Land of the Dead

Land of the Dead (formerly known as Dead Reckoning) (2005) is the name for the fourth installment of the Living Dead zombie movie series. The movie was shot in Toronto, Ontario, despite director George A. Romero's wishes to continue the series in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The movie began filming on October 11, 2004, and was partially credited to fans, according to Romero, who kept on bugging him to do another zombie movie.

Social satire

• An emphasis is placed on class differences. The rich elite live blissfully indulgent lives in the skyscraper

while the lower-class masses live in terrible conditions in the city below.

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• At one point there is a shot of a bird cage in Fiddler?s Green. It seems to imply that the people in the city, while protected, were actually prisoners from the outside world. Later on, during the zombie attack on Fiddler's Green, the birds inside the cage are revealed to be mechanical - perhaps commentary on the artificial nature of life inside such a closed community.
• Kaufman (Dennis Hopper) uses vices such as gambling, prostitution, alcohol, drugs and gladiator fights with the undead to distract the lower class from their miserable lives. This touches on the theme of ?bread and circuses? used in the Roman Empire.
• It is implied that Kaufman rules largely through fear, with frequent ominous allusions to the "stenches", the derogatory term for zombies, from overwhelming the people. This is likely an allusion to certain criticisms of US president George W. Bush's frequent invocations of terrorism, a likelihood that is reinforced by a scene in which Kaufman declares that he does not "negotiate with terrorists."
• There are several scenes that show a Punch and Judy-style puppet show performed inside a hollowed out TV with an American flag tacked up as a backdrop. The glimpses of the play one sees intimates that it is a simplistic story of a human outsmarting and defeating a zombie. Implicit in this is a criticism of the US media.
• In several scenes the rich seem to be preoccupied with cell phones and are frustrated when they cannot get signals. This demonstrates the disconnect between the idle rich and the real world: even in the face of the undead hordes, they are concerned about signal strength.
• Romero's characters display an especially human covetousness towards money, considering the collapse of the United States and world economy would render money worthless—especially outside the human-controlled areas.
• The zombies are totally mesmerized by fireworks shot into the sky at night. Eventually, however, they learn not to be distracted by the lights and become immune to them. Romero here may be referring to the greatly touted Shock and Awe deception campaign employed against Iraq by the US military, which kept the enemy focused on the sky, allowing for the lightning-fast ground assault.
• The ending has a definite Marxist ?workers rise up? feel to it. The masses, undead and poor included, overthrow the rich and dethrone them. The use by the undead of workers tools such as jackhammers and spanners to break into Fiddler's Green, as well as the very proleterian garb of Big Daddy, contributes to this. A similar scene appears near the end of Fritz Lang's Metropolis.