Perhaps the most exciting of all of Umbrella's fuller-than-their-competitors' special editions is their new release of
Night Of the Living Dead, 1990. That's the remake of
George Romero's original that was produced by
Tom Savini. This time, the Australian blu seems to come out ahead in both picture quality and absolutely in the special features department. I mean, this is an early entry in the popular wave of unnecessary remakes, but this disc has made me re-evaluate and decide, you know, maybe there really is a place for
NotLD90 in my collection after all.
Update 5/11/16 - 7/12/18: I've added the US DVD for comparison, confirming this definitely is the same root master.
Update 9/29/25: It's on, now! Sony hasn't just upgraded the movie to 4k. They haven't just enlisted the perfect man (Red Shirt's
Michael Felsher) to create a slew of excellent, new special features. They've also restored the gore Savini was originally forced to edit out for his R rating, meaning we're getting to see this film uncut for the very first time! ...They may have also made an unfortunate decision, but we'll get into all that below.
Night '90 plays it very close to
Night '68. It's not quite shot-for-shot
Psycho, but it really plays it beat-by-beat, with cast members even cast for their resemblance to the original characters. So, what does
Night '90 bring to the table? Like, why even watch it if you have the original? Well, updated effects for sure. Expect some new, awesome looking zombies like they never could've created in 1968. And the other thing are Savini's twists. Savini knows most fans are familiar with the original, so he's constantly subverting your expectations and giving you little surprises.
A great example of this is right in the beginning. Again,
Night '90 follows
Night '68 very closely, right down to the details. Barbara and Johnny are visiting their mother at the graveyard even though Johnny doesn't want to. He teases her, including the famous line, "they're coming to get you, Barbara," while pointing to a stumbling old man walking towards them in the distance. Of course, in '68, this turns out to be the first zombie,
Bill Hinzman, who kills Johnny and chases Barbara to the farmhouse. But in the remake, it's just an old man who says "sorry," and walks away before the real zombie pops out of frame left and attacks zombie. Of course, he then kills Johnny by cracking his head against a tomb stone and then chases Barbara just like the original. The film stays on the original's tracks. But it's just got all these little alterations and tweaks to keep fans guessing. And the ending, which I won't spoil, is significantly different.
Seeing this for the first time in widescreen (I used to own the VHS, but Umbrella's 2016 blu was the first time I'd watched it since then), has improved by opinion of this film a little bit. Not that I hated it before, but it struck me as having a made for TV movie look. And it is pretty heavy on close-ups, but the cinematography's a tad more impressive now. Even said close-ups are now less boxy, and it's a fairly well-made production over-all. The soundtrack feels like a quick cable TV project, but it's serviceable.
Patricia Tallman and especially
Tony Todd are rather good in this film, and even the rest of the cast are a little hokey but express their characters well. And let's face it, the original had a lot of the same problems in that area, so we haven't lost any ground there. The original's stark, grainy black and white look is iconic, and this film can't recapture that; but '90 wisely doesn't try, and instead makes it's own, gentle color look. In a way, it makes the film feel a little delicate and old fashioned, but at least it's distinct rather than a poor man's knock-off.
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| Splat! |
And now in 2025, my opinion has risen another little bit. Because
we're finally able to see it uncut. And let's face it, more gruesome
special effects is the whole selling point of Savini's remake. So, the
new running time is just twelve seconds longer, but there's more to the
story than that. It's not just a story of adding a few bloody frames
back in, though there is that. When Tallman and Todd are fighting the
two zombies they find in the house, there's six of those extra seconds, which is
essentially a single, nasty shot of Tallman wresting her fire-poker out
of the farmer zombie's head, which again, is exactly what we were paying
to see in 1990. But other times footage has been replaced. So when
Tom is shotgunning zombies at the gas pumps, they cut to Tony Todd swinging
his torch at zombies back at the porch. But here, instead of that Todd
shot, we get a big, gooey
Maniac-style shotgun head explosion. So, now
addition to the run-time, but a big addition to the fun factor.
There's also one change I'm not so fond of. The first four and a
half minutes of this film have been turned black and white, as a tribute
to the original. Then it suddenly switches to color during the first
attack. And it's just cheesy; simply a bad idea in my opinion. The
opening shot of this film is a very low saturation shot of the moon,
which I think was already there to suggest the film going from black and
white to color, but also nice and subtle, just there for those who want
to see it. Now, eh, it's just revisionist "Greedo shot first" tinkering. To be fair, Sony has included both this uncut
director's cut and the original theatrical version for purists, both scanned
in 4k, which is definitely the correct impulse. But I just wish there
was a way to watch the restored, uncut version without the black and
white tinkering. But oh well. It's a compromise that still definitely
beats never getting to see the original, censored footage.
So, like I said, Umbrella's blu was my first time with
Night Of the Living Dead 1990
on disc. But it was hardly this film's first time at the rodeo. There was
a fullscreen laserdisc, then Columbia Tristar put out a DVD release.
The first edition was a flipper disc, fullscreen on one side and
anamorphic widescreen on the other. It had a Savini commentary and
'making of' featurette, and was later reissued in 2006 as just a single
sided widescreen disc, which was essentially duplicated in the UK and
other regions. Then Twilight Time put it out on blu for the first time
in 2012, with the commentary and ditching the featurette; but most
notably it's very dark, with a strong blue hue over the entire picture. Then came Umbrella's blu from Australia in 2016. I have the solo disc, but they also put out a
limited edition 2-disc version which pairs this with the original 1968
Night Of the Living Dead, also on blu. That disc includes a full-length documentary on the original called
Reflections On the Living Dead, which was originally released on VHS as
The Night of the Living Dead 25th Anniversary Documentary. Anyway, finally, we have Sony's wicked new steelbook UHD/ BD combopack, just in time for Halloween.
