The Crazies (1973)
It isn’t that surprising to watch a George Romero movie and see someone being brutally murdered. Nor is it that novel to see how he delights in charting the downfall of mankind, usually as a result of our own folly. What marks him out as a great filmmaker is his ability to weave his pretty linear story into a complex narrative on the tragic weakness of humanity, namely our unfathomable combination of dauntless courage and distasteful arrogance. The Dead series is steeped in this notion, with Romero executing a beautiful full-circle from Night to Land in showing audiences how, when the going gets tough we generally go to pieces.
Day of the Dead (1985)
For two decades, Day of the Dead was considered the final installment of George A Romero’s seminal zombie series, and talk of the film has always carried with it the faintest sense of anticlimax. As has been well documented over the years, it’s not exactly the film Romero set out to make - his planned epic featuring, amongst other things, a war between several zombie factions, had to be drastically scaled back for budgetary reasons - but he’s since labelled it his favourite of the original trilogy, and twenty years later there’s a strong case to be made for Day as the best in the series. Read more
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