If you're like me you're a huge fan of George A. Romero's living dead series. Then again, you're probably not.

At a party the other night a friend remarked that watching Night of the Living Dead with my running commentary enhanced the experience, which isn't normally the case when some know-it-all fanboy won't stop yapping. But Romero's first zombie flick is in my opinion the perfect film. It's got it all -- internal drama compounded by an external threat, social commentary that isn't over the top or preachy, an unrecognized hero, and did I mention the gore? It's actually tame by Romero's later standards.

(Do yourself a favor and steer clear of Tom Savini's 1990 remake of the original, which completely misses the point and turns the cheese up to 11.)

The sequels are great for their own reasons, and they're quite different. The allegory (which, despite critics who pretend to come bearing keys, is never subtle) was simpler and more direct in Dawn of the Dead, and Day of the Dead was just good fun with a big gory budget.

Now that Romero has completed the series with Land of the Dead it's appropriate that boffins are close to perfecting the art of zombification with the aim of preserving life. It's doubly appropriate that those boffins are in Pittsburgh, where Romero's films were shot:

SCIENTISTS have created eerie zombie dogs, reanimating the canines after several hours of clinical death in attempts to develop suspended animation for humans. US scientists have succeeded in reviving the dogs after three hours of clinical death, paving the way for trials on humans within years.

Pittsburgh's Safar Centre for Resuscitation Research has developed a technique in which subject's veins are drained of blood and filled with an ice-cold salt solution.

The animals are considered scientifically dead, as they stop breathing and have no heartbeat or brain activity.

But three hours later, their blood is replaced and the zombie dogs are brought back to life with an electric shock.

Plans to test the technique on humans should be realised within a year, according to the Safar Centre.
. . . . . .
Tests show they are perfectly normal, with no brain damage.

Kudos to the editors for choosing the most menacing dog pic they could find. Looks like a zombie dog if ever I've seen one.

(I should add by way of postscript that while Return of the Living Dead is an unofficial sequel, it's a (campy) classic in its own right. The film, made by disgruntled producers and the co-writers of Romero's first two films, actually begins with the claim that Night of the Living Dead was based on a true story, but that the government made the filmmaker change the details. One of the 'true' facts is that zombies eat brains. And to this day more than half the people I talk to about Romero's original say, 'brains! brains!,' a testament to the power of a good camp a send-up.)