Mike Watt

Night of the Living Dead '90 Mike Watt

Who could forget the great setpieces Tom Savini dreamed up for his remake of George Romero's classic Night of the Living Dead? Like that wonderful scene where Ben, able to get only one shell into his revolver, is being attacked by a zombie, and we watch, agonized, as the cylinder rotates slowly, with every fruitless click of the hammer bringing that live shell closer, closer to firing. Or the fantastic homage to Lolita in which Barbara, transformed from the weak, shell-shocked victim to the gun-toting, take-charge hero, executes the cowardly Harry Cooper as he hides behind a full-length mirror, metaphorically fracturing herself into millions of pieces. All of those sequences may be unfamiliar you because they were never filmed, never even made it past the storyboard stage. As Savini fans are aware, there are numerous things the veteran effects master had planned for his feature film directorial debut, and the three listed above don't even scratch the surface of the unseen version of Night of the Living Dead 1990. Now, however, nearly thirty years after the fact, the true story can be told.