medics to help her.

Is this shot pandering to the dentists in the audience? Eugh.

Every fucking line, she's screaming her head off. Was it supposed to be funny? Because it's not, unless you just think really loud things blaring in your face are funny. In that case, I have another recommendation for you which I am sure you will also find hysterical:

So they go to a party, where Mercutio (Harold Perrineau) is dressed in drag as a disco ball, apparently, and goes into a whole song and dance about...well, I don't really know, as frankly I'm too distracted by the annoying, garish visuals to pay attention to what they're saying.

This is a carefully crafted assault on our collective minds...

I get it, they're trying to go for spectacle here, fast and entertaining and colorful – but this is way, waaaay over the top. Shakespearean theater is no stranger to silly comedy, but what you did here was like someone bringing a mechanic a car and telling him to polish up the exterior and change the tires, and he instead adds big wheels with flashing strobe lights, paints flames on the sides and puts a rocket launcher to the top.

Also, why is there a guy in an astronaut costume at this party? I guess it's a costume party, so anything goes, but seriously, doesn't that just seem slightly out of place? Or maybe that one was just between the lines in the original play.

Juliet always dreamed of being with a man who wears adult diapers.

Romeo meets Juliet, and they go through the whole routine, falling in love faster than a celebrity can backpedal after the media catches them saying racist things. It's a decent scene, as whenever the camera is just on these two, the movie is at least kind of tolerable. And by that I mean it isn't a hyperactive blast of rainbow-colored annoyance, so that's good at least.

Ew, cooties. Gross.

But alas, they find out they're from warring families, so they can't be together. In the original play this made sense, as it was hundreds of years ago and kids their age had little control over their lives. But in a big modern city like this movie is set in? Shit, man – these kids would be running away, smoking blunts in a hotel room and probably be pregnant in as much time as the movie takes place, if this were real life.

The movie kind of blathers on for a while, and we get a scene where the two of them horsing around in a pool. I love the scene where there's actually a security guard for the Capulets' mansion dressed up in regular clothes and watching a security cam, and he comes out and checks on Juliet after hearing them fall into the pool.

"I should probably retire, but being a security guard is fun because I don't have to do any work!"

The point where she learns she can get away with anything with just a smile...

He sees her for a split second and she gives him a thumbs up, so I guess that's OK – I mean, maybe she's just the type of person who falls into pools all the time. No point in checking to make sure she isn't being held hostage at gunpoint and being forced to pretend she's OK, right?

Romeo then goes to a priest and asks him how he can marry Juliet. The priest doesn't think to tell him it's a stupid idea – he just escalates the situation, presumably because he is a sick man who likes to play with peoples' lives.

"Father, shouldn't we talk him out of this crazy idea and be rational?"
"Ssshhhh... I want to see where this trainwreck goes."

But luckily, before that can come to fruition, Mercutio is brutally murdered by Tybalt. Oh, did I say luckily? I, uh, misspoke. I meant it's very tragic. Ahem. Yes. He was an annoying man who didn't deserve to die...you know what, I'm no good at eulogies. I just can't put my whole self into it.

Romeo then chases down Tybalt in the rain and kills him, too – it's another awful, wretched scene full of bad directing, with lots of super fast cuts that make you more nauseous than that rickety old carnival ride that made you puke on your date last year after you ate a chili dog. Incidentally, this movie is also the number one cause of people puking on their dates when watching it.

"THIS IS MY BEST IMPRESSION OF A TURKEY CATCHING RAINWATER IN ITS MOUTH! DO YOU LIKE IT?"

Because of this, the judge of the court banishes Romeo from the city, which is something a lot of judges do. I remember when Casey Anthony was on trial and then they banished her from Florida afterward. That was an intense day.

Juliet's family then forces her to get married to some doofus who didn't have any important lines in the movie. Still hopeful that Leonardo DiCaprio will win an Oscar back in 1996, she rebels and runs away from her family. There's also an awful, repugnant scene of her father (Paul Sorvino) screaming at her for disobeying him. Wow, an angry father taking out his insecurities on a daughter who won't obey him? Please, movie, dazzle us with more of your brilliantly original scenes!

