Like the marauding ghouls that strip meat from their human feasts, leaving only an empty, picked-over husk, the zombie movie has been ripped apart and resurrected time and time again. After a slew of remakes and revisions, the latest undead offering from the godfather of the genre, George A. Romero, stumbles around in a wasteland of tired cliches and convoluted commentary. It's not to say that Survival of the Dead is a bad zombie movie, it's just that after 40 years of working in the same sub-genre, Romero has trouble breathing life into his latest living dead story.
Our disconnection from Survival's themes starts with its remote, old-world island setting. Two families -- the O'Flynns and Muldoons -- have shared the island off the coast of Delaware for as long as anyone can remember. When the dead began to walk, it was just another situation to divide these two clans. The O'Flynns start laying the undead back to rest with bullets in the head, while the Muldoons believe that a cure is on the horizon and flesh-hungry hordes should be looked after until then. To muck up the social matters even more, the every-man-for-himself marines from Diary of the Dead are thrown into the mix (for whatever reason). Faster than you can yell, "RUN!" Romero's typical archetypes are asking the same old zombieland question -- how do we live amongst the dead?
Whereas Romero's prior films have woven a not-so-subtle commentary into their stories, Survival of the Dead's social agenda is not as clear as Dawn of the Dead's attacks on consumerism or even Diary's internet media criticism. Romero's predictable out-of-control militia message (a rehashed theme from Day of the Dead) clashes with his nihilistic view that the only ones who will adapt to the zombie plague are the undead themselves (cue the title line). Romero's military commentary has trouble finding a foothold between our current "support our troops, end this war" political climate and the hardheaded O'Flynns and Muldoons playing out the different sides of the same coin. By the end of the film, the only group that can garner horror fans' sympathies are the gore-gorging zombies.
Although those aforementioned social commentaries have helped Romero's zombie canon survive the past 40-plus years, his original trilogy (Night, Dawn and Day) left a more gruesome legacy -- practical zombie gore make-up effects. 1978's Dawn of the Dead introduced artist Tom Savini to horror audiences, and his Karo syrup-covered practical effects inspired a generation of gore-hound horror, including the seminal Friday the 13th, and brought some of the most gruesomely impressive images to the screen with Dawn and Day (not to mention the first on-camera head explosion). Perhaps Survival of the Dead's greatest misstep is its reliance on computer-generated (CG) effects over the time-tested and artistic practical make-up effects that Romero introduced to horror fans a generation ago. Survival's CG decapitations and bullet wounds look as out of place as a zombie in one of Muldoon's cattle corals.
For fans of Romero's zombie legacy, there's still enough charm and wit to put a devilish smile on the face of even the most cynical zombie fan, despite Survival's shortcomings. Part of it comes from Romero's ability to create memorable zombies -- like the horseback riding zombie or the mailman zombie. They are goofy enough to be entertaining, but human enough to be our own friends and family. The other part comes from Kenneth Welsh's charismatic performance as old man O'Flynn. Whether he's handing a lit stick of dynamite to an unwitting zombie or making a pitch for strangers to come join him in his island paradise in a YouTube video, Welsh keeps us entertained, even as the painfully predictable zombie story asks us to put it out of its misery before it turns into another mindless cinematic corpse.
