(Couple of expletives in here, couple of drug refs, a gory photo, nothing you won't survive)
When I heard that George A Romero's daughter Tina was doing a zombie film, I admit to being a bit...trepidatious. I have been a fan of the Godfather of Gore's classic, trailblazing, gutspilling undead epics for over four decades, and sincerely hoped that what resulted would not be a nepo baby corruption of a mythos created by Romero, just because his daughter had first-dibs insider family access the zombie lore. Watching the trailer above a few months ago I thought hmmm, looks...interesting, see how it goes. Tina Romero is gay, and, that comes through very clearly when watching the trailer. I have zero problem with gay people, never have had, and was more worried about her paying proper tribute to her dad's films than about any of the sexuality riffs in it.
I shouldn't have worried.
I really enjoyed this film. A lot.
What you get with Queens of the Dead is a way for the young director here to meet with her father's critically feted material, whilst adding her own spicy twist to it. It seemed more of an affectionate love letter to Romero's fleshripping films than a way to try and set up a franchise she could continue with other films, though I suppose that remains to be seen. She's certainly got a lot of competition, though, because zombies have literally been done to undeath and beyond over the last few decades, often using a template laid down by Zombie Daddy's 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead.
The focus then shifts over to the cavernous, glam-slammed warehouse run by butch lesbian DJ Dre (Katy O'Brian, in a funny nod to the famous steel-wheels-turner) and the crew of drag queens putting on the evening's entertainment who get dragged into the anthropophagous proceedings over the course of the frantic, frenetic evening. Among them are:
Sam (Jaquel Spivey, as a reformed drag performer who can't escape her fierce fashionista past).
Ginsey (Nina West, in a role Divine would have been born to play. There is actually a nod to this when a character calls Ginsey a "sea witch." The villainous character of Ursula in The Little Mermaid was based on Harris Glenn Milstead's famous John Waters muse; Waters and Divine are two of my all-time favourite cinematic icons).
Other characters duck and dive and bob and weave in and out of the film, but these are the main ones. There is even a token hetero guy, Barry (Quincy Dunn-Baker, who eventually gets accepted and called "girl" by the gay crew surrounding him, in a tearmaking poignant moment). All sexualities are included in this film, whether bitch or butch, top or bottom of the power hierarchy. They can divide and conquer and die, or they can fight and live together. And guess which they choose to do, as they prove Tina is a very decent actor's director.
Now. George A Romero's cinematic oeuvre was PC long before there was such a thing. From his use of black actor Duane Jones in Night of the Living Dead, and the use of sexual and racial minorities in all of his films (see: Knightriders) to a greater or lesser degree as characters, Romero was a proponent of diversity casting - for him just quite simply the best people for the jobs (as it should be, obviously) - long before such a concept existed. The whole main undercurrent of this film is political, in that minority sexuality is being demonised in scary America right now by the Golf Fuhrer, which makes expressions of gay pride like this even more political - and indeed important - than it maybe even started off as. I am sure the Out-And-Proud element was obviously there as an important political plot point - Hell, this is a gay movie through and through - it's just that recent deranged political events in America have pushed the flag-flying element in the film more to the forefront of the film than it would have started out in the writing and filming of the movie, started during Joe Biden's White House tenure.
On a base aesthetic level, this is a gorgeous-looking production, all vibrant vivid neon Chroma key compositions, like Dario Argento (the obligatory strong primary colours-using horror film reference!) eckied and coked up and bouncing around gleefully to endorphin-slapping tasty sonic club sandwiches. Shannon Madden, the cinematographer here, really did a great job in club candy colour schemes. Truly a great-looking film, and one I would love to have seen on the big screen. The costumes and sets are excellent, too. As for the cast, well, I don't think there was a single bad performance during the zombie-stagger running time.
It's interesting and funny. What really made this film, for me, was the laugh-out-loud waspish Wildean wit gay humour, partly down to the director's co-writer, comedian Erin Judge, something I have been a fan of since seeing Kenny Everett and Kenneth Williams on the telly in the early 80s. The miaowbitch kittyclawing comedic dialogue bouncing between the handbag-fighting cast members, and the talent of the ensemble cast, really convinced me that Tina Romero would be a decent comedic director, even away from zombies. She clearly knows the gay club milieu well - she is a DJ, and Dre is clearly her stand-in here - and a more traditional comedy film, away from things that go crunch in the night, might be just the ticket for her. I laughed out loud many times during the film. I wonder if she almost felt obligated to make a zombie feature, or if it was just the easiest option for her, being her first feature (after two shorts, 1998's Rainbowarrior, and 2012's Little Girl Blue, and a 2018 episode of a web series, Flicker) and all. It's possible, I suppose. Maybe it was easier for her to get money that way, with the force of her father's impeccable humane splatter pedigree behind her. Shrug.
