Ever since a minor copyright incident caused Georgia A.
Romero’s 1968 classic Night of the Living
Dead to be relegated to the public domain there have been tons of
filmmakers trying to cash in on the popularity and name of that film with their
own take on the material. One of the
latest is director Douglas Schutze’s Mimesis:
Night of the Living Dead (2011). A
group of horror fans at a party awaken the next morning to find they are living
as characters from the film Night of the
Living Dead and carrying out events from that film in new and horrifying
ways.
This more modern take on the material finds our main
characters believing that the dead have returned to the land of the living to
kill them all. It is a very self-aware
film as the characters recognize the film they are forced to relive as well as
the common tropes of all horror films as they realize they are trapped in a
simple farmhouse in a siege scenario. The film is actually very entertaining and
brings new material and ideas to the zombie genre especially in its look at the
home invasion film which takes a bigger emphasis in the final third of the
film.
Mimesis has a lot
of original ideas going for it wrapped in the disguise of a classic horror film
and you can be forgiven for thinking that this film is just another uninspired
knock-off of Romero’s classic like the 2006 film Night of the Living Dead 3D (and its 2012 sequel Re-Animation) as well as last year’s Night of the Living Dead: Resurrection. This is one of the unofficial films that
actually pay homage to the original while also presenting enough original ideas
to make it worth even the most jaded Romero fan’s time.
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