Le Mort-vivant

Bob Clark and Alan Ormsby continue down the trail blazed by Romero. Following Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things, an absurd satire of discredited hippie ideals, this time they use the living dead in a biting reflection of Vietnam syndrome and the issue of reassimilating returning soldiers into a society that doesn’t understand them. As in the case of other thorny issues, ignoble genre productions got out ahead of Hollywood, which turned its attention to veterans’ issues only several years later in more soothing and psychologically tinged melodramas like Heroes (1977) and Coming Home (1978). Though Dead of Night has a trash plot about a fallen soldier who returns home as a living corpse and must delay his physical decay by feeding on the blood of new victims, the film doesn’t slide into superficial exploitation. On the contrary, through its complexly developed, exaggerated premise, it succeeds in showing viewers what veterans went through when they returned home from the psychologically destructive hell of war to a country that had not been touched by war at all. (19/07/2013)