Juliet then goes to that priest from before, and threatens to commit suicide if she has to marry that other guy. She also points a gun at the priest, which was the best scene in the movie for me.

DO IT!!!

The priest sits down with her and talks her through it, calming her down and helping her realize suicide isn't the answer.

…

Nah! Just kidding. He gives her a potion to fake her death until Romeo can come back and save her. He really had this whole fake death thing planned well, huh? He didn't even skip a beat – just brought it up like it was the most normal thing in the world.

He tells her his plan with the aid of images horribly green-screened behind him, which makes this whole sequence look like a bad anti-drug video they would make you watch in fourth grade.

"Here, take my faking-death potion that I mysteriously, worryingly have for suspicious reasons!"
"But Father, wasn't that your real bottle of shark poison?!"
"Oh, well... shit."

Meanwhile, Romeo is hanging out somewhere in the desert doing nothing. Really, Juliet – are you sure this is the guy you want to marry? He doesn't seem particularly motivated. Oh, except when he learns that Juliet killed herself. Then he does an excellent overly dramatic scream at the heavens with his fist pumped. Yeah! There's the old Romeo spirit. Bravado underlined by utter pointlessness.

Also it seems like he's been exiled to North Dakota. Which makes sense - if you're going to exile people from a city, might as well send them to places with wide open space, a lot of room and no reason to want to continue living.

He had to wander around in the field and find the best spot to drop to his knees and dramatically scream at the sky. It's a talent of his, and he's becoming an expert.

It's really just too bad he couldn't put as much effort into checking whether she was really dead, as he did in that dramatic scream. Because when he finds her fake-dead body, he kills himself for real. And right before he dies, she opens her eyes and reveals that she wasn't dead!

So then she shoots herself in the head and dies along with him. I really have to admire the neat and clean way she shot herself in the head, with no blood and her head fully intact!

Guys, I know middle school theater productions of this play don't have blood, but the least you could have done after making us sit through the movie, was show us the characters' mangled and bloody corpses. Thanks for fucking nothing.

I hated this movie for years growing up, and in fact for years in high school I proclaimed this to be the worst movie ever made. Watching it again now, I don't find myself mad, but rather just very, very fascinated with all of this. It's loud, it's stupidly colorful, it's goofy, the acting was bad, the costumes were bad and I'm pretty sure it would smell bad if you could smell it. It's an assault on every sense you have, and it's amazingly, relentlessly annoying almost every minute of screentime. Tony said later that the movie deserves the same treatment as the ET game cartridges, with every copy buried in a landfill, and I'm inclined to say he's right.

The way they tried to modernize the story was half-assed and not clever at all. The story's silliest moments seem extra dumb now when you couple them with the goofy acting and the awful directing. The entire thing is just a cacophonous mess and it's actually kind of amazing how weirdly awful everything is. It's seriously a marvel how little of anything was done well here.

But really I just had to come back to one thing – in the original play, you got a sense of the young, fleeting, passionate love the characters had. You got into the drama. It was a story about two kids who fall in the kind of stupid, blind, insane and passionate love that kids fall into, and reading it or watching a faithful adaptation makes it clear how little teenagers and the young love they share have changed in the hundreds of years since Shakespeare's time. It's a timeless story and can resonate with anyone who was ever a teenager and had a boyfriend or girlfriend. That's what made it so fucking brilliant.

This movie doesn't have that timeless feel. It's tired and extremely dated now, and it just can't make you connect with any of the drama in it. Between the folds of fat of the ridiculous garish colors and over the top acting, it loses the humanity and drama of the story. I guess I can see why people like this, for the over the top artsiness, but it really fell flat for us here, and failed at everything it tried to do.

Luhrmann said in interviews that he wanted this to reflect the kind of bawdy, theatrical goofiness that would have kept crowds watching in Shakespeare's own time, when he was alive. But really, we don't need that now, because audiences are intelligent and can understand more things without gimmicky flashiness and over the top cues every second. I mean, it's just hard to take any of this seriously when the hero dies wearing a shirt that looks like it's from Spencer's.

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REVIEW: Miner's Massacre (2002)

It’s a movie about a miner going on a massacre, isn’t that an apt title when you know the plot? I think so. I can’t think of anything else to write in this part so let’s just skip to showing the DVD box cover and the usual info:

Director: That guy who made the 7th Friday the 13th Movie

Starring: Generic white people!

