Zombie guru George A. Romero paved the way for the likes of “Shaun of the Dead,” “28 Days Later” and last year’s quirky hit “Zombieland,” modern classics which drew inspiration from his body of work.
And yet Romero’s latest undead affair can’t hold a candle to any of them.
“Survival of the Dead,” Romero’s sixth zombie feature, is an unholy collage of anti-war boilerplate, western silliness and the occasionally inventive “kill shot.”
It’s far beneath the man who chilled us to the core with the black and white masterpiece “Night of the Living Dead,” and it even lacks the feistiness of his last entry, “Diary of the Dead.”
It’s clear someone should put a bullet in the brain of this undead franchise before it gets off the gurney.
“Survival” follows the unsavory guardsmen, led by Sgt. Crocket (Alan Van Sprang) who briefly harrassed the heroes from “Diary of the Dead.”
They’re desperate to find a refuge from the growing undead army, and they settle on a small island off the coast of Delaware promising a zombie-free oasis.
The island is far from deserted, but the horrors within have little to do with those flesh-gorging zombies.
It’s teeming with kin from a decades old feud involving two Irish families.
Anyone else get the sense Romero ran out of ways to milk his franchise for anything but a few splatter gags?
Romero’s penchant for biting social commentary is reduced to a generic wailing about the intractability of war, a theme so obvious even a zombie could suss it out. The film does take a quick slam at flyover country when our hero says out of the blue that small towns breed small people.
“Survival” features the kind of amateurish acting we’d expect from a no-budget thriller, not one conducted by one of the genre’s true maestros.
Romero still manages a few neat moments, from a cheap scare that actually works to a few delirious zombie kills.
Audiences will chortle over the early carnage, but during the ridiculous finale the laughter will be aimed directly as Romero.
“Survival of the Dead” would be just another limp zombie outing if not for the name on the credits.
It’s a sad state of affairs for a filmmaker who all but reinvented the modern horror film.
(Photo: Joris Jarsky and Kathleen Munroe star in “Survival of the Dead,” a Magnet Release. Photo courtesy of Magnet Releasing)
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
“The film does take a quick slam at flyover country when our hero says out of the blue that small towns breed small people.”
Ouch. If anyone ever holds a contest for the Snobbiest Line Ever Written by a Hollywood Screenwriter, I think we have a winner right here.
It’s an odd, ugly moment in a film that doesn’t have enough brains to make such sweeping statements.
Did anyone else notice the odd clash between these three scenes:
“Dawn of the Dead,” our heroes notice some cash has been left out at the mall bank. They pick up a wad and sarcastically shake hands over it for the security cameras. It’s just paper.
“Day of the Dead,” people looking for survivors pass a bank where a pointless attempted robbery was interrupted by zombies, or alligators, or both. There are great mounds of cash blowing about in the wind. Our heroes quite sensibly ignore it. It’s just paper.
“Land of the Dead,” the villain is absolutely obsessed with collecting great quantities of cash printed by a civilization that no longer exists.
I confess I’ve seen “Land of the Dead” several times and enjoyed it in spite of the anti-capitalist propaganda. Though I’m not surprised to find the DVD outtakes included scenes that were far, far more boringly didactic than what actually made it into the final cut.
Good point, Charlos. And all it takes for Romero to get his Capitalism-free utopia is for billions of people to die in a zombie apocalypse. A fair trade, wouldn’t you say?
I had ‘Survival’ on my DVR but after watching a little, deleted it in fear that the absolute suckiness of this movie could infect some of the other movies that I had recorded.
The combination of typical Rednecks (found to have beheaded a dozen or so blacks, with heads firmly impaled on posts) and accents that came off as more Gorton’s Fisherman than Irish, had me wondering when my life had careened into cinematic oblivion. Surely I could have spent my time more wisely. Maybe the bathroom or the garage needed cleaning.
I thought Romero had jumped the shark with Diary. Boy was I wrong . With Survival, he jumps it, lands on it then drops it in a blender.
You hit the nail on the head with: “Survival of the Dead” would be just another limp zombie outing if not for the name on the credits.
Amen brother.