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1) 2006 US Columbia Tri-Star DVD; 2) 2016 Australian Umbrella BD;
3) 2025 Sony BD; 4) 2025 Sony UHD. |
The good news is the blue overcast is thankfully gone from the 2016 release!
It's still a detailed, HD transfer. It does have occasional speckling
and noise (look closely at the zombies' forehead in that second shot),
but it's relatively minimal. It's clearly an older master - as you can
see, it's the same one they used on the DVDs - but it's fine even for
blu-ray standards, possibly a bit better than Twilight Time's even if
you take the dark blue shading out of the equation. Like, if I were
giving letter grades, it would be a strong B. Oh, and a lot of sites are
listing this as 1.85, but it's actually framed at 1.77:1, which to be
fair, is what it says on the back of the case. The DVD, meanwhile, is
slightly window-boxed in the overscan areas to 1.81:1, so you can see
Umbrella's blu restores a little bit of vertical information to the
picture.
And now Sony frames it at exactly 1.85:1, like it should be. As you can see, it's a little cooler than the other versions on this page, generally looking the most authentic of all (especially on the UHD, which retains a bit more of the reds than its accompanying BD). That light film damage on the Umbrella disc has been cleaned up. And thanks to being a fresh, 4k scan, the transfer finally retains the film grain, which helps this film look more genuinely filmic than previous releases, which help's this film's case for not just being a cheap knock-off. Hey, look, it's a real movie!
Audio-wise, Sony has the core Dolby 2.0 mix, while Umbrella brings the
same as Twilight Time gave us: DTS-HD 5.1. Sony has it, too, but
they've also gone big with a new TrueHD 7.1 mix. And for purists, the
theatrical version (only) also has the 2.0 mix in DTS-HD, as well as the
5.1 and 7.1s. Only Twilight Time has the isolated musical
score track, though, which is pretty much their thing. Every disc
offers optional English subtitles.
As for foreign language
options, the DVD also has Chinese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish and Thai
subs, plus a Portuguese dub. And the 2025 set has German, Italian and
Spanish dubs along with Danish, Chinese, Dutch, Finnish, French, German,
Italian, Korean, Norwegian,
Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish,
Thai, and Turkish subs.
But now let's get into extras, because there's some great stuff to dig into. First of all, again yes, Umbrella retains
Savini's audio commentary, which except for a couple stretches of
silence, is quite good, and addresses a lot of the topics viewers would
have about the remake. And they also bring back the 'making of'
featurette that Twilight Time dropped, which is also quite good, showing
you a lot of the creation of the film. It's like a serious, 25-minute
piece, not just one of those typical promo featurettes that plays like a
padded version of the trailer.
But then Umbrella kicks in with a bunch of all new extras (which are,
interestingly, credited to Severin Pictures). First off is a new
on-camera interview with Savini. At first it seems like he's just going
to rehash all the things he said in the commentary and featurette, and
he does for the first couple minutes. But then he starts getting serious
about all the plans he had for this film that the producers made him
cut, why that happened and why he thinks they were wrong. He talks about
the divorce he was going through during the shoot and his
disappointments with the film, whether Romero really ghost-directed the
film, and also how he's finally come around to really appreciating it
only recently. It goes for almost half an hour and is much more open and
honest - thanks I'm sure to the extra passage of time - than the other
pieces. Really, if you only check out one extra about this film, this is
the one.
Then you've got a fun interview with
John Vulich &
Everett Burrell,
who're on camera together and clearly having a good time. They're very
forthcoming, too; and you can imagine the scrutiny you must be under as
the effects team when Tom Savini is your director. Patricia Tallman, who
was interviewed in the 'making of' featurette, has her own on-camera
piece here, too. She's very cheerful and proud of the film, but also
addresses things like when Romero took over shooting at the end because
Savini had to "go take care of" his divorce. And there's also an
eight-minute "behind the scenes" featurette, which is really a
collection of video tape footage that the special effects guys took of
the shoot. It's tightly edited, so we really just get the interesting
moments without like twenty minutes of set-up for an insert shot or
actors asleep in their make-up chairs. There's also the original
theatrical trailer and reversible cover art, clearly by the same artist
as the
Night Of the Creeps cover.
And now in 2025? Sony carries over all of the old stuff from the DVD and yes, from the Umbrella, save one, but let's put a pin that. Because, besides all that old stuff, we've got a bunch of new stuff, including a new Savini commentary, for the slightly longer director's cut. And we've got all new, on camera interviews with co-stars
Bill Moseley,
William Butler,
McKee Anderson &
Heather Mazur, amiable zombies
Greg Funk and
Dyrk Ashton, producers
John A. Russo &
Russell Streiner and editor
Tom Dubensky. Now, Sony does seem to have dropped that eight-minute "behind the scenes" featurette, BUT Felsher has cut that footage into a couple of the interviews, so I'm not sure that every frame is accounted for, but you're really not missing anything. Sony's disc also comes in a nice looking steelbook case.
I once called Umbrella's blu "the definitive release of
Night Of the Living Dead 1990, at least for now." Well, that "now" has turned to "then," because Sony's new release is a strong improvement in every category: picture, audio, special features... and they're put the censored footage back in! If you care enough to have this film in your collection, this is the one you have to have.