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0325214/

"You scared the shit out of me!"

-John Leguizamo Stand In #2 (He's being very literal here...)

This gem of a movie begins with an explosion followed by the title, delivered in cheap looking mid-90s dated computer animation, so you know this is gonna be a timeless horror classic! The actual film itself begins with a guy sitting in a cabin. How exciting this is already; how drawn in I am with this riveting set-up! I guess he really wanted out of this movie fast, though, as he gets killed off quickly by the movie’s ‘miner’ killer…

Oh no, not that guy!! He was my favorite character!

Then we get an extremely poor transition as the swipe of the killer’s ax cuts into someone chopping up onions. She’s one of our main characters, but after the movie ends I still have no clue what her name was, or what her personality was supposed to be. All we know is that she talks to her mom on the phone, has a bland boyfriend and gets packages with tiny gold nuggets in them from her brother. This leads her to deduce that it’s TIME FOR ADVENTURE!

Then we cut to some other characters, one of whom looks kind of like John Leguizamo, and the other who is his girlfriend or something, who argues and whines about everything. I bet she’d be best friends with Bridget Fonda’s character from Lake Placid! She complains that she wants to use a bathroom, but also complains when they find one – yes, it’s in a place that looks like the gas station from Texas Chainsaw Massacre III, but damn, this chick is just NEVER HAPPY!

I especially love this one scene where we meet this crazy old guy who works at the gas station. I can’t even decide what to make fun of here. The fact that the girlfriend openly mocks and is rude to the guy with no reason to be other than that she’s a one note character? Or when the John Leguizamo stand-in has a conversation with the guy alone? Yeah I think I’ll go with that one. The guy tells him this story about the miner-killer of the movie, The Forty-Niner, who apparently cursed his gold, and anyone who tries to steal it will be killed, or something like that…

"Here, wipe your ass with toilet paper I pulled out of my back pocket; that's sanitary!"

The Leguizamo stand-in wants to buy this wanted poster from the guy, who says it’s invaluable and a family heirloom, only to change his mind two seconds later when offered 40 bucks. Allow me to bash my head against my desk in frustration. Oh and the killer gets gas station man right after; I guess his worth in the movie went down to nothing after giving us an info-dump…although we’ll have several more info-dumps later on, so who really knows.

So the couple drives some more and we get some more idiotic arguing about nothing that goes on for way too long, and by the end of it I mostly just want to stab both of them. We cut to some other jackasses screwing in a car! Oh the suspense! What position will they use?

Keep your mouth like that long enough and it'll get stuck that way

I love this conversation right here:

IDIOT GIRL: All you care about is money! (With no reason whatsoever for saying this…)

IDIOT GUY: Hey, we all have our passions in life. Mine is money. Yours is…taking your clothes off.

Is she offended? Yes. Will that stop her from screwing him at least two more times in the rest of the movie, utterly without any purpose? Of course not! Women don’t have any complex feelings or depth! They just want to have sex all the time! Didn’t you know?!

So they all meet up and have great conversations that establish what awesome characters they all are! Nah, just kidding, they bicker and whine about nothing and wander around aimlessly. Leguizamo stand-in meets this chick and flirts with her openly, even in front of his girlfriend. OK, it’s time to put on my psychologist glasses and analyze this.

Come take a seat on my couch.

The Leguizamo stand-in is clearly a rotten piece of dog turd for flirting with another girl so shamelessly in front of everyone else including his own girlfriend. However, can you really blame him when his girlfriend nags him all the time over every little thing, and doesn’t seem to have a compassionate bone in her body? My conclusion is that ALL OF THESE PEOPLE ARE WORTHLESS RETARDS! GOD. THEY DESERVE EACH OTHER ACTUALLY. *sips wine and sits back against satin armchair* Ahhhh.

So the girlfriend leaves and gets killed by the killer, even though I don’t think she had any of the gold or a reason for it. I think the killer just found her as intolerable as we all do. Score one for the Forty-Niner, oh yeah! Oh and the two jackasses who were screwing in the car now go and screw in the barn, amid several torrid and unfunny sexual puns…yeah, I guess their libido is higher than the national debt right now.

