Horror in the 90s: 'Night of the Living Dead (1990)'

Night of the Living Dead (1990)

Directed by Tom Savini

Written by John A. Russo, George A. Romero

Starring Tony Todd, Patricia Tallman, McKee Anderson, Tom Towles

Release Date October 19th, 1990

Box Office Gross $5.8 million

The 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead is one of the greatest horror movies ever made. There was really no need for a remake. Any movie that tried to recapture the iconic qualities of the original was always doomed to failure. Naturally, the motivation to remake the George A. Romero classic was a shyster producer looking for a popular title that they could ring some fast cash out of. Enter Menaham Golan, half of the schlockmeister team of Golan and Globus, famous for awful sequels from Chuck Norris to Superman. It's doubtful that Golan ever even saw Romero's 1968 classic. All he wanted was the title and concept.

That Golan hired special effects master Tom Savini to direct the remake makes sense, Golan probably figured he could save on salaries for both director and special effects by hiring one guy. I know that sounds cynical, but that is the exact type of corner cutting that Golan made his fortune on in the 1980s. Night of the Living Dead was Savini's first effort as a director and thus he could be brought in cheap with the added bonus of providing special effects and makeup prowess to the proceedings.

The remake of Night of the Living Dead stars Patricia Tallman as Barbara. As she visits the grave or her late mother, along with her brother Johnny (Bill Mosely), Barbara is accosted by a strange lumbering man carrying the stench of death and a fearsome emptiness behind his eyes. In the ensuing scuffle, Johnny is killed and Barbara goes on the run as another strange, lumbering, being emerges and reveals himself as having been recently autopsied.

Running away, a hysterical Barbara arrives at a farm house looking for shelter. Unfortunately, what she finds inside are more of the undead lumbering and lurching after her. Barbara is rescued by the arrival of Ben (Tony Todd), who has, at the very least, learned that taking these beings out with a head shot is the only way to stop them from trying to eat their victim. Together, Ben and Barbara dispatch a pair of the monstrous undead before finding out they aren't the only ones alive in this farm house.

In the basement, a rich couple, the Cooper's, Harry (Tom Towles) and Helen (McKee Anderson), are caring for their sick daughter with the help of a young couple, Tom (William Butler) Judy Rose (Katie Finneran). While Tom welcomes the chance to work with Ben in securing the house from further attacks, Harry is belligerent and nasty. Harry believes that the only safe place in the house is in the cellar and he chooses to strand himself and Helen down their with their daughter while the rest of the cast fortifies the home.

The action of Night of the Living Dead 1990 pretty much tracks to what occurred in the 1968 original but with one notable variation. In the original Night of the Living Dead, Barbara, as played by Judith O'Dea, was a basket case who turned catatonic for most of the movie, paralyzed by fear. In the updated version, Patricia Tallman takes on an early template for the proverbial, Final Girl, the character who goes from victim to heroic badass who saves herself from danger.

It's a good choice as Tallman flips the switch from hysterical suburbanite paralyzed by fear to warrior princess with a shotgun quite well. Barbara is arguably the weakest element of Romero's original as she goes from being the main protagonist to someone who is a detriment to everyone's survival before she is dispatched unceremoniously. Updating Barbara for a new audience of empowered young women in horror is the best choice anyone making a Night of the Living Dead remake could make.

That said, the alteration to Barbara's character has the unfortunate quality of cutting into Ben's character. Tony Todd is a terrific choice to play Ben. He carries the same noble stature as original Night of the Living Dead actor Duane Jones. He has the same composed charisma and innate intelligence as that character as well. Unfortunately, Savini takes the character in a slightly more angry direction. Instead of focusing on the task at hand, stopping the undead from killing everyone, Ben chooses a series of confrontations with Harry, if only so that the movie can create some of the racial tension that made the original movie deeper than it had intended to be.

The ending of the original Night of the Living Dead gets an extra kick of tragedy from the fact that Ben is black and is shot without a seconds hesitation by the arriving army of extras with guns. The fact that Ben had survived all of this time to then be needlessly assassinated took Night of the Living Dead from being a monster movie to a movie of a lot more substance and meaning, especially in 1968 amid the clashes over Civil Rights and Police Brutality.

The remake didn't have the backdrop of 1960s era America to add anything to its back story. Thus, the forced tension between Harry and Ben is used as a stand-in. Harry's casual, unspoken racism, and Ben's reasonable resentment of that racism ends up driving a portion of the second and early 3rd act of Night of the Living Dead. This tension however, makes both characters look very silly as they waste valuable time and bullets, trying to kill each other for really no good reason other than the forced tension Savini and company want to generate as an homage to the original.

In the years since the release of Night of the Living Dead in 1990, Tom Savini has talked about the film being the worst experience of his career. After having been told he would have the freedom to explore his vision of Romero's classic, Savini found himself repeatedly overruled by studio executives and producers who demanded cuts to get an R-Rating and then dismissed many of the story changes that Savini had planned in order to set his film apart from Romero's. By Savini's own estimation, about 40% of the ideas he had for the movie ended up in the film.

Critics at the time of the release panned the remake for, well, being a remake of a classic that doesn't really add anything of note to the classic. Yes, the update to the character of Barbara is a good choice and a new ending, minus the charged racial elements of the original, does give the remake a slight amount of identity all its own, but yeah, there isn't really much here to recommend. We have the original Night of the Living Dead. That film is about as good as that idea is ever going to be.

With Romero's masterpiece looming large, the necessity for a remake, especially one with not much new to say, simply doesn't exist. The mercenary nature of the remake foils any chance for Night of the Living Dead 1990 to stand on its own two shambling, stumbling feet. Tom Savini does what he can to make the proceedings passably entertaining. He does have an incredible knack for gore effects, make up and sound design that occasionally threatens to give life to this remake. Sadly, he's undermined throughout by a studio and producers who simply want the original all over again so they could make a marketing campaign as much as a movie.

Intellectual Property thus was always more important than any kind of artistry or storytelling or personality that Savini was going to bring to Night of the Living Dead. The producers of the remake were far more interested in pinching pennies and marketing the movie than in actually making a remake that could stand on its own as a good horror movie. The compromises to Savini's vision, the deep cuts to get an R-Rating, and story choices that exist only to callback to the original, all work to doom Night of the Living Dead (1990).

This article on Night of the Living Dead 1990 is a serialized portion of my ongoing book project, Horror in the 90s. In the book I am writing about theatrically released horror movies from January 1990 through December of 1999. I am writing reviews and examining the tropes, trends, stars, and franchises that defined this pivotal decade in the horror genre. You can read previous serialized Horror in the 90s articles at Horror.Media. I am hard at work on the book but I cannot complete the book without your help.

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