George A. Romero's Land of the Dead

Okay, I don't get the zombie thing. No, I understand what zombies are, I just don't get the interest in movies about them. Old time sci-fi movies used to have men dressed in tin suits posing as robots. They lumbered along at such a slow pace one wondered how they ever caught up with anyone to do them harm. Now the robots in I, Robot had more terror potential.

Zombies are the same thing as the old-time robots. The only difference is that they are made of flesh and blood, can only be killed by cutting off their heads or by a brain-destroying headshot, and if they bite you, you become one, too.

In this movie, which starts off in a world where zombies are growing in numbers and people live in fenced enclaves, zombies are evolving and getting smarter. Not as smart as a parakeet, mind you, but smarter and much less mindless than before.

We have our hero, his sidekick, the guy with dubious ethics, and the girl he meets along the way. All the standard character elements of movies like this. We also have a bad guy in the form of Dennis Hopper who basically phones in the same performance he's given in so many other movies. It's getting old, just like him.

Hopper plays a crooked developer who has created an enclave away from the zombies called "Fiddler's Green." This leaves the other uninfected people outside to fend for themselves. We discover that he's been giving them drugs and diseases to make them food for the zombies.

Our hero is part of a crew that goes out zombie hunting at night. They have a battle wagon named Dead Reckoning, and when our guy of dubious ethics (played by John Leguizamo), who has been colluding with Hopper character, is betrayed by Hopper, he steals Dead Reckoning.

Well, Hopper wants Dead Reckoning to get him and his cronies out of Fiddler's Green and move to a safe place up in Canada, where there are no people. No people=no zombie food=no zombies, get it? So, he hires our hero to get Dead Reckoning back. He and his sidekick (a mentally challenged one-eyed guy who also happens to be a crack shot) and new girl (a hooker he saved from a pair of zombies) set off on Leguizamo's trail. This is important, because Leguizamo will use Dead Reckoning to destroy Fiddler's Green and along with it the encampments of the poor people as well with some missiles that the truck is armed with.

Well, I'll leave the plot there. I'll just say that two or three times I felt like I'd rather be in my dentist's office have a few teeth pulled.

But I don't get zombie movies, so don't take my word that it's bad. Find out on your own.