What happened is this: Seattle-based indie filmmaker Timothy Hines’s Pendragon Pictures set out, in early 2001, to make a contemporary updating of H.G. Wells’s classic novel of alien invasion, with skyscrapers under attack and urban terror and the like. You know what came next: 9/11. With his project — which had already been shot! — suddenly lost to propriety and good taste, Hines came back with an even better idea: a faithful, Victorian-era adaptation of the novel, which had never been done before. And then Spielberg’s modern version of Wells got pulled up from 2007 to 2005… to just after the Pendragon period piece was to be released.

See, there’s this beaten-down weariness to *Land of the Dead* that’s unlike your typical gore-and-shuffle zombie movie, and — even though this is Romero’s Big Hollywood Film — it’s unlike anything that the typical big-budget splatter flick has going for it, either…

There is a place for snarky meta-commentary on pop culture, but that place is clearly not at the hands of anyone named Ephron. Sisters Nora (who directed) and Delia (who cowrote with Nora) have concocted an evil brew of misogynist tripe, faux-ironic nostalgia, and painfully false romantic comedy that purports to be an ‘edgy,’ modern updating of a 1960s sitcom.

Ever see one of those movies where you’re moaning ‘crap… crap… crap… crap’ through the first two-thirds and then it starts gripping you in the end so that you by the time it’s over, you’re thinking it’s not so awful after all? *Herbie: Fully Loaded* is like that. Now, I’m not sayin’ it’s any threat to *Madagascar* or anything as something both the kiddies and the ‘rents will enjoy. But it’s not bad. It’s not good, but it’s not bad.

You know why this new Batman feels so potent and important and *necessary*? Because he *is*. Because the world, the real world, feels like it’s falling apart, rotting away at its core from all manner of injustice and greed and indifference. Because we share this Bruce Wayne’s incoherent grief and shattering rage at the misdeeds of the powerful and the cowardly timidity of those supposedly in the right. Because the world is desperate for a champion like this, who channels fury through compassion *and gets things done.*

Follow your dreams, we tell little kids. Dare to imagine! You are the master of your universe! Maybe we shouldn’t tell them that, because then they grow up thinking that cleverness and talent and, yup, imagination will take them places, when we all really know that the world does its level best to beat such things out of us before we get too uppity, start thinking, and stop buying stuff, all of which can only lead to heartbreak, neuroses, and prescriptions for Prozac. Or else they turn into Robert Rodriguez, and inflict upon the world the unmerciful products of an imagination run batshit crazy on the power — the mad, glorious power! — of cheap modern consumer electronics.

I wish I could say that the fact that Ralph Kramden’s M1 bus route, which should be taking him northbound up Madison Avenue, as the bus’s signage clearly indicates, is taking him southbound down Seventh Avenue, way the hell on the other side of Manhattan, was the biggest problem with this abysmal TV-to-movie adaptation. But actually, deciphering twisted bus routes was quite a pleasant distraction from the rest of the movie, which is torture.