George A. Romero's zombie trilogy turns into a tetralogy. Four zombie films seem more than enough for a single filmmaking career, even one that extends almost four decades, and even with an interval of twenty years between the third and the fourth. Zombies, at least as envisioned in his Night of the Living Dead, are inherently less interesting, less multifaceted, less malleable than vampires, for example, or ghosts. Romero pretty much said what he had to say about them in that first film, and then he said it again, more fluently, at greater length, with more humor, and in glorious gory color, in the second, Dawn of the Dead. The third, Day of the Dead, was already redundant, although the missile-silo setting might have made it plainer, if the metaphors of cannibalism and consumerism hadn't made it plain by then, that what he was talking about was the end of civilization as we know it, the end of the world. It is to Romero's credit that he hasn't injected his zombies with the steroidal strength and speed of their bastard offspring in the remake of Dawn...; again to his credit that he hasn't accompanied them with the headbanging heavy metal that seems, everywhere else, to have become their obligatory musical motif (Romero isn't a teenager, he's in his mid-sixties); again to his credit that he has rejected any trendy razzle-dazzle technique in favor of solid old-fashioned craftsmanship; and finally to his credit that, notwithstanding the zombie cameos offered good-naturedly to the makers of Shaun of the Dead, Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright, he hasn't caved in to self-mockery. He is still, let's remember, talking about the end of the world. He is, in his own way, serious. He doesn't seek here to "top" himself, only to maintain. (The quick-hitting gore is indisputably extreme and yet somehow blasé.) And if the evolution of his idea -- the evolution of his zombies -- is not particularly inspired, neither has it been in any way perverted. With Simon Baker, John Leguizamo, Asia Argento, and Dennis Hopper. (2005) — Duncan Shepherd