Revenge of the Revenant Review 26: The one that's George Romero without George Romero

 

Title: Zombi

What Year?: 1978

Classification: Unnatural Experiment

Rating: Ow, My Brain!!! (Unrated/ NR)

 

As I write this, I’m into the final stretch of what I planned for this feature. In the process, I’ve come back to a decision I’ve been putting off for a long time, how to handle the films of George Romero. So far, I’ve covered Two Evil Eyes (or half of it) as representative of the rest, but I was never satisfied that that would or could be the end of it. The obvious problem that kept coming up is that almost all his zombie movies were unusual and “weird” for the time, but even his lesser works (see esp The Crazies and Day of the Dead) have long since become known and influential enough for the genre to shift to accommodate them. In the end, there was one entry whose sheer improbability demanded further attention, if only because it could never happen again. With that, I present Zombi, the movie that’s not quite the same as the most successful and possibly best zombie movie ever.

Our story begins in the middle of a familiar scenario: The dead are returning to life, and rabidly overwhelming the government and urban civilization. In short order, we meet Fran, a TV producer at the end of her rope, her boyfriend Stephen, the network’s helicopter pilot, and Roger and Peter, two SWAT officers who meet while trying to clean out an infested tenement. The group join together in a bid to escape the city in a hazily appropriated helicopter. As their fuel runs low, they land on the roof of a mall that’s still intact. There, they discover everything from gourmet food to guns, but it’s far more than they can take with them, and the zombies seem instinctively drawn to the shopping center as much as they are to living prey. The guys quickly hatch a plan to take the mall back from the undead and keep the goods for themselves. Their offensive succeeds, except they have not counted on the price, and the zombies are not only threat. When the survivors find themselves in battle with living raiders and the undead, will they have the will to escape, or will consumer culture finally leave them to be consumed?

Zombi was the Italian release of the highly successful 1978 George Romero film Dawn of the Dead. The production was a collaboration between Romero and Italian filmmaker Dario Argento, with a cast that included Ken Foree as Peter, Richard France of The Crazies as the (sometimes) unnamed scientist, and effects guy Tom Savini in a small but prominent role as the leader of the biker gang. In Italy, the movie was released under the title Zombi, as a 118-minute cut reportedly assembled by Argento. It has been known in the US mainly for its connection with the 1979 film Zombie (see The Beyond), an originally unrelated film initially released under the title Zombi 2. Following releases of both versions on VHS and disc before 2010, the film became entangled in issues with various rights holders which have blocked new Blu Ray releases or distribution on streaming platforms. A Spanish Blu Ray of the Argento cut may be the most accessible high-resolution release of any version of the film.

Moving into my experiences, I could tell a long story of how I found Dawn of the Dead. For my encounter with the present selection, however, I will start a few months back. I was fresh off a rage binge after checking on the latest announcement of an imminent new release of the movie that might turn up on US soil. When I once again turned up nothing, I was frustrated enough to look to the online listings, and found a European seller offering the Spanish release whose legality is clear as zombie bodily fluids. With a little cross-checking, I confirmed that it was the storied Argento cut, which I had already seen others praise as equal or even superior to the US/ Romero version(s). It was the kind of thing that usually doesn’t greatly interest me, and I was pretty sure I had already seen a couple versions at one time or another without noticing much difference one way or the other. As usual, I was interested enough to proceed, and ordered the damn disc, and got to it after a few days. I went in without a fresh viewing of my ancient DVD, but with my usual world’s-worst-superpower memory honed over almost 20 years of viewings, and the one thing that quickly became apparent is that this is not the same movie I knew. What’s far stranger is that I was quite unprepared for how it would be different.

The one thing to get to right off the bat is the music. This is in turn something where a little honesty is in order about Romero, who famously drew much of the soundtrack from stock music, including “The Gonk”, a 1965 number often remembered as the “theme”. The complete absence of this alone in the Argento cut may throw off U.S. fans. Fairness requires, however, that we consider what is offered instead. For the most part, the difference is mostly made up by the already familiar music of Goblin, without much more repetition than in an average movie soundtrack. The differences get more pronounced in the attack/ action sequences, which in at least one notable case are simply done with no music at all. There’s also a strange riff that sometimes accompanies the zombies, including the famed Hare Krishna, that I find distinctly archaic, like something out of a 1950s monster movie. It’s in the finale, however, that Argento’s music truly feels like its own “thing”, with an electric-guitar heavy score to accompany the final battle. It is at least a bold choice, and the one real “problem” is that it doesn’t capture the ironies and shifting moods that Romero intended.

