This is George A. Romero's best film. His original Night of the Living Dead is a fine horror film as well as being a scathing attack on racism. His Martin is wonderfully weird and its protagonist strangely sympathetic. Here, though, he combines all of his talents into a movie that is both a terrific horror film (one of the bloodiest ever created) and that is a senstitive and insightful satire of the budding "Me" generation that had commandeered the social conscience of the 1960s and turned it into something sick and disgusting. It is fitting that the end of this film has the audience rooting for the angry bikers and mindless zombies over the pathetic and greedy protagonists.

Not really a sequel to Romero's 1968 splatter-fest, this is more an extrapolation of the events in the earlier film. For some reason, the dead were returning to life and eating the living, creating a plague of zombies that threatened to take over the world. At the end of the original, it seemed somewhat heartening to see that the forces of humanity had figured out how to destroy the zombies and were on the verge of triumph. This sequel picks up some time later, when the qualified victory has fallen apart. Society is on the verge of collapse, and the government is powerless to fight the throngs of zombies. A television reporter named Francine (Gaylen Ross) and a helicopter pilot named Steven (David Emge), accompanied by two National Guardsmen, Peter and Roger (Ken Foree and Scott Reiniger), flee the destroyed studio and escape to a deserted mega-mall. After gung-ho soldier Reiniger is killed, the three others hole up in the mall, ridding it of zombies and fortifying their new Utopia against the masses. They live a life of luxury, taking what they need from the various stores and confirming suspicions that one could, if necessary, live forever in one of those places.

Quickly, though, the structure of the outside society that was collapsing re-establishes itself. Steven and Francine become lovers, then become distant. Peter, a black man, finds himself waiting on the two white people. They all become disgusted by the fact that they have everything they could ever need. Eventually, their upper-class nightmare of plenty is disrupted by a gang of bikers who tear into the mall, letting in the zombies and having a good old time slicing off heads and throwing pies. The protagonists have to flee yet again, and the movie ends on one of the most uninspiring uplifting notes I can remember.

There's an obvious class issue here. The staggering zombies (lower classes) are trying to get into the shopping mall, that apex of Western culture, which is defended by the white protagonists (upper classes) and their valet. The rich people are unhappy, because, as we all know (wink wink), money doesn't buy happiness and the lives of the rich aren't as great as one would think. Finally, the bikers (more lower classes) wreck the party by attempting to take part in the riches. Marx would have been proud.

The makeup effects were done by the genius Tom Savini, who apparently got a lot of his ideas from the horrors he witnessed in Vietnam. He has a cameo as a biker who is eaten most gruesomely. There's a lot of great sight gags, such as zombie Hare Krishnas and zombie nuns. The film was co-written by the Italian king of horror, Dario Argento, who is strangely incapable of injecting any humor at all into his own films.