Arguably the genre’s most famous entry, 1968’s Night of the Living Dead put zombie movies on the map. While its sequels became more and more complex, this one stuck with a very basic template. That serves it well in a “less is more” manner.

At the start, adult siblings Johnny (Russell Streiner) and Barbra (Judith O’Dea) go out of their way to put a memorial on their father’s grave at their mother’s request. A strange man attacks them in the cemetery, and it turns out he’s a zombie. Johnny gets knocked unconscious in the melee and Barb runs for it. She locks herself into the car but the zombie still comes after her.

Before long, Barbra escapes and runs to a house she sees. She makes it inside but the zombie still chases after her along with another one. Ben (Duane Jones) soon comes in for refuge as well and tries to get her to defend the place. In shock, Barbra fails to respond even when ben fights with the creatures and more and more come at them.

This forces them to stay in the house, and Ben wants to board up the abode. Eventually he breaks Barb out of her catatonia, but she goes bonkers when she talks about Johnny. Ben continues to prepare and soon finds they’re not alone in the house. Harry Cooper (Karl Hardman) and Tom (Keith Wayne) eventually emerge from the cellar. We also find out Cooper’s wife Helen (Marilyn Eastman) and daughter Karen (Kyra Schon) are downstairs as well. Cooper wants to stay in the cellar but Ben thinks it’s safer upstairs.

After much bickering, Tom stays upstairs with his girlfriend Judy (Judith Ridley) while Cooper returns to the basement. However, wife Helen convinces him to collaborate since they have outside communication via a radio. They also soon find a use a TV, where they eventually learn of rescue stations to which they need to go. The rest of the movie follows their attempts to escape the zombies and stay alive.

I won’t say whether they do so or not, but I will note that the vast majority of Dead takes place inside the house. That limits the action, but not in a negative way. It compresses things effectively and gives the film a nicely claustrophobic feel.

That’s extremely important for a zombie flick. You couldn’t have a movie of this genre set inside the Grand Canyon. In wide-open spaces, zombies don’t make very satisfying monsters. They’re slow and easy to escape, so they need to operate inside tight quarters to provide a menace. The sequels to Dead subscribed to that theory as well, but not as firmly. This flick keeps our living characters stuck in one tiny space, and that helps create a lot of tension.

Dead also benefits from very spare direction. For the sequels, director George Romero’s style acts as something of a negative. He’s a very basic filmmaker without much style or panache; he presents the action in a workmanlike manner and that’s about it. However, this tendency suits the simple and stark Dead. It’s not exactly an elaborate story, and it doesn’t need fancy tricks to make it succeed. Less is more, and that makes Dead prosper.

Given the film’s origins, parts of it seem amateurish, but surprisingly, a lot of it comes across as more professional and accomplished than its more expensive and elaborate sequels. That connects to Romero’s direction as well as the acting. No, Streep and Olivier didn’t envy the performances of Dead, but they fare better than the wooden work in the sequels.

Actually, most of the actors here seem exaggerated and artificial, but one stands out as particularly positive: Duane Jones. He offers a powerful and naturalistic performance as Ben, for he brings nice charisma and strength to the part. Unlike the others, he doesn’t overplay his lines, and he presents a believable and dynamic character. He helps carry a lot of the flick.

The best of the three Dead flicks, Night of the Living Dead has its flaws, but its strengths outweigh them. It presents a simply tale in a tight and efficient manner. It’s too dark and gross to be a broad crowd-pleaser - it offers one of the bleakest endings I’ve ever seen - but it’s a well-executed effort in general.

Night of the Living Dead appears in an aspect ratio of 1.33:1 on this single-sided, double-layered DVD; due to those dimensions, the image has not been enhanced for 16X9 televisions. I thought colorization went away in the Eighties, but I guess I assumed too much. This new Dead DVD offered a colorized take on the flick, and it didn’t succeed.

Inevitably, the biggest issue connected to the image will connect to the artificial colors. I’m not sure who this was possible, but the tones looked too dull and too bright at the same time. The palette went with a very subdued look that tended to muted hues. We got flat blues and yellows for the most part. These lacked vivacity and came across as bland.

So why’d I think they also looked too bright? Because they maintained a fake and artificial appearance. The colors were too peppy for this sort of flick, and they never came across as believable. They were a step up over the badly illogical hues of older colorized movies, but they still didn’t work. Never did Dead look like a movie shot in color. It always presented an odd and somewhat garish appearance. The choice of tones - such as in the bright blue interior walls of the house - seemed strange, as I couldn’t imagine that the production design would have looked this way if they’d shot the film in color in the first place.

Sharpness varied, partially - but not entirely - due to the source material. Dead was shot on the cheap more than 35 years ago, and that showed. Sharpness seemed decent at best, but much of the movie came across as fairly fuzzy and indistinct. Some of these concerns related to the original photography, but not all of them. The colorization process rendered the image softer than normal and gave the movie a flat look. No problems with jagged edges or shimmering occurred, and I didn’t notice more than slight edge enhancement.

Print flaws were fairly minor for a low-budget flick from 1968. Grain could be moderately heavy, but that didn’t come as a surprise. Otherwise, I noticed occasional marks, specks, and thin vertical lines, but nothing extreme. In general, the image maintained a fairly good level of cleanliness.

