One of the stars of that film is John Leguizamo, who plays a zombie hunter named Cholo. IGN spoke to Mr. Leguizamo this weekend at a junket for the upcoming Assault on Precinct 13. He was eager to discuss the Romero flick as well.

"It was amazing, man. I felt blessed... I just finished… I'm hoping that that's his masterpiece, man. I've really got a lot of high hopes for that flick. I love the man. He's incredible. He's 68 years old and he's [got an] ageless career. He's at the top of his game. We do all-night shoots, exteriors… He's smoking, drinking tons of coffee...

"I play a zombie killer. It's an apocalyptic world. It's very political too. It's very operatic, man. It's a very ambitious piece. It's an action movie, it's political. It's got a little bit of comic relief as well. The zombies have taken over and there's only certain patches of right wing people controlling everything… Then there's the working class people, which is me and Simon Baker coming in to try and help to get supplies from the zombies. [We are] minimum wage men. (Laughs) It's a weird thing. I've got my own hypothesis too about [the politics]. I think it all has to do with, in that situation with the war in Iraq and all that and our sense of, it lightens things up, when you can't take death so seriously, it lightens it up. It plays with that, sort of, our anxiety. I know I've got a lot of anxiety. I think it has to do with right-wing, neo-conservatives controlling things and corporate power..."

As has been Romero's trademark, the film promises to have a sense of humor, including some amusing cameos. "Those guys from Sean of the Dead are in the movie. As zombies, yeah." (Laughs) Romero's beauty is that there's always a sense of humor. There's always a bit of a wink to things."





Some of Shaun's castmembers get to play zombies for real in the Romero film



Beyond politics and humor, there will also be plenty of gore. "I've never worked in a movie where there was so much f***ing [gore]? They put, like, real guts in mannequins and then they pull at spleens and intestines..."

Some of the recent zombie films, including 28 Days Later and the remake of Romero's own Dawn of the Dead, have forgone the slow-moving zombies for speedy, more threatening ones. Romero has no plans to make his zombies in Land of the Dead any quicker. "They're slow. He will not do fast. He has his really strict theories about zombies. He created it; he's part Cuban, and zombies and voodoo and all that comes from the Caribbean."

Leguizamo says that he has enjoyed some of the updates, but sees the slower zombies as more realistic. "I think that was cool. It has its own fascination, but zombies can't be fast. They're dead people. They're corpses. How are they going to move fast when they've got rigor mortis, you know what I mean? They're a lack of logic in those movies. The mythology of zombies, which comes from West Africa, they were dead people who died and came [back]."