Survival of the Dead

You know, I loved the original Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead.  I kind of enjoyed Day of the Dead and the one with John Leguzimio (sp?), although I didn’t think smart zombies were the way to go.  Then I watched Diary of the Dead, which is a found footage movie, I generally don’t care for those that much anyway and the story was only okay.  So, I guess what I am getting at here is that I have a deterioration fondness for Romero and his films.  With the name Survival of the Dead, I thought we would get back to some good stuff.  I was wrong.

Why do Night and Dawn work so much for me?  Well they are horrifying for one.  But they are also about the people and not about the zombies.  The people are the characters and the zombies are just a situation/metaphor.  In night and dawn, you actually care when a character dies.  By the time you get to survival the characters are just caricatures. 

Survival may be the first Romero movie where zombies are a joke.  None of the characters are really afraid of them.  Ammo is abundant and everyone is a crack shot.  The zombies are slow and they come at people single file almost.  The zombies are also ninjas and can sneak up on someone that is supposedly surviving in a zombie apocalypse.  If I never see a person shoot past another person’s head again, it will be too soon. 

After reading Max Brooks zombie stuff and reading/watching the walking dead, it is clear that Romero doesn’t really do his homework on the genre that he created.  I mean he really falls short in this movie.  The movie is really about a blood feud between two families on an island and how that is intensified over treatment of zombies.  Go ahead, read that again.  The families are fighting over whether or not the zombies should be killed.  It even goes so far as they are trying to teach the zombies to eat something other than human flesh. The purpose or importance of this experiment was completely lost on me. 

If you want to see a zombie ride a horse for an hour, then you might like this movie.  Everyone else is probably going to be let down.  The DVD has a bunch of special features, but I don’t care enough to watch them.  I think Romero is the zombie now.  This movie was dumb.