Mr. Blog's Tepid Ride

Night of The Living Dead came out in 1968. It was in glorious black and white because George A. Romero was color blind. He thought he had bought six rolls of high quality color film but in reality he was ripped of and shot the feature on grainy Super 8 film stock.

Set chiefly in the Department of Motor Vehicles, Night of The Living Dead opens with Tom and Barbra, two siblings visiting their parents graves on the absolute worst night of the year. Ten years ago, their parents died in a freak accident involving two grapefruits and a grain elevator. Their dying wish was to be buried in the most desolate, abandoned graveyard in America.

Tom and Barbra never really loved their parents. In fact, the only reason they ever went was so that Barbra could stop at a little roadside stand and buy tomatoes. As they paid their respects by laying plastic flowers on the graves, a zombie, whose brain was “switched on” by radiation from a passing satellite (that’s what the movie said) lurched over to them. You see, newly reanimated corpses have, since Odysseus first ventured to Hades, been out to eat your brains. There is nothing sweeter to a zombie than a juicy brain. The problem is, for them, that they are very slow and sort of lurch with a herky-jerky gait. Oh, and this particular zombie’s pants were for some reason missing their entire back.

The semi-pantsless zombie managed to get the jump on Tom, not a hard thing to do since he was drunk on moonshine. Barbra managed to get away while the zombie munched on Tom’s short-term memory and found refuge in a small town Department of Motor Vehicles. Immediately, she passed out on a bench and had no more lines for almost half an hour. Good thing too, as actress Judith O’Dea’s resume includes exactly eight credits in the forty years since this movie came out. A thespian she is not.

Barbra wasn’t alone in the DMV. There were six people waiting in line to renew their licenses for over four hours and never noticed anything amiss. When the guy behind the counter died and came back as a brain eating zombie it looked like any other normal day at the DMV.

Among the human survivors in the DMV were a family of rednecks and a black guy named Ben. Unbelievably, the redneck had less of a problem with undead white guys than a live black guy. But the joke was on him. Even if he shot the black guy he’d just come back from the dead anyway. I suppose that is some Southern idea of Hell..

Ben was played by a young Barack Obama. When the zombies surrounded the DMV, Barack decided, rather than to fight, to talk to them. Try as he might, he couldn’t get a straight answer from the zombies. It was hard to talk with their mouths full of cerebellum. Eventually, after watching a few women and children get eaten alive, he realized that the zombies would be able to live in peace as citizens of the world if only they had food. No wonder they were angry- America had so much food and they only represented a fraction of the world’s undead. He decided to “redistribute the wealth” by giving some of the survivor’s food to the zombies. Despite the fact that the zombies chowed down on people, Barack, after twice rethinking his position, decided that he’d give the redneck’s left leg and the wife’s right arm to the zombies. The redneck refused. He pointed out, rightly, that Barack’s plan would cost an arm and a leg and would only, at best, be a short term solution to the zombie problem. Plus it amounted to little more than socialized welfare.

Seeing how the wind was blowing, Barack changed his position and said that they should all hide in the basement. In fact, he claimed, he never stated that he’d give anything at all to the zombies, and now he’d only tax those with extra limbs. After all, he said, those had more to give up should do more. It would be patriotic to give extra limbs to the zombies.

Hearing all he could stand of Barack, the redneck shot him and threw him to the zombies. The zombies, not caring how many times he voted “present” on important Congressional issues, ate him.

Eventually the zombies broke into the DMV where they were mistaken for city employees.