Children of the Living Dead (2001)

REVIEW

In 1998, John A. Russo, co-writer of the original Night of the Living Dead (1968), revisited the film, removing fifteen minutes of Romero's footage and adding fifteen minutes of newly shot material that got released as Night of the Living Dead: The 30th Anniversary Edition. The new version enraged fans of the original, not only for the needless tinkering but for the blatant attempt to reconfigure the series' continuity - the new ending of the film seems to suggest that there's a way to control the zombie outbreak, thus dismissing the two Romero sequels out of hand. Russo then confirmed many worst suspicions by announcing that he was going to make his own sequel to Night of the Living Dead - or more accurately one to the 30th Anniversary Edition - titled Children of the Living Dead. Although Tom Savini was announced as being involved, fan expectations weren't high - but no-one could have expected something as unbelievably bad as this abomination.

Quite apart from the fact that the film brazenly dismisses the events of Dawn of the Dead () and Day of the Dead (), which would surely have been enough to have angered the vast majority of the fan community, Children of the Living Dead is quite simply awful in every respect. Chief among the film's many crimes against film lovers is the script, surely one of the worst written pieces of hackwork ever placed before a camera. Nothing is ever explained, the narrative constantly skips forward in time with no rhyme nor reason and things happen simply because the writer felt the need for them to do so, nit because they progress naturally from the plot. This is strictly amateur hour stuff and even serious re-writing probably wouldn't have done much for it. That Karen Lee Wolf, perpetrator of this appalling patchwork of atrocious dialogue, bungled exposition and confusing construction (the film actually starts three times!) doesn't seem to have written anything else either before or since Children of the Living Dead is both unsurprising and encouraging.

The cast are uniformly dire. Savini, reduced by post-production tinkering (more of which in a moment) to a mumbling cretin, is only in the film for the first quarter of an hour and has since, wisely, tried to distance himself from the film. The rest are largely unknowns, mostly Pittsburgh natives who have mixed CVs full of bit parts in major movies and major roles in forgotten ones. They're all universally bad, though they're hardly done any favours by that script, which sketches in loose outlines of characters and fails to flesh them out, leaving an inexperienced cast with terrible lines and little else to work with.

Under normal circumstances, one would round on director Tod A. Ramsay, but he's made it clear that the film as it currently exists had little to do with him. Responding by email to a review posted on the Internet Movie Database by James Raynor, Ramsay puts the blame for the film firmly on Karen Lee Wolf, who allegedly refused to allow her script to be tampered with in any way and who took the film to the editing suite without Ramsay to create the final cut. Under these circumstances, it would be unfair to place the blame solely on Ramsay, particularly as his previous feature, Urban Mythology (2000) had been so much better and was clearly the work of an intelligent and talented film maker. (You can read the full sorry story in Ramsay's email here.)

Children of the Living Dead doesn't even have the saving grace of some decent gore, often the one thing that can give zombie movies a much needed lift. It's staggering that with both Savini and make up effects man Vincent J. Guastini (who also worked on Dogma (1999), Requiem For a Dream (2000) and Hannibal (2001) among others) the effects should look so terrible. Indeed the violence and mayhem are so cheap and cheerless that the film managed an uncut release in the UK with the BBFC awarding only a 15 certificate!

It comes to something when many of a film's leading creators have tried to distance themselves from the final product - as well as Savini's justified embarrassment and Ramsay's understandable bitterness, it should be noted that Russo himself, ostensibly the prime movie behind the project until it fell into the wrong hands, has also disowned his pet project. Still, he seems not have learned anything from this terrible experience and in mid-2003 he was promoting another semi-sequel, Escape From the Living Dead, which mercifully has still yet to appear.

Of course, anyone with a passing interest in the genre as a whole and in Romero's zombie movies in particular will already have suffered their way through this truly dire travesty. Anyone who hasn't and feels tempted... Well, it's your decision, but be well warned - if your tastes run to 90 minute amateur movies packed full of non-professional actors performing a script that would get you rejected from the entry process of any decent film school in the world and technical qualities that would have made even Andy Milligan weep with shame, this could be for you. Anyone with sense will steer well clear.

And to think that Romero can't get the backing for a final Dead movie while trash like this can get released...
KEVIN LYONS

Last Updated: 1 January, 2009