company: Artfire Films,
Romero-Grunwald Productions and
Devonshire Productions
year: 2009
runtime: 90′
director: George A. Romero
cast: Alan Van Sprang, Kenneth Welsh,
Kathleen Munroe, Devon Bostick,
Richard Fitzpatrick, Athena Karkanis,
Stefano DeMatteo, Joris Jarsky
writers: George A. Romero
cinematography: Adam Swica
music: Robert Carli
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Survival of the Dead is currently out in limited theatrical release through Magnet Releasing, and is available for online rental or pre-order on Blu-ray and DVD through Amazon.com
Oh no. It’s the zombie-pocalypse. Again. People are dying, society is crumbling, and wi-fi coverage is spotty at best. I’ll be the first to give George Romero credit for his accomplishments, and its hard to overstate his importance to independent film and modern existentialist horror. But it’s been a long time since Romero’s ghouls first shambled ‘cross the silver screen. Four decades and five sequels after the fact the people, places and things are all too familiar, and Romero’s once brave new zombiefied world is less compelling than ever before.
Survival of the Dead follows Sarge (Alan Van Sprang reprising his minor role from Diary of the Dead) and his motley crew of National Guard deserters as they trek across the countryside on the hunt for safety from the unseen chaos brought on by another and as of yet still unexplained zombie uprising. They’re colorful characters in the typical Romero tradition – a god-fearing Spaniard, a lesbian, a balding middle-aged loser and the cigarette-chugging Sarge – but I can’t say that any are terribly interesting. Along their trip they encounter some hicks who just can’t treat zombies right and a fifth addition to their troop, the creatively credited Boy (Devon Bostick, Diary of a Wimpy Kid). They eventually hit upon a streaming video of Captain Courageous, an older gentleman peddling salvation in the form of the isolated and peaceful Plum Island.
Sarge and Co. take the Cap’n up on his offer and, after a bit of ambush and deception, wind up on a ferry out to an island that’s every bit as isolated but not nearly so peaceful as they had been led to believe. The Cap’n turns out to be one Patrick O’Flynn (Kenneth Welsh, The Day After Tomorrow), evicted from Plum Island by Seamus Muldoon (Richard Fitzpatrick, The Boondock Saints) because of a disagreement over a zombie’s place in the world. You see, ol’ Seamus thinks we should take care of them and try to convince them to eat things not us, while Pattie can’t make them dead enough. Sarge dives right into the feud between O’Flynn and Muldoon after the latter patriarch turns out to be a mass-murdering maniac, leading to a protracted gun fight and a healthy dose of the expected gut-munching mayhem.
Romero’s mediocre Diary of the Dead gets a mediocre sequel in Survival, another in a steadily growing list of arguments for the moth-balling of the horror icon’s ailing franchise. I find it difficult to believe that the writer and director, well respected for his usage of horror to discuss social and political concerns, has run out of things to say. It is unfortunate, then, that he seems to have run out of interesting ways to say them.
There isn’t much in Survival of the Dead that doesn’t feel like a retread of past efforts. The motley crew of intrepid survivors is reminiscent of those from Dawn of the Dead, the National Guardsmen presenting with much the same crudity and bad manners as the bored Army men of Day. Bad-guy Seamus Muldoon comes off as a conglomeration of Land of the Dead‘s Kaufman and Day‘s mad Doctor Logan, the patriarch of a little island empire just crazy enough to keep his dead wife in the kitchen. Then there are the zombies, who are just like the zombies of the past films – slow-footed dumb-dumbs with some capacity to learn and a fancy for human flesh. A good deal of the plot for Survival revolves around Seamus’ attempts to convince the zombies to eat something other than people, a subplot that manages the impressive feat of both panning out and fizzling at roughly the same time.
The gore, like everything else, feels overly familiar. After Saws and Hostels and endless iterations and knock-offs of both, gore that would have shocked audiences in the 60s and 70s is now suffering from its own ubiquity. Everyone expects Romero’s zombies to disembowel a few deserving yokels before the running time is through, but never has it felt more unnecessary than it does here. It is only in the frequent moments of zombie destruction that the horror veteran is allowed to show at least some of the imagination that earned him that status. Viewers are treated to the usual array of head shots, punctuated with the careful application of explosives and, in one memorable case, a fire extinguisher. There’s also a nice twist on an old trope, with a man biting a zombie for a change. Turns out there’s more than one way to catch the undead bug . . .
Survival of the Dead marks the first time that Romero has left me with a dearth of things to say, a sad day for this long-time fan, and the recent announcement that he intends a further two sequels in the new dead series has left my hope in the man running dryer than ever. Survival may not be awful, but it never ranks as much more than ‘okay’, and while the sub-genre can always produce worse I’m pained by the fact that it can do (and has done) so much better. Certified zombie-holics will want to indulge, but I can’t recommended.
