Headscratchers / Night of the Living Dead (1990)

• Okay, so this is a farmhouse out in the sticks yes? Remote enough that it's owner has his own gas pump, a barn filled with hay and at least one tractor. He was fixing up the place, and thus his house is full of tools and lumber, and he's shown to be a hunter, owning both a rifle and a double barreled shotgun. So, clearly a self sufficient kind of family yes? So for more then half the movie they are searching for keys to the locked gas pump. "Keys! We've got find the keys!" But...you mean to tell me, out of all the tools in that house, and with the dead owners nephew there, there isn't one single pair of bolt cutters on the entire farm? I'm seeing fencing, I'm seeing barbed wire. You mean to tell me that "Aw crap...the pump is locked!" comes up, but no one goes "Well just cut it off!" Sure, Tom later tries a shotgun version, but I simply can't believe that no one would even THINK of looking for a tool solution.
  • A good point, particularly as it was implied that Tom was close to Uncle Reg and Satchel and probably visited them often. The best I can conjecture:
    • Even in a remote country farm, the heavy tools aren't kept in the house. They were most likely out in the shed we saw when the first zombies of the night showed up.
    • It's possible they didn't HAVE bolt cutters, or at least as far as Tom knew. They probably had at least a hacksaw, but that would have taken forever to cut through.
    • And finally, we are examining these possibilities without having hordes of ravenous zombies attacking us in all direction: in their situation, even common sense solutions can be hard to see.
    • There's some Fridge Horror with this whole idea about the boltcutters being in the shed: the shed pointed out above might have had keys needed to unlock it, as people who live even in the sticks would have made sure that someone didn't come onto their property and steal things. What if one of the keys that were found on the uncle's body had actually been to the shed?
• How are zombies with broken necks ambulatory? Ben mentions seeing someone with an obviously broken neck still getting up and moving, and a zombie seen in the film itself also seems to have a broken neck, but that leaves the question of how a walking corpse can keep walking in that situation. That the zombies are active until the brain is destroyed implies that have something of an active nervous system, but a broken neck typically severs the connection of the brain to the nervous system from the neck down, which should prevent the zombie from being mobile even if its head remains active.
  • To be fair, breaking your neck doesn't automatically sever your nerves, its just the most likely scenario, for all we knew the guy with the neck had fallen and broke his neck trying to get away from the zombies, and got infected then.
  • How are dead people able to move at all? Movie Zombies obviously take a lot of liberties with biology.
    • A lot of people figure the whole "no more room in hell" explanation is correct, and the virus is supernatural, because obviously, without the body working as it should, zombies would rot away much quicker, and zombies dead for ages would not be able to move.