‘Land of the Dead’ 4K UHD Blu-ray (review)

Every stew needs a pinch of salt, but you can’t make a stew out of salt.

That culinary metaphor may seem an incongruous beginning for a review of 2005’s Land of the Dead now available on 4K UHD, a film about cannibalistic zombies, but stick with it for a moment: Land of the Dead is the fourth entry into George Romero’s celebrated Living Dead series of films.

Those films, 1968’s Night of the Living Dead; 1978’s Dawn of the Dead and 1985’s Day of the Dead are revered for how they mix creeping horror and human drama with prescient social commentary.

Land of the Dead takes this to a fault.

Made at the height of George W. Bush’s War on Terror and post-9/11 paranoia, the film is swallowed up in its social commentary to the point where all the zombies seem to be operating in service to a painfully on the nose allegory for political oligarchy, class struggle, and America’s renewed capacity for offensive warfare after 2001.

Set some time after the events of Day of the Dead, the film is centered on Fiddler’s Green, a heavily guarded luxury high rise for super wealthy survivors surrounded by a squalid slum near the ruins of Pittsburgh.

Dennis Hopper plays Paul Kaufman, the wealthy controller of Fiddler’s Green whose control depends on commodities scavenged from the nearby ruins. To this end, Kaufman sponsors a team of runners led by Riley (Simon Baker) who lead organized raids into the old city with the help of their massive assault vehicle,Dead Reckoning.

Riley looks at what he’s doing as a necessary evil, but his second in command Cholo (John Leguizamo) has been Kaufman’s personal fixer for some time in the hopes that he can one day be allowed to live in the high rise. When Kaufman backs out on his end, Cholo effectively steals Dead Reckoning and holds the community to ransom, drawing Riley back in.

All the while, the zombie hordes waiting outside the gates have slowly begun to adapt to the organized tactics of the raiders, setting the stage for a ghoulish final showdown.

Land of the Dead has one real central issue: where the other films in this series each felt like a snapshot into the anxieties of the decade they were made, most of the symbolism and allegory was subtextual, even when it wasn’t subtle.

Dawn of the Dead may delight in its zombies doing pratfalls in an abandoned shopping mall as an obvious metaphor for consumerism’s ability to dehumanize, but the characters in the film were tough, desperate people just trying to survive a literal fate worse than death.

This film almost feels like a satirical comedy in how each of the principal characters is a device for commentary rather than a person.

When Cholo declares “I don’t care about love, I only care for money” or Kaufman infamously states “We don’t negotiate with terrorists,” we’re pulled out of the movie, out of the characters’ struggle to survive and reminded of the politics the film is referencing. This continually breaks the tension, and it also dates the film in a way that none of the others in the series suffer from.

Land of the Dead is a film of its moment in pop culture and hasn’t remained in the public consciousness the way the first three films did.

What absolutely does work though is the continuation of the other major throughline of Romero’s zombie films– the narrowing gap between the humans and the monsters and how we begin to resemble one another when in crisis. In this film Eugene Clark plays a zombie informally known as “Big Daddy” who begins to remember how to use tools, and starts to reclaim his human instincts.

This is not only a great device for ramping up the finale’s tension but a satisfying continuation of the Bub storyline from Day of the Dead. It’s fitting that while this film was releasing in the midst of endless repetitions on the zombie theme, the master of the zombie film found a new angle for the monsters themselves that keeps the audience guessing.

Extras are plentiful: included in the set includes the Unrated 4K UHD, and two Blu-rays with both the Unrated and Theatrical Cuts.  Spread across the sets are audio commentaries, featurettes, CGI test, interviews, deleted scenes, photo gallery, and theatrical trailer.

Land of the Dead is a mixed bag: it has some fantastic ideas, and the best action of the series but the fatal flaw is how a great cast of actors are wasted in the thinnest possible roles because the story has been subsumed in service to the satire and not the other way around.

What we’re left with is a well made horror film with monsters we love where we really don’t care what happens to any of the people, and in a survival horror film, if you can’t care whether the people survive– you have a serious issue.