They find some gold but can’t carry it all because it’s about to get dark by then. So they go into the woods and party! So yeah, more sex and stupid dialogue! What a shocking plot twist! All I have to say about these scenes is, juxtaposing scenes of people having sex with a guy taking a shit…is a really really bad idea, and whoever wrote that scene should be shot point-blank.

"Oh, I love you, I'm glad I went to that terrible party my sister dragged me to, cause otherwise we'd never be in the blandest of bland white people love we are in..."

Yeah, real nice transition - they just cut right from the above scene to this. Isn't that romantic?

The sheriff of the town catches the Leguizamo stand-in in the woods and chases him around with his (the Leguizamo stand-in’s) pants down from trying to take a dump. Why didn’t the sheriff just approach him rationally and, uh, NOT act like a crazy serial killer? Uh…LOOK, CHEESE!

This is apparently the costliest cheese in the world, Pule Cheese. There, you learned something today! You're now smarter than the people who made this movie.

So then the one guy who loves money suspects everyone of conspiring with the sheriff and pulls out a gun, saying it’s business now, oooh. There’s no motivation for him to do this beyond that one line earlier in the movie about how he loves money. That’s some of the worst writing I’ve seen since Blackout! Second graders could write more realistic characters! He gets in the car, tries to drive away with all the gold, but collides with the killer, and everything bursts into flames for no damn reason. Must be those Firestone tires again.

Then the gang meets Karen Black, a veteran actress who has no place in this film. She tells them the same crap about the killer that we already knew, and then uses her magic powers to give us a dragging, inept 5-minute flashback that is about as scary as a Cabbage Patch Kids doll. We see that the miner kidnapped some blonde girl, threatened people in an over the top and silly manner, and bit off his own fingers and spat them at people. Wait, what?

The dreaded finger catapult spit attack, mastered by none other than the Forty-Niner.

That’s…really strange! Why did he do that? He has a weapon, for Pete’s sake; why couldn’t he just have used that? He doesn't even consider it! His first thought, his very first instinct, is to bite his finger off and spit it at the guy attacking him, no joke. That’s the most random, out of nowhere way to attack somebody I’ve ever seen! He runs around and shouts that he’s cursing his gold for anyone else who ever tries to take it, and since we already knew that, this whole scene was more useless padding, hooray!

So in the real world again, we see the gang mobilizing and doing a bunch of really boring stuff which amounts to basically just blowing him up. The gang is happy and gets ready to go home the next day when the sheriff picks up a stray piece of gold and gets killed immediately after touching it, even though that was never how it worked before. Then the movie ends, and I think we’ve all learned a lesson from this movie. The lesson is that you shouldn’t let the director of Friday the 13th part 7 direct a movie. Ever!

Yeah, this was stupid. It’s really, really poorly written, the characters are cardboard cutouts (well, that’s an insult to cardboard manufacturers around the world) and the story is stupid and makes no sense. It’s pretty much just your average every-day bad 2000s horror movie. It’s a dime-a-dozen slasher that will appeal to no one simply because it doesn’t do anything particularly well. Maybe this was supposed to be a comedy-horror or something, but to be honest that wouldn’t really save it anyway. What more can I say? It’s a bad movie and you probably wouldn’t have seen it anyway, but at least you got a review out of it! Until next time, folks.

Review: Land of the Dead (2006)

Director: George A. Romero

Starring: Simon Baker, John Leguizamo, Asia Argento, Robert Joy

Website: http://www.universalstudiosentertainment.com/land-of-the-dead/

"They're just people."

-One Dumb Zombie Killer

You know what I don’t like? Being raped by alligators. You know what else I don’t like? Land of the Dead. UGH.

Okay, so we start off with what looks like a zombie convention as they stumble around in front of a building and play musical instruments. Gee, that’s…not threatening at all! They’re being watched by some normal people – or what this movie considers to be normal – named Riley, played by Simon Baker, and some other guy who gets killed off in a few minutes, so I won’t bother to learn his name. Riley is a Typical Depressed/Cynical Futuristic Dystopian Hero, making quips like “Aren’t we just pretending to be alive?” and “That’s what I like about you, you still believe in heaven.” This character is just delightful, isn’t he? He’s got all the personality of a goddamned paper clip. There’s one scene where he shoots a zombie and the guy next to him says “Nice shooting,” to which he replies, “Good shooting, Charlie. No such thing as nice shooting.” Great. So we’ve got a philosopher on our hands, too. Really glad this guy is our main character…ugh.

