SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD review

SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD (2009)

Director:

George A. Romero

Stars:

Alan Van Sprang, Kenneth Welsh and Kathleen Munroe

“Last time anyone counted, fifty-three million people were dying every year, a hundred-fifty thousand every day, a hundred and seven every minute, and that was in normal times.”

After watching Survival of the Dead, the only thing that was dead was George Romero’s Zombie franchise and Romero’s career.  Now this film is not as bad as the utterly atrocious Diary of the Dead, but it isn’t much better either. 

Thankfully George goes back to the more traditional method of filmmaking and rids himself of his pathetic attempt at first-person camera perspective.  The story here is simple and strange at the same time.  The O’Flynn clan and the Muldoon clan have been feuding for years over a shared piece of land called Plum Island off the coast of Delaware.  Now that a zombie outbreak has occurred, the O’Flynn patriarch goes around shooting the zombies while the Muldoon patriarch believes that the dead should be kept around in the hopes that they can be cured.  This concept is exactly the same territory George covered in Day of the Dead back in 1985, so just like with Diary of the Dead, here we go again with George repeating himself for no other reason than to make another zombie movie with almost no redeeming qualities. 

What we simply have here is an Irish Western Zombie movie.  I know it sounds strange, but that is what George has given us.  All the citizens of Plum Island speak with thick Irish accents and walk around dressed as cowboys.  Even their homes look like they were built in the middle 1800’s.

Alan Van sprang plays Sarge, a member of a military team who is just looking for a way and a place to survive.  It should be noted that George, in a moment of pure dementia and senility, decided to introduce us to the female military person as she has her hand shoved down her pants masturbating while her friend Francisco stands a few feet away chatting it up with her.  All the progress George had made over the years evolving his female characters was thrown out in that one moment. 

At some point Sarge and his team meet up with the exiled Patrick O’Flynn and soon they are all head back to Plum Island.  Once back, the feud continues.  But here Romero is very inconsistent in that Muldoon’s argument is that the zombies shouldn’t be killed, but when we are back with him and his men they seem to be killing every zombie they can.  He claims those who don’t show promise should be killed.  I cannot understand his motives or his change of thought, nor is a true explanation given. 

And of course the third act of the film consists of a good old fashioned western stand-off between the two feuding clans.  We learn that after seeing O’Flynn’s deceased daughter whom we met at the films beginning, that there is actually a twin daughter so the one we thought was dead really wasn’t.  What the fuck George?  What’s the point?

Muldoon captured the deceased O’Flynn daughter to see if she will eat an animal rather than a human, and believes that by capturing her, he will force O’Flynn to realize that the Muldoon was is the true way.  This film is the ultimate pissing match between two old cranky codgers.  In Day of the Dead both sides of the argument stayed with their beliefs until the moment their stances killed them, but here in Survival everyone’s belief systems change at random. 

Ultimately Muldoon and O’Flynn kill each other, while Sarge and a few others escape.  O’Flynn’s surviving daughter puts her hand in her zombie sister’s face and then is shocked when she gets bit.  O’Flynn shoots her just in time to stop her from vocalizing that she saw her zombie sister take a bite from the horse that was in the pen with her, making sure that none of the survivors realize that maybe the zombies can be trained to eat something besides humans.

The final scene in the film is great.  It features O’Flynn and Muldoon standing in front of a giant moon during dusk, both holding empty guns and trying to shoot each other, leaving us to believe that these men will spend the rest of eternity as zombies still feuding because they never learned their lesson.  It’s too bad the entire movie fails to live up to that final scene, and it’s too bad that Romero doesn’t seem to be learning the old adage, “Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”  ENOUGH ALREADY GEORGE!!!!

GRADE- D