I first watched this back in the early, maybe mid-1980s...not long after it had been released in theaters (and then later on VHS) and at the time, I thought this was absolutely the coolest horror movie ever produced. Forty-five (45) years later, however, this is so awful it could _almost_ be considered funny…except it's truly awful. Everything from the storyline to the stiff acting (and I don't mean by the zombies, either!) to the conclusion…it's just BAD. So many things I would love to sit here and pick apart but I'm just not going to waste time. Maybe no one else will ever read this comment/review (and that's fine) but I'm mainly leaving this for myself so I will **never** be tempted to watch this again. It's just horribly, horribly bad. Even the attempt at "gore" is completely laughable: I never realized our intestines were all - every part of us - the exact same color as silly putty…and even stretched like silly putty. Wow, this was just really, really, REALLY bad. Sorry if you're a George Romero fan; this was great back in its day but by today's standards, this doesn't even rate as "scary". This is just rotten.

This is one of the finest sequels ever, in that it's both of comparable quality with the original, yet is fundamentally different from it at the same time. Marvelous stuff, with aspects copied thousands of times over the past two generations, with no end in sight.

This and 'Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom', from about the same time frame, would make one of the best double-bills ever on the evils of consumerism gone rampant...

Romero’s imaginative and thrilling zombie sequel

A decade after the excellent “Night of the Living Dead” (1968), writer/director George Romero offers up this exceptional sequel. The plague of reanimated corpses with a hunger for warm flesh is now global and society is increasingly breaking down. A television exec (Gaylen Ross), her helicopter-reporter beau (David Emge) and two SWAT officers (Ken Foree and Scott Reiniger) take refuge in a suburban mall. Unfortunately for them, a veritable army of biker-raiders wants the mall for their own.

One of the main reasons this film is so iconic is because Romero seriously considered what it would be like after a ‘zombie apocalypse’ and came up with an inspired story. While the bleakness of the situation is addressed there’s also a sense of adventurous freedom; for instance, the protagonists having an entire mall to themselves.

The movie’s disturbing, ghastly and gory, but also action-packed and sometimes humorous. The zombies make for good bullet fodder while, at the same time, satirizing consumer society. The creative score is varied and I’m sure it was cutting edge at the time, but it’s very dated today, although you’ll probably find yourself acclimating to it. The no-name cast is convincing with the towering Foree standing out while Emge comes across as a poor man’s Donald Sutherland.

The movie runs 2 hours, 7 minutes with the longer version running 2 hours, 19 minutes (the one I watched). It was shot in Monroeville, Pennsylvania, and nearby Pittsburgh.

GRADE: A-

Been a while since I last watched this one, but with the new 4K UHD out, decided to give it another watch going with the Extended Cut. Still very well made with some great zombie effects and really liked the characters, Peter (Ken Foree), especially. I'm not a big fan of the zombie horror genre but this is one of the exceptions. **4.0/5**