George Romero's black & white cult low budget zombie film, Night of the Living Dead is now regarded as a seminal classic.It is not a great film. The acting is ropy, the zombie effects are not that good and it is too talky. However it did rewrite the rules for low budget horror films.Two siblings are visiting their father's grave and are attacked by a strange looking drifter. The woman, Barbara (Judith O'Dea) runs to an abandoned farmhouse to escape him.Ben (Duane Jones) a black man also escapes to the farmhouse where she meets Barbara who is in shock. Ben barricades both of them inside the farmhouse by reinforcing the doors and windows.They encounter several other people who have been hiding out in the cellar. They learn on the radio that radiation contamination from a space probe has somehow reactivated the brain of dead people. These people were now devouring the flesh of the living who themselves would come back as zombies.It is a classic base under siege scenario with various types of people bickering, arguing and reluctantly joining forces. The film is notable that the lead is played by a black actor who is ordering the other survivors around, even shouting at them. In retrospect that looks like a brave piece of casting.Jones does give the film's best performance. O'Dea is pretty bad though, the zombies are more animated than her.

If you watch this film and wonder...what exactly is the big deal...well you could not be more wrong. This is where the zombie genre began...with a film shot in black and white for less than a 150,000 dollars. The atmosphere is amazing which is what sold the film really and the actors are also good considering most were just side characters actors. George Romero started a franchise with this and even directed many other zombie films but this is where it all began. Its funny how the film is in public domain and anyone really can make a version of this and yet many have tried and failed to match the intensity and horror of the original. This is a must watch if you are a horror fan.

I should alert readers that I am not very knowledgeable about the modern zombie genre, so my review should be taken accordingly as one by an unenlightened old geezer who is not at all hip to the twenty first century.This classic horror movie's greatest strength is its carefully developed and successful "creepiness factor" by director George Romero. After many viewings, I am still terrified when the man walking among the cemetery monuments (Bill Heinzman) suddenly begins to attack Barbara (Judith O'Dea) before moving on to her brother, Johnny, (Russell Streiner), and then begins to chase her into an isolated farmhouse before being joined by what becomes an army of his fellow ghouls, mysteriously raised from the dead. Heinzman not only imitates Karloff very well, but he looks like him! It's my worst nightmare being brought to life on the screen.Although the music is stock material, it was well chosen for its fear effect and downright creepiness. Considering its low budget, Romero's ability to create such a spine-chilling movie is very impressive and commendable.One of the problems with the film, however, is that it fails to sustain the intensity of its opening scenes and loses its punch along the way. I understand that the dialogue was often spontaneous, but it was also often weak, as was much of the acting. This may be controversial, but I didn't get the racial theme that many IMDb reviewers mentioned. I saw Ben as Ben without regards to his race. Harry views both Ben and Tom, who is white, with contempt, and I didn't understand why Ben didn't shout out "Help! I'm not a zombie!" as soon as he heard gunshots outside. He had to know that the zombies were incapable of shooting weapons. Also, the scientists and military officials in Washington were not very credible. They were actually laughable, as was their dialogue.In spite of the weaknesses, this film remains as a remarkable, pioneering classic in the horror genre, and I will continue to watch it and fear it.

Director/co-writer George Romero and co-writer John Russo bring a fierce and subversive undiluted nihilism to the basic formula horror premise of the dead coming back to life as hideous flesh-eating ghouls that's lost none of its sting throughout the decades: Whether it's a couple of loved ones returning as lethal zombies so they can kill their own mother or sister or the noble Ben (a fine and commanding performance by Duane Jones) being shot dead with a bullet to the head after he's mistaken for a zombie by a posse of trigger-happy rednecks, this film pulls zero punches. Romero and Russo tackle head on major issues that remain timely and topical even today: The unreliability of the clueless media, the danger posed by average citizens having easy access to firearms, people failing to put their differences aside in order to work together so they can survive a perilous situation, and society starting to come apart at the seams when faced with a baffling problem that it's patently unprepared for and hence unable to properly deal with. In a movie rich with dark and delicious ironies, one of the richest and mot biting ironies of all is that the idea proposed by the selfish and cowardly Harry Cooper (well played to the slimy and sniveling hilt by Karl Hardman) to hole up in the basement is much better than Ben's insistence on remaining upstairs. Wholly deserving of its classic status.