Romero’s imaginative and thrilling zombie sequel

A decade after the excellent “Night of the Living Dead” (1968), writer/director George Romero offers up this exceptional sequel. The plague of reanimated corpses with a hunger for warm flesh is now global and society is increasingly breaking down. A television exec (Gaylen Ross), her helicopter-reporter beau (David Emge) and two SWAT officers (Ken Foree and Scott Reiniger) take refuge in a suburban mall. Unfortunately for them, a veritable army of biker-raiders wants the mall for their own.

One of the main reasons this film is so iconic is because Romero seriously considered what it would be like after a ‘zombie apocalypse’ and came up with an inspired story. While the bleakness of the situation is addressed there’s also a sense of adventurous freedom; for instance, the protagonists having an entire mall to themselves.

The movie’s disturbing, ghastly and gory, but also action-packed and sometimes humorous. The zombies make for good bullet fodder while, at the same time, satirizing consumer society. The creative score is varied and I’m sure it was cutting edge at the time, but it’s very dated today, although you’ll probably find yourself acclimating to it. The no-name cast is convincing with the towering Foree standing out while Emge comes across as a poor man’s Donald Sutherland.

The movie runs 2 hours, 7 minutes with the longer version running 2 hours, 19 minutes (the one I watched). It was shot in Monroeville, Pennsylvania, and nearby Pittsburgh.

GRADE: A-