Not surprisingly, these colors also affected the rest of the image. The colorization really affected the black levels, as they gave the dark elements a distinctive blue tint. Shadows were erratic, but a lot of that came from the source. Low-light shots tended to look pretty dense, but much of that occurred due to the original photography. The colorization exacerbated this, though, as the added hues rendered matters more opaque than originally.

I tried to go into this version of Dead with an open mind, but nothing about what I saw convinced me that colorization works. The biggest problem remains one of intention. Dead was composed for black and white, and even the best rendered colors in the world won’t look natural because the film wasn’t shot with them in mind. It was lit and shot for black and white, and that made it unattractive any other way. Ultimately, Dead looked crummy as a colorized flick.

Not content to alter just the visuals, this new DVD of Night of the Living Dead came with two remixed soundtracks. It included both Dolby Digital 5.1 and DTS 5.1 editions. The pair sounded virtually identical and I noticed no distinctions between them.

Really, the 5.1 remixes came across as little more than glorified mono. They focused on the center channel and spread the music and effects across the front in a rudimentary way. Little in the way of accurately localized or distinctive audio appeared, as the sound mostly stayed general and loose. Surround usage remained minor and didn’t add much to the package. Some early thunder moved decently across the channels, but not much of value occurred. Dead is a pretty claustrophobic experience, so it lacked many opportunities for useful expansion. This combined with the limits of the source work meant an undefined soundfield.

Audio quality seemed weak, but most of that stemmed from the low-budget source material. Speech tended to come across as thin and lackluster, with a moderate amount of edginess. The lines remained reasonably intelligible, however, and were fine given their origins, though the remixes added a little reverberation to matters. The echo more negatively affected effects, which usually sounded broad and without definition. The mix took on too much of a sense of hollowness. Some decent bass popped up for louder effects like thunder or explosions, but this also created an impression of denseness for other elements. Music was more concise but not by a ton, as the score was fairly tinny and without much range. Although the original material suffered from its own problems, the 5.1 mixes exacerbated these issues and didn’t improve anything.

Happily, one of the DVD’s extras compensated for these image and audio problems. The DVD’s producers saw fit to include the original black and white version of Dead along with the colorized take. The package refers to this as a “restored” edition, but I don’t know how much work they put into it. Really, it looks a lot like the colorized take without the added hues. It presents virtually all of the same print concerns, though it seems sharper and better balanced since it lacks the concerns inherent in the colorization process.

It also comes with the original monaural soundtrack. It’s not a great mix due to the source, but it seems clearer and more concise than the loose and boomy remixes. This DVD stands as one of 72,000 home video versions of Dead, and I don’t know how it compares to the others. However, I felt fairly satisfied with this transfer, both in regard to audio and visuals. Could it look and sound a bit better? Yes, but it presented good quality in general when I considered the limits of the source material. I didn’t like the colorized version of the movie, but as long as we get a good edition of the original black and white - and monaural - flick, I’m happy.

Note that the DVD’s package lists a mono soundtrack along with the 5.1 remixes. This is true only if you count the black and white version along with the colorized one. There’s no mono option for the colorized take, and the B&W edition only presents the original single-channel audio.

An unusual extra, we also find an audio commentary from Mystery Science Theater 3000’s Mike Nelson. He offers a running, screen-specific chat that comes short on information and long on snotty remarks. Occasionally Nelson tells us some actual facts about the participants, but he often makes up these tidbits and gives us comically false details. He also offers many snide comments about the story, the pacing, and the performances. Yeah, the film warrants some of this, but Nelson’s attempts to be clever and witty miss the forest for the trees.

Perhaps his mockery would work better if he presented funnier cracks. Unfortunately, he only occasionally manages to prompt a smile. Most of the jabs seem lame and obvious, and they come across as mean-spirited. The track also suffers from lots of dead air, though given the unfunny nature of the remarks, this may not be a bad thing. Frankly, I don’t know who’ll enjoy this commentary. Fans of Dead will probably be bothered by the nasty take on the flick, and the track isn’t amusing enough to entertain others. It’s a weird commentary and not a useful or enjoyable one.

Two minor supplements finish the set. We get two trailers for Dead along with one each for Carnival of Souls and Flesh Eaters. All but the last one come colorized. Finally, Separated at Death offers a comedic comparison of Dead’s characters and some celebrities. We see a picture of the character and then look at a similar one of the star. For example, it posits that one of the zombies looks like Peter Boyle, while another resembles Courtney Love. Many of them seem like stretches but some work and offer a bit of amusement.

Despite many amateurish elements and flaws, Night of the Living Dead holds up well after more than 35 years. It succeeds as a horror movie in spite of its problems and remains probably the best example of its genre. The DVD presents a colorized image that looked soft and unattractive, and the remixed 5.1 soundtracks failed to improve upon the original monaural audio.

I gave Dead a “B” for supplements simply because it included the original black and white, monaural version of the film. Without that, the extras seemed weak, as the only significant one came from a crummy and unfunny “comedic” audio commentary. If you want a decent version of the original movie for a low price, then you might want to give this set a look. It’s definitely not worth a purchase for the “updated” version or its supplements, though.