Something With an Edge

This week saw the 4K release of two films by beloved horror masters who are no longer with us but still very present, echoing through modern genre cinema in ways big and small. They’re very different visions, which is no surprise; what is surprising, at least to me, is the way each film serves as a window into the strengths and limitations of their directors.

Otherwise, Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street and George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead couldn’t have less in common. Even as chapters of a successful film series, they’re polar opposites: The scrappy Nightmare kicked off a franchise that raised the stakes on slasher cinema both narratively and stylistically for a decade or more, while Land was the ostensible end point of the zombie saga Romero had started four decades earlier in Night of the Living Dead, produced by a major studio on a scale that dwarfed any of the other films.

In the rear view, with Freddy Krueger having been a pop-culture fixture for forty years, it’s instructive as well as surprising to revisit the first Nightmare and realize there was almost nothing funny about him at all. The heavies of The Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes and even Deadly Blessing were allowed some level of humanity, however twisted; Fred Kreuger was pure malevolence, a sneering child-murderer avenging his death at the hands of a vigilante mob by invading the dreams of their surviving teenagers a decade or so later.

Full credit to Craven here: Krueger is an ingenious creation, a monster in life who only got worse after he was killed. Craven’s script never offers any motivation for his original crimes other than simple opportunity. The sequels made him an evil prankster, pouring on the one-liners and the surrealist dream sequences, but the first Nightmare presents him as a cold, sadistic threat, almost always lurking in the shadows, his scarred face and growling voice rendering him almost feral. He’s unsettling in a way he’d never be again, however many sequels they made.

I’ve always wondered if the casting of Robert Englund – a proper actor, not a stunt performer – was the reason the character caught on; unlike the faceless, unemotional Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees, there was a sense of liberation in Englund’s performance that connected with audiences. Dead or alive, Fred Krueger enjoys his work; it’s up to plucky Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp) and her friends to figure out how to send him back to hell.

That premise is the simplest in the series, and the template for pretty much everything that followed, which was another limitation of the Elm Street sequels: This thing keeps happening in the same neighborhood, with a new group of teens realizing they’re Freddy’s next victims and rallying to fight him off. But here it’s fresh, and since those teens are really well-cast – with the engaging, sympathetic Langenkamp supported by Amanda Wyss and a factory-fresh Johnny Depp – it’s easy to root for them as things get weirder and weirder.

The funny thing about Land of the Dead is that its maker doesn’t really care if we root for his heroes – at least, not the ones with a pulse. Even the best of the humans are a little pissy when the film opens, having survived years of the plague and watched America collapse into Fiddler’s Green, a condo-and-mall complex in the ruins of Pittsburgh where wealthy tenants live in luxury, employing an ecosystem of guards and employees to wait on them hand and foot, scavenging goods from the outside.

No, this movie wants us to root for a different set of heroes entirely.

Romero’s sympathies lie with the dead, and this time they get some damn respect.

Sure, Dawn showed us that the dead had memories, and Day introduced us to Bub, a zombie who showed clear signs of intelligence and even personality … so long as he was well-fed. But Land goes a step further. The zombies have been around long enough that they’ve learned to communicate with one another – or at least their leader, a former mechanic known as Big Daddy (Eugene Clark), has, and he has a very simple message: The apocalypse is back on.

As it happens, the fragile society of Fiddler’s Green is already collapsing, no matter how hard its realtor-slash-president Kaufman (Dennis Hopper) tries to reassure his people; things are running out, the workforce – as personified by John Leguizamo’s testy scavenger Cholo – is starting to question exactly why they have to kowtow to the fat cats when they’re the ones with the guns and the supplies, and Cholo’s more pragmatic pal Riley (Simon Baker) is getting tired of trying to keep the peace.

It isn’t long before Cholo commandeers the scavengers’ armored RV and lays siege to the complex, demanding a five-million-dollar bounty – leading Kaufman to force Riley, his sidekick Charlie (Robert Joy) and their new pal Slack (Asia Argento) on a mission to take Cholo out. Anyway, the zombies show up and ruin everything because, well, this is a George A. Romero movie. And the really awkward thing about Land of the Dead is how little it has on its mind.

Sure, advances in effects technology – deployed by a generation of artists who grew up loving the earlier films – mean both the zombies and their carnage look more convincing than ever, and the resources of Universal Pictures meant Romero could tell this story on a scale that dwarfs Land’s predecessors. But he hasn’t come up with anything really new: The dead walk, the living turn out to be selfish and venal, turning on each other and failing to confront the common threat while a handful of decent folks wind up banding together to escape the ensuing chaos.