Once the zombies start appearing, Queens basically turns into Night of the Living Dead, i.e. keeping the wanna-dance zombie hordes locked out of the warehouse and the drag crew alive. Well, I suppose the dancing zombie thing is more Michael Jackson than George Romero, but you know what I mean. I confess, I did think the film got slightly disjointed during the third act a wee bit, with the director seemingly not entirely sure which way to go in using material so well-trodden and established by a million films her father spawned, but it never got too groan-worthy for me. It just didn't seem to give one good gleeful fuck, on one level, clearly knowing how ludicrous a lot of it was if taken at face value.
But Hell, it's basically a satiric film mixed with seriousness of homosexual representation intent, Party Monster (with the biopic about the deranged Michael Alig referenced in the dialogue; Scrumptious gave off real Angel-from-Party-Monster energy to me) mixed with the aforementioned Night of the Living Dead. Heretically, it even sorta-refs the crappy 2004 Dawn of the Dead 'reimagining', in musing about making it through the zombies to an escape vehicle. Maybe that was inadvertent, Tina. I certainly hope so. Your dad's 1978 classic is untouchable, one of my favourite films (I even visited Monroeville Mall in 1989), and I'd hate for you to purposefully have referenced the braindead spinoff from it.
(I am laughing here, not hugely serious)
What else? Well, the film is very contemporary, with social media obsession riffs popping and jabbing throughout the laughs and action. The way that the characters find out about the zombie plague and impending zombie holocaust is exactly how they would find out about it in real life, i.e. on their phones, and the truncated, slang-and-jargon-spewing dialogue marks this out very clearly as being a 21st century film. None of this wordstuff could have existed twenty years ago. In capturing the essence of a bunch of glitz-and-glamourous-self-obsessed characters and their actions, Romero inadvertently does a far better job of capturing the start of the end of the world than her father did in his own tenuous attempt at the same material, in the not-great 2007 flesh-feaster flick Diary of the Dead.
As for this being a Romero zombie movie, you may ask: is it gory? Well, there are a few gory spots here and there, one mostly notably with a skullcracking drill referencing a zombie-killing scene in Day of the Dead, and a spurting throat wound. But it never truly gets to full Romero zombie grand guignol gutspilling excess, and, with the characters mostly battling off their undead attackers with thing like sparkly garbage can lids, you get the feeling that the director's heart may not entirely be with amping and ramping up the gore score, and that blood (often CGI - tsk, tsk, Tina!) floods would have detracted from the rambunctious feelgood gay club energy of the film, and the black humour. It hardly matters. She's her own woman, and this is her own walking-corpse-mangling angle, let her get on with it. Seasoned top Romero makeup FX artiste Greg Nicotero does put in a bit of work of prosthetic makeup fabrication, giving another neat wee link to George Romero's work. Funnily enough, Greg made me up as a zombie in Toronto in 2004 on the set of Land of the Dead (one of the greatest events of my life, for obvious reasons), and I got a brief cameo in the film. Tina Romero is in the film too, as a soldier. Small world.
The film is ultimately both reverent and irreverent towards Tina's dad's films and their mythology. In closing, I will show what a Romero nerd I am, and the references/homages to George Romero's zombie films I noticed. If you're a Romero fan, you will get them. If not, you probably won't have read this far, so it hardly matters. I took screenshots of the nods, smiling as I did so. The first, obvious one is the music from Day of the Dead threaded through most of the film. I love John Harrison's tropical-sunblast-inflected soundtrack for that classic (saw it ten times, aged seventeen, at the cinema in Falkirk when it came out in Scotland in 1986, a full year after its USA release; opened the back door for my fifteen-year-old brother Tony and his pal Mikey to get into see it, too), and hearing it mixed into a rave tune was a real kick.
First off: Dawn of the Dead's Gaylen Ross (who played Fran) puts in a sneaky wee cameo as a nurse near the start:
Frequent George A Romero makeup FX collaborator Tom Savini puts in a hilarious telly cameo, and, tells us, well, see for yourself:
And follows it up with a funny wee gag:
The whole phone pisstake scene is a ref, to me, to the scene of Bub being handed the phone in Day of the Dead:
A serious nod to Dawn of the Dead, with a comedic riff right afterwards that shows, in a microcosm, the difference between father and daughter as directors:
Just putting this one here because it's a funny line, and I despise Thatcher:
So anyway, that's about it. Thought I would sling down a few vagrant thoughts about Queens of the Dead after just watching it, nothing studied or major. I was pleasantly surprised, and I am very glad about that. And Tina Romero, I salute you for having upheld your father's seminal zombie legacy in a political and irreverent and anarchic way I am sure he would have appreciated. And I look very much forward to seeing what you come up with next, as I am sure middle-aged hetero Scotsmen are very much your target audience. Slainte!
THE END
Bonus classic tune, cos the title is similar to the film's:
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