So they run into a burn victim named Charlie, played by Robert Joy, who does his best impersonation of what it would be like if zombies could talk and act like regular people, or if Nic Cage was a zombie, you take your pick. Okay, he’s mentally handicapped, and to be fair, he’s probably the best thing in this movie just for how unassuming and innocent he is even when he’s killing some fucking zombies, but it’s still kind of strange that they just randomly toss him in without any introduction…

Fuck it. We’re also introduced to our second in command, John Leguizamo, playing a guy named Cholo. His job is to ride motorcycles, perform hokey, overdone acting and give snarky replies to everything his leader Riley tells him. The apparent plan of this group is that they have a giant machine called Dead Reckoning that shoots off fireworks to distract the zombies so that they can kill them and raid the cities for supplies and food and stuff. Except apparently now the zombies are getting smarter and are able to think and even work together now, as is illustrated in one scene where this big black zombie helps his fellow zombies and pushes them out of the range of the gunfire. Oh no!...wait, I don’t care. The movie has given me no reason to care.

So the one sidekick guy from before gets bitten and shoots himself, and nobody seems to care except for Riley. Leguizamo and his buddies do some stupid motorcycle stunts in the middle of the street that should in all reality attract a lot of zombies to try and eat them, but I guess not in this movie. Having actual excitement might slow things down; you know the drill. And if they’re supposed to be so smart, how come these rebel guys aren’t killing more of them?

The basic story behind how the last fringes of humanity have survived in this post apocalyptic world is that they’ve walled off one specific city where the zombies can’t get to. The rich live in tall skyscrapers in nice homes while everyone else lives on the streets fending for food every way they can. We see Cholo and Riley returning from their mission as Riley chews out Cholo for celebrating after a good soldier just died. Cholo will hear none of it, and the scene is pretty much pointless.

Cholo goes up to one of the buildings to visit his supervisor Kaufman, and a random black guy almost kills him, telling him of something strange going on next door. So Cholo goes over and checks, finding a man who has hanged himself while his family for some reason did not hear him doing it. And then he turns into a zombie and bites his teenage son…huh. I don’t get it. So whenever people die, they just become zombies regardless of how they died? How does that work? Explanation please? None? Okay, fine, I’ll just…assume that the rope had some zombie blood caked on it and that it somehow got into his blood stream, infecting him as he died. There. It’s stupid, but it makes about as much sense as anything else in this goddamn movie!

Our next spectacle of this movie’s intellect comes when we see what the people of the city do with the zombies they captured – yes, they capture live zombies, because that could never go wrong…and to add insult to injury to the Romero legacy, here we see people taking pictures with them like they’re fucking circus attractions, and also shooting paintballs at them. And they use them in cage fights to bet money on, too! That’s…really weak. A lot of the stuff in this movie is like that. It’s just like, really? That’s what George Romero is giving us in 2006? C’mon. You can do better, man.

They throw in a prostitute played by the luscious Asia Argento, who is intended to be the ‘bait’ that the zombies fight over. Riley, while looking for a way to get his car back from a midget in a purple suit, notices this, and saves her, only for him, Charlie and the prostitute, whose name is Slack, to get arrested for killing the midget…yes, there are midgets in this post apocalyptic city. I don’t know why; that just seems funny to me that the movie would point that out. Between this and the retarded guy, they’re really pandering to the PC crowd, huh? Never thought I’d see the day a zombie movie did that. Equal rights for everyone to get murdered and eaten in a zombie flick, I guess…

But trouble’s afoot when we finally meet Kaufman, played by the late Dennis Hopper, in a performance that you will most likely forget five minutes after the end credits roll! Wait a second, Dennis Hopper? John Leguizamo? You’d be forgiven for thinking this was just a convention of B-minus list actors, but these two were also together in the much maligned Super Mario Bros. movie back in 1993 together. Who knew this would be their reunion? Let’s get some Goombas and mushrooms in here; maybe that would make this more interesting. Kaufman doesn’t want to let Cholo buy a room in his big building for no real reason, so Cholo gets PISSED OFF and rallies his men to steal Dead Reckoning and use it as leverage, planning to destroy the city and start a mutiny against him.

