It’s nice to see Joe Kane — aka The Phantom of the Movies — emerge from the video aisles with another book. Instead of covering hundreds of titles this time, his third tackles just one, but it’s a goodie. NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD: BEHIND THE SCENES OF THE MOST TERRIFYING HORROR MOVIE EVER covers George Romero’s 1968 classic from idea to influence, but really, it doubles as a Romero career retrospective.
Even by watching all the numerous DVD documentaries and commentaries on NOTLD, you won’t get quite a complete a picture of the making of the low-budget classic than you will by reading. Through interviews with the principals, Kane details virtually every aspect of its inception and production, warts and all.
And being a labor of love, there were plenty of warts, but also just as many happy accidents. The bigger obstacles didn’t arrive until after production, when critics assailed the film, yet that only brought it more publicity. That resulted in enormous box office, but Romero and company never got their cut, thanks to the famous oversight of the missing copyright notice, which threw the moneymaker into the public domain. (Through various collections and editions, I think I have a dozen copies of it on DVD, with transfers ranging from pristine to shoddy.)
All that would be enough for the NOTLD fan, but Kane keeps going, covering all of Romero’s sequels and all his movies in between, from successful (CREEPSHOW) to not (MONKEY SHINES). But, wait, there’s more! Kane also covers the RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD franchise; Tom Savini’s official NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD remake (which gets too hard of a knock, I think); Jeff Broadstreet’s disastrous NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD 3D remake; and the equally disastrous 30TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION, for which John Russo, Russ Streiner and Bill Hinzman attempted — operative word: attempted — to work in 15 minutes of new scenes.
At the end, Kane includes a healthy filmography and Russo’s original screenplay for those interested in seeing as it was originally written. It’s not properly formatted and all the dialogue is in captial letters, but I guess it doesn’t matter when you’re making the movie yourself. And as we now know and continue to appreciate, they obviously knew what they were doing. —Rod Lott
Related posts:
- Gospel of the Living Dead: George Romero’s Visions of Hell on Earth
- The Living Dead
- Dead of Night Featuring the Man-Thing
- King Kong: The History of a Movie Icon from Fay Wray to Peter Jackson
- Living Dangerously: The Adventures of Merian C. Cooper, Creator of King Kong
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Rod,
As a huge fan of the film, I’m looking forward to checking out this book…my question to you is, which DVD version do you consider the best of the lot?
Many thanks for a great site!
Nancy
I have the Elite 2-disc edition, but I also bought the recent (and very cheap) Dimension release for the new, feature-length documentary in its extras. And for fun, the Rifftrax colorized version is good just for the guys’ commentary.
Ordering my copy of the book pronto. Joe Kane is god! Thanks for pointing this one out, Rod.
The 2-disc Millenium Edition put out in 2002 by Elite Entertainment is considered the definitive NotLD DVD release.
Many thanks Will E.!! Off to eBay….
I love behind-the-scenes books like this, especially ones about flicks I love. Totally agree with you that Savini’s remake gets too harsh a treatment. I’ve watched it a handful of times over the last few years and despite some woeful over-acting it’s a tight, entertaining take on Romero’s classic. Will definitely pick this up for future summer reading.
Thanks for the info about the copyright situation, I always wondered what was up with that. My local cable access is always playing this movie (by the looks of it, a worn out vhs version) on their weekend horror host shows along with other obscure and public domain movies. Always wondered how such a recent and famous movie became public domain.