Featuring some impressively haunting surreal dream sequences alongside the creepiest eating of a hard-boiled egg since Frank Reynolds’ efforts in that field, this combo of feminist commentary and shocking gore is pure Romero. High definition redder-than-red blood, Donovan’s Season Of The Witch theme song and beehive hair hysteria are the order of the day as our wonderfully detached witchy protagonist gets involved with far worse things than plastic crystals from the local goth shop. Soon, this intrigue leads to creepy dreams, love spells and our middle-aged mother going all Mrs Robinson with her daughter’s man, played by the cock-sure Laine. Jan White plays a bored and beaten-down housewife who becomes intrigued at her friends’ idle chatter about an acquaintance’s dabbling in black magic. Season Of The Witch, or Hungry Wives, as it’s named in this outing (distributors tried to accompany the suggestive name by turning the film into a porno, which Romero succeeded in resisting), released two years later, represents something much more akin to the confident horror-satirist we know and love as Vanilla star Laine and composer Steve Gorn both return. Laine is suitably smug as our dickheaded lead, though you can’t get away from the feeling of a sadly unrealised vision lurking beneath the disappointingly dull surface of what Romero himself describes as his ‘worst film’.

Wacky lines such as the brilliant “What do I want? A peanut butter sandwich!” sit uncomfortably with the heavy subject matter as Rudolph Ricci’s boldly unconventional yet terminally messy script attempts to say… something about commercialism, domesticity and society, though more often veers into irritating swagger. This time, our marauding hordes are definitely (definitely) not deados but instead crazier than the time this writer briefly believed there was a calamitous seismic event in Norfolk, after accidentally switching between a Great Yarmouth-based TV property show and seventies disaster movie Earthquake. To commemorate three of Romero’s less celebrated early movies, Arrow Video has released the intriguing Between Night And Dawn set on Bluray, with ample extras to sate the most eager fanboy/girl.įirst up, and by far the movie most will know (perhaps due to its 2010 remake), 1973’s The Crazies plays out almost like a retread of Romero’s 1968 debut Night Of The Living Dead, with a group of townsfolk again subject to a dodgy violence-inducing substance whilst military jackanapes try and control the epidemic. Romero, the master of satirical zombie tomfoolery, responsible for horror classics from Dawn Of The Dead through to Tales From The Dark Side, shuffle off this mortal coil. With real life’s ridiculous news stories almost beyond parody, it seems fitting that 2017 was the year we saw George A.

George a romero between night and dawn