THE END IS NIGH! Part 4: The remains - 2000? And then things became awful quiet. With the disappearance of Day Of The Dead from theaters, zombies themselves disappeared as well. What the characters in Romero's movies could never achieve now happened almost without anyone noticing: zombies were dead and buried. By Michael Jackson. In the 1940s, Abbott and Costello put the final nail into the coffin of Universal's famous monsters, Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy and The Wolf Man, by having them appear in the duo's ropey comedies. In the 1980s Michael Jackson did the same thing for zombies by having them do a dance number in his video for the song Thriller. This video, which scared the average ten year-old but few others, suddenly made looking at zombies a ridiculous instead of terrifying experience. No doubt the legion of italian zombie flicks had already achieved a numbing effect for the few that had seen them, but the Michael Jackson video came right at the end of the italian wave and so served as the last straw. With this in mind it's not surprising that George Romero hasn't tried to make a fourth and conluding part. Come to think of it, George Romero hasn't tried to make anything for quite a while. He did give his make-up man Tom Savini a hand with his directing debut, the remake of Night Of The Living Dead. Scripted by Romero and directed by Savini, it opened in 1990 and suffered a predictably unglorious fate, ending up directly on video everywhere but in the US, where it played rather badly and quickly disappeared from theaters. Over the last few years, independent filmmakers have tried to resurrect the zombie genre by revising it and adding unusual touches. Peter Jackson's Braindead, Brian Yuzna's Return Of The Living Dead 3 (which thankfully had very little to do with the original or its disastrous 1988 sequel) and Michele Soavi's Dellamorte Dellamore (a.k.a. Cemetery Man) showed a diversity of original approaches to the genre as well as some fine filmmaking talent (especially in the case of Jackson and Soavi). All three films sadly gained little more than cult status. It is not unlikely that Romero will ever make a fourth chapter to his series. Given the compromises he needed to make to get Day Of The Dead off the ground, many ideas and developments were left hanging in limbo. Romero has so far only hinted at the merest possibility of doing another one, this one to reflect the first decade of the next century (skipping the nineties altogether) and taking mankind to the stage where he lives in resorts surrounded by fences and armed guards so he doesn't have to deal with the zombie problem anymore. The Living Dead series deserves to end with dignity. Seeing as how no studio is ever going to put up the cash for it, perhaps all the great horror filmmakers of the last three decades should make a donation, allowing Romero to make his definitive zombie movie. Just imagine: Twilight Of The Dead, directed by George Romero and produced by John Carpenter, Sam Raimi, Clive Barker, Stephen King, David Cronenberg, Wes Craven, Dario Argento and John Landis (to make up for directing Thriller). Wouldn't that be bliss? Tom Mes