All three of the films that made Land of the Dead a marketable project – Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later … , Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead and Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead – had more to say about people and zombies than Land does, and it’s the first sign that Romero was slowing down. I loved the guy, and I don’t begrudge him the work he so loved, but Diary of the Dead and Survival of the Dead were faded copies of his original brilliance, and Land doesn’t really hold up either.

I did have fun spotting Canadian actors and Toronto locations, though. There’s no single cast member whose career subsequently exploded the way Survival’s Tatiana Maslany did, but there are plenty of familiar faces. Boyd Banks (who also appeared in the Dawn remake) and Jennifer Baxter turn up as two of Big Daddy’s posse, and Tony Nappo, Maxwell McCabe-Lokos, Peter Outerbridge, Heidi Von Palleske, Shawn Roberts, Jasmin Geljo, Earl Pastko, Richard Clarkin, Krista Bridges and a very young Devon Bostick all turn up as potential zombie fodder. As for outlander cameos, Simon Pegg and Tom Savini turn up to provide callbacks to Day and Dawn, respectively, and Edgar Wright is also here, because how could he pass up the chance to be a zombie for George A. Romero? I’d have done the same.

Warner’s 40^th anniversary release of A Nightmare on Elm Street presents the film in the cleanest version I’ve ever seen – perhaps not a surprise, since I first encountered it on VHS, a format not known for handling dark imagery all that well. The DVD didn’t look great either; Warner’s Blu-ray offered a considerable improvement, but this new UHD master is almost spotless, with organic shadows and only the slightest sign of degradation in shots with optical effects. It’s almost too clear, if I’m being honest; this is the sort of movie that should feel slimy and disreputable, like a tape that’s been rented three or four times too often.

The Scream Factory restoration of Land of the Dead arrives a year ahead of the film’s 20^th anniversary, but zombies don’t care about milestones so that’s okay. The transfer is spotless, as you’d expect from a film of such recent vintage, though once again the sense of no expense spared feels wrong for Romero’s vibe.

After the graininess of Night, the Prismacolor blood of Dawn and the brown-and-yellow palette of Day, it’s downright jarring to see the living dead looking so well put-together, with a prosthetics budget that can stand up under a studio lighting package. Yes, the people of Fiddler’s Green live in luxury, but the rest of the world looks too good; I kinda wondered why the dead would want to take over the place. I guess for the food. It’s always about food.

Extras on both discs are sourced from earlier releases, and both packages offer the theatrical and unrated editions of their respective features … though only the unrated director’s cut of Land gets the UHD bump. It’s the same strategy Shout employed on its 4K edition of the Dawn remake: unrated version in 4K, rated and unrated cuts on separate BDs with different suites of extras, all mastered from the new restoration and looking downright spiffy.

All the extras from Shout’s 2017 Blu-ray package are here. Both the 4K and BD platters of the unrated cut feature two audio commentaries – one with Romero, editor Michael Doherty and co-producer Peter Grunwald recorded for Universal’s 2005 DVD, the other a Shout-commissioned track with zombie performers Matt Blazi, Glena Chao, Michael Felsher and Rob Mayr – and the BD also includes the supplements produced for the Universal DVD.

The theatrical Blu is accompanied by Shout’s newer special features: Retrospective interviews with co-stars Leguizamo, Joy and Pedro Miguel Arce, a sit-down with hero zombies Clarke, Baxter, Banks and Geljo and the director’s cut of Dream of the Dead, a production documentary by frequent Romero documentarian Roy Frumkes.

Warner’s Nightmare is a single-disc release, but that disc is chock-full of goodies: We get the two audio commentaries produced for previous DVDs (with Craven, Langenkamp and DP Jacques Haitkin appearing on both), an assortment of alternate and TV-safe takes and three documentaries produced for the 2006 franchise boxed set: The 50-minute “Never Sleep Again: The Making of A Nightmare on Elm Street” and the shorter featurettes “The House that Freddy Built: The Legacy of New Line Horror” and “Night Terrors: The Origins of Wes Craven’s Nightmares”. I admit it: It made me want to revisit some of the sequels.

… well, Dream Warriors and New Nightmare, anyway. Those were fun.

Up next: Spin the spinner and call the shot, it’s Twisters! And Arrow's new Hellraiser set arrives to tear your soul apart … or at least give your 4K player a workout.