So this is George Romero’s sequel to Night of the Living Dead. It’s also iconic — it’s the movie that introduced the shopping mall to the zombie genre, and it’s where you get road flares (press X to light) and a helicopter on the roof and a car you can use to plow through crowds; just very iconic. Two things about it surprised me, though.

The one that shouldn’t have: It’s not quite what you’d think from its influencees. I expected that it would be a group of people fleeing to a shopping mall, and then desperately trying to barricade it and keep it safe before succumbing to a zombie onslaught. But no! It’s people who take off from a TV station in a helicopter, fly it across the state (stopping at an abandoned airport for gas), and who eventually land on top of a mall so they can pick up supplies, but then decide to hole up there. It’s a half hour before you even get to the mall.

And then once they’re there, they build a safe haven in an upstairs storage room, and quickly clear out the residual zombies in the mall. They live there for literal months, just chilling and having a nice life (though they get snappish that nothing is on TV anymore; there was no sign that they raided the mall’s Waldenbooks for reading material). There are zombies outside, but apparently they’re not strong enough to break through locked glass doors; it’s ultimately when a biker gang comes in and starts fucking shit up that stuff goes poorly for everyone.

So yeah, not what I expected. Also surprising to me: Goblin (who you will remember from the soundtrack of such gialli as Suspiria and Tenebrae) did much of the soundtrack for the movie; and also Dario Argento is credited in a number of places as having done stuff here — apparently he arranged financing, had some conversations with Romero about the script, and wrote some of the music along with Goblin. (He also made a separate cut for the European market, which leans harder on the Goblin music and is faster-paced. I kinda want to watch it, although not so much that I’m going to just back-to-back the movie.)

Iconicity aside, though, I think this is a weaker movie than Night of the Living Dead. The character interactions aren’t as sharp or tense, the scenario is a lot looser, and it’s just… not as good. For some reason, this has a reputation as being better than its predecessor, but that’s just flatly wrong; I suspect it’s just people who don’t like B&W movies. Still, that leaves this in the position of being a very good, and hugely influential, movie. Recommended to zombie fans, just for historical literacy alone.