By Adrian Martin

Land of the Dead (2005) is, at every moment, a jaw-droppingly audacious film. In fact, it is Karl Marx’s Capital on the multiplex screen. George Romero’s anti-Bush (indeed, anti-American) rhetoric is fearless and unrelenting: the embodiment of evil capitalism, Kaufman (Dennis Hopper), announces, “We don’t negotiate with terrorists”; and his opponent, the heavily ethnic Cholo (John Leguizamo), later responds with: “I’m gonna do a Jihad on his ass.” Only a supposedly trivial zombie horror movie – dismissed, overlooked or treated summarily by many mainstream, middlebrow critics – could manage to fly under the ideological radar so completely to work its savage, subversive mischief.