A promo trailer has arrived for George Romero’s …of the Dead, which wrapped recently in Toronto. The Voltage Pictures site has the clip, which starts off looking a lot like…a Romero zombie movie. Make that a new Romero zombie movie, but I don’t want to argue the relative merits of that right now. Because a third of the way in, there’s a slight change in tone, and a little bit of Cormac McCarthy flavor. Not that I expect this to be the zombie version of The Road, but by the end of the clip I was a lot more curious about this new project than I ever was about Diary of the Dead.
I’m glad the talkbacks are off for the moment, too, because the litany of people complaining about how cheap the movie looks would get old fast. Yep, it looks cheap. And that doesn’t thrill me, either, but I can deal with it if there’s a story, some characters and ideas. If we don’t get those (again) I’ll be as disappointed as everyone else.
Here’s how Voltage describes the film:
On a small island off North America’s coast, the dead rise to menace
the living. Yet…the islanders can’t bring themselves to exterminate
their loved ones, despite the growing danger from those the once held
dear. A rebel among them hunts down all the zombies he can find, only
to be banished from the island for assassinating his neighbors and
friends. On the mainland, bent on revenge, he encounters a small band
of survivors in search of an oasis on which to build a new life. Barely
surviving an attack from a mass of ravenous flesh-eaters. They
commandeer a zombie-infested ferry and sail to the island. There, to
their horror, they discover that the locals have chained the dead
inside their homes, pretending to live ‘normal’ lives…with bloody
consequences. What ensues is a desperate struggle for survival and the
answer to a question never posed in Romero’s Dead films: Can the living
ever live in peace with the dead?