Land of the Dead (2005)

Three years before the economy collapsed, and six years before Occupy Wall Street tried to shake America out of its cloud of greed and luxury, George Romero – the original Zombie King – made “Land of the Dead,” a rebel grandchild of a grandparent that was once its own kind of hell-raiser. Dig it: In a post-zombie-apocalypse America, the ever-shrinking human population is walled up inside Pittsburgh, divided into two classes – the peasants, fighters, and scavengers on the street, and the privileged suits atop a glass-and-steel tower, safe from harm. Of course the stomach-chomping zombies will come, and the rich will flee, and the down-trodden will do the right thing. Romero goes full satire, casting ex-“Easy Rider” Dennis Hooper as a Donald-Trump-like lunatic carting around cases of money in a world where money is useless. Grimly, the bloody delicious irony zombie shuffles its way stage left as the third act loses its head just when the story demands this world be burned by the hand of an evolved zombie who once pumped gas as a living minimum wage slave. B-