Bet you thought we forgot this one, huh Mr. Hopper?

So Riley, Charlie and Slack get released to go hunt him down, along with a few other mercenaries, two of which get killed off later without even doing anything…and we get about fifteen minutes of filler as Riley and his crew go hunting for Dead Reckoning. They come across a few parties of zombies who probably did not say grace before they sat down for their blood feasts, kill them, and move on. And while that’s going on, apparently the horde of zombies from outside the city breaks in rather easily, seeking to avenge their fallen zombie brothers.

…is it just me, or is the idea of cogent zombies who can actually think and form plans really lame? It’s not scary and it certainly doesn’t make for any kind of tension. It robs them of everything that was originally so interesting about them. Watching them assemble like some kind of army is just like “…huh?” What are we supposed to feel here? There is certainly no imminent terror. It’s just…well, weak. Zombies go swimming through the water…huh, well I don’t give a crap.

In a surprisingly, stupidly easy finish, Riley and pals get Dead Reckoning back from Cholo and then they go to fight off the zombie hordes. Cholo gets bitten and decides he wants to be a zombie…yawn, yawn, yawn, WHERE’S THE EXCITING STUFF? Get to it, movie! I’ve been to knitting classes more interesting than this movie. So Cholo goes after Kaufman, who has been abandoned in the parking garage. Kaufman is attacked by the big black zombie who actually pieces together in his rotting brain how to pour gasoline on the car and then throw a Molotov cocktail at it, blowing it to bits.

But not before this exchange: Cholo comes in, shadows on his face like the movie thinks it’s actually suspenseful as to whom he is, and Kaufman says, “No…you’re dead.” That’s a cliché and stupid line in itself, except that then he comes fully out of the shadows to reveal that he has become a zombie, to which Kaufman replies, “You really are dead,” right before Cholo bites him and they both get set on fire and blown to bits. Ha! Oh, Romero, you kidder, you. Always the comedian…oh, man, this is a bad movie.

Meanwhile, Riley and Charlie are marveling over how easy it was for the zombies to get in and eat everyone. They watch over a scene of death, destruction and flames as they have a moment’s consideration before they launch a missile and blow everything up. “They’re just people,” one woman with them says about the flesh eating demons from hell, as if there isn’t a reason to stop them from killing innocent people. But Riley tells him to do it, so Charlie presses the button and blows them up anyway. Hooray for destruction and violence!

But of course there has to be an uplifting ending for no reason, so we actually get some sympathy for the zombies – yes, really, sympathy for the goddamn zombies. That’s a new one. Yeah, have sympathy for them; they’re only killing everyone you know without any intention of stopping! You think they’ll really show you that same kindness the next time you’re under their mercy, you frigging idiots? What, is there going to be a sequel where these assholes form a Zombie Liberation Front dedicated to protecting the rights and safety of those who are not living and who eat brains to survive? Ugh, what a dumb idea. Riley doesn’t kill the head zombie because “he’s just looking for a place to go.” Maybe in a more compelling movie this could have been a good plot point, but in this movie, it’s just weak, and it wasn’t even a plot point for the entire movie anyway, so what the hell? They just...randomly introduce it at the end because apparently the movie needed a moral or something! Like everything else in this movie, the idea of sympathetic zombies is weak-ass, pussy crap for people who aren’t cool enough to watch the good Romero films from back in the day. Pff, pass me the vomit bag.

Land of the Dead is a huge waste of time! Nothing about this movie is exciting, nothing about it is scary and nothing about it merits a viewing at all, even if you’ve already seen all of the good zombie flicks. The acting is menial, the direction tame and indistinct and the plot is just weak. What happened, George Romero? How did you sink to such a gut-wrenchingly lame and pussified low as this movie? This is just shit, shit, shit all around, and the only way I can possibly recommend it to anyone is if you have absolutely no standards. Otherwise, you can just take a look at a pile of actual shit and you’d probably have something of equal worth. Putrid.