BILL O'REILLY LOOKS like a hog, but he probably doesn't taste as good. You'd have to cook Dick Cheney at a very high temperature to eradicate all the toxins from his body, and even if Wolfgang Puck or huggably cute Iron Chef Hiroyuki Sakai did the honors, the result would still undoubtedly inspire one's stomach to heave-ho. Karl Rove certainly is juicy, but his fat count spells cardio trouble – after giving him the spit treatment with rotten apple and trimming away all the corpulent stuff, little of culinary worth would remain. Nonetheless, thanks to George A. Romero, the old catchphrase "Eat the Rich" has become appetizing once again. The morsels Romero serves up in Land of the Dead are just desserts for a zombie nation wearing the eternal-shame badge of a second-term Bush presidency.

One disappointing aspect of the recent horror-remake revival has been the toothless apoliticism and reactionary tendencies of the resulting movies, with the exception of Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead, in which Sarah Polley is as tough as Galen Ross in the original and a hell of a lot faster than Night of the Living Dead's catatonic Barbara. In the late '60s and early '70s, Romero, Tobe Hooper, and Wes Craven crafted definitive end-of-the-Aquarius-Age visions of America in turmoil. The last couple alive in Romero's Night of the Living Dead were the Ku Klux Klan's worst nightmare – ultimately too progressive to survive in a landscape where a police force still tried to maintain order. Hooper's vacationing hippie children met their Manson-ized makers. Craven took the supposedly "nice" American nuclear family and savagely attacked it, exposing its barbaric underside.

In contrast, current-day throwbacks like Wrong Turn, Marcus Nispel's Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and this year's House of Wax do little more than vilify the rural poor, making them extra monstrous by pitting them against gel-styled and gym-toned Beverly Hills-zip code model types. At least Craven's suburbanites looked like ordinary people – Jessica Biel and company seem to have fallen off a 24 Hour Fitness ad into some Abercrombie and Fitch executive's methed-out hallucination of the '70s. The only message seems to be that rednecks are the biggest danger to six-packs of the ab variety, and civilization ends and barbarity rules wherever one's cellphone's signal starts to give out.

The nearly unanimous raves that have greeted Land of the Dead are testimony to the fact that gutsy opinion is sadly lacking in Hollywood's area code; it takes an outsider – Pittsburgh is practically today's version of Sirk's Germany – to deliver what people are craving. Built upon bloody slapstick, Romero's imagery is far from subtle, as it should be. When a ready-to-flame nozzle spouting premium petrol is smashed through the front window of a car belonging to an evil oligarch (Dennis Hopper, more charismatic than anybody in the current Bush administration), it's as concise and effective a protest gesture as anything that happened in SF a few springs ago. I can think of no better way of emerging from the ever-more vulgar Fourth of July haze than a second viewing of Romero's movie, where legions of zombies are distracted by fireworks.

Funny thing about those zombies – in Romero's universe, they have potential, they just might be able to change. They've never been the enemy, but more like symbols of middle-class, US media-opiated banality. Taking a cue from Day of the Dead's Walkman-toting Bub, Land of the Dead's restless corpses play a pivotal role in the war between living haves and have-nots. Emerging from a stroll along the bottom of a river (in an obvious nod to Herk Harvey's Carnival of Souls) to burn down Hopper's high-rise, Fiddler's Green, they're led by a gas station attendant who has pumped his last gallon. The sleeping masses, Romero seems to say, could still be roused to revolt, and when they do, they won't be chomping down on the poor – after all, they're tough and stringy.

Back before video killed off the grindhouse, horror was a home for cutting societal commentary, a place where figures like Larry Cohen could rudely satirize and wage visual violence against everything from religious mania and sugar-crazed consumerism to baby making. But you'd have to look all the way back to the class and race warfare of Craven's The People Under the Stairs – which arrived at the tail end of the first Bush family reign – to find a US horror box-office success that illustrated this country's internal divides so clearly while delivering precious wish fulfillment for one side, and cruel comeuppance for the other. Land of the Dead's success should serve as a notice to younger directors that it takes more than gore to follow in the footsteps of a master.

Johnny Ray Huston