Survival of the Dead

This is George Romero’s sixth DEAD movie and his third in four years, reflective of the sub-genres resurgent popularity in the wake of a remake of his own DAWN OF THE DEAD. The new movie uses a secondary character (squad leader Alan Van Sprang, seen in both LAND OF THE DEAD and DIARY OF THE DEAD) to act as a bridge to a new story but otherwise offers an opposing visual and narrative aesthetic to that of its immediate predecessor. Replacing DIARY’s verite depiction of an undead apocalypse, this is a conventionally shot scope zombie take on THE BIG COUNTRY.

SURVIVAL takes place six days after the beginnings of the end seen in DIARY. Its set on a Delaware island where two prominent families, the O’Flynns and the Muldoons, are at perpetual loggerheads as to how to deal with the zombie epidemic. The former, represented by patriarch Kenneth Welsh, takes a zero-tolerance toward the zombies and believes they should be exterminated. The Muldoons, however, (led by Richard Fitzpatrick) believe they should keep the undead in shackles until they find a cure. To get revenge on Muldoon after being exiled from the island, O’Flynn posts a video on You Tube hoping more people (read : zombies) will show up on the island to pester Muldoon and his good intentions. The soldiers seen briefly in DIARY also show up.

SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD, despite the genre cross-pollination, unfolds in a familiar Romero-esque world, where (as in, for example, DAWN), the zombies are as much a nuisance as anything and sometimes even become irrelevant to the main narrative. As in DIARY, they have become bait for sports and cheap kicks, becoming at times the stuff of slapstick. As in DAY OF THE DEAD, the zombies carry on the menial tasks they performed when alive (love the zombie mailman). Momentarily, the movie becomes fresh : the zombies find new sources of food (a horse is ripped apart in arguably the only truly gut-churning sequence) and some of the splashy gore effects offer neat new ways to off the living dead.

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