Meanwhile, what gets entirely counterintuitive is that Argento’s approach is in many ways more subtle than Romero’s, and I suspect this is a major reason the defenders come out in its favor. Of course, there is more gore, as well as some more dynamic shots and pacing (the most striking to me being a head-on take of the car driving through the mall). Even here, though, there are moments of restraint, like a moment of silence when the barricaded room in the tenement is broken open. On the other side, there is a good deal of extra dialogue, enough to provide better development of the main characters. There’s even some extra scenes with the bikers that reveal a fair level of intelligence and planning. It’s all the more impressive that the total running time is still almost 10 minutes shorter than Romero’s “theatrical” cut. Something else that stands out to me is that the memorable “character” zombies don’t seem as prominent or well-rounded, to the point that a personal favorite of mine simply disappears by the finale. (Commentary on the NRA presumably didn’t resonate with the Europeans!)

It is indeed in the finale that the differences continue to count against Zombi. Of course, it must be factored in that this is where Romero himself made his most latest and most controversial decisions, and it seems conceivable that at a certain point, Argento acted on sheer frustration. Yet, that alone does not account for what I find to be an odd lack of emotional weight. The improved pacing that worked in earlier segments starts to feel just rushed, including in the death of a major character. The existing issues show most in Peter’s already controversial escape. The apparently unidentified stock track used by Romero is as infamous as “The Gonk” is loved, to the point that I found multiple sources that independently named it “(the) hero music”. Yet, it at least suits the tone as the trooper comes back from the brink and starts fighting back. In Argento’s cut, on the other hand, the guitar keeps droning on right through the credits.

That brings me to the “one scene”. If I were really doing a review of the movie as a whole, I wouldn’t even try, which ultimately is why movies this prominent almost never suit my purposes. When it comes to differences between Romero and Argento, however, there is indeed one that stands out uniquely. After the establishing scenes in the TV studio and the tenement, we come to a dock where Roger and Fran land to refuel and meet up with the troopers. (As loremasters will know, the late Joe Pilato made a cameo at this point in Romero’s cuts.) In the “theatrical” cut, this comes in a jump cut abrupt and ominous enough to imply that the “heroes” may have committed outright murder. (Or maybe that’s just me…) Here, we actually see the helicopter land at an apparently deserted facility. Stephen climbs out and makes his way inside. There’s a typically well-framed shot as he enters a darkened corridor. He follows the sound of a radio around the corner, where he discovers a uniformed figure still seated at a console, dead from a gruesome wound to the head (where the theatrical cut begins).  He’s visibly shaken, though not enough to refrain from searching the surroundings. The speaker on the radio presses for an answer, until finally Stephen picks up the mic long enough to say, “Operator dead, post abandoned.” He promptly leaves, ignoring further requests for him to identify itself. It’s one of the more intriguing variations, which in many ways sits better with what we see of the characters, but doesn’t hold quite the same impact as it did when left ambiguous.

In conclusion, what’s noteworthy if not bizarre about Zombi is that it was made with Romero’s evident approval, and that alone was enough for me to give up on giving it a "rating". It’s now fairly routine to have “director’s cuts” as an implied rebuke to interference and censorship, but this took place contemporaneously with the theatrical release. A further thought that has weighed on my mind is that the movie and to a certain extent Romero’s work as a whole never had quite the same problems as more routine exploitation fare. While the violence and gore were easy targets for moral guardian types, for sheer puritanical outrage (and retrospective “cringe”), this didn’t even push the bounds of “’70s PG” films (see Shanks). On a deeper level, the anti-materialist and antiauthoritarian themes fit in just as well with apocalyptic Christianity as with ‘70s liberalism.  I have previously commented that Romero was counterintuitively traditional in his filmmaking, and here one can see down to an almost Medieval moral core. The bottom line is that the strength of the film’s artistic vision lay in its restraint as much as its boldness, and the balance paid off. Sometimes, what we don’t see is as horrifying as what we do, and that is what separates the workmen from the masters.