Wednesday, August 11, 2010

George Romero's Survival of the Dead

I am a huge fan of George Romero's work; really am. And I frankly believe that his zombie movies, the same movies that actually established the zombie sub-genre in horror, are some of the most interesting, unique, smart, innovative and politically intriguing horror movies ever created. The Night of the Living Dead was unique in featuring a black protagonist and anti-racist overtones back in 1968, the Dawn of the Dead was harsh in its critique of consumerist society, Day of the Dead openly mocked armies, the Land of the Dead was the only zombie-based class drama ever shot, and all of them were great films with proper characters, interesting plots and wise scares.

George Romero's 2009 zombie flick Survival of the Dead, on the other hand, is far less than spectacular. Actually, it's a right-out disappointment, that fails on so many levels, it actually managed to shock me. This is sub-standard, uninspired b-movie fare, and I simply didn't see it coming.

First of all, you see, gone are the political undertones and the original ideas in the already tired sub-genre, and in are most major zombie movie cliches. Then there's the inclusion of some dire attempts at slapstick humour, and an even more desperate attempt to test some cardboard, soap-opera inspired characters, which -surprise, surprise- miserably fail to create any sort of empathy. Oh, and in case you were wondering the plot sports gigantic holes and is roughly as interesting as watching school kids remake Romeo and Juliet. Adding the fact that the movie doesn't even try to scare anyone, well, I guess it would be safe to say this is something you'll most probably want to avoid.

It doesn't even get the atmosphere right! Seems like someone forgot to put the needed amount of zombies in it...

And, please, don't get me started on that curing the zombies subplot. Or the miserably and decidedly unfunny slapstick ending to some originally promising scenes. It simply makes me sad. George Romero deserves much better than that. 

You can find out more about Survival of the Dead at imdb and its official site. To grab a copy of the movie, you could try Amazon.

10 comments:

  1. Oh, where did all the good zombies go?

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  2. Heaven presumably, where they can happily play with their shocking (A)i(r)Phones:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUT39op2Pp8&playnext=1&videos=Lvuqy0o1Vrk

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  3. Who is that guy?
    Like his work!!!!

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  4. I actually enjoyed this to a degree. Much better than "Diary of the Dead".

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  5. This, I wisely ignored Anatoly. The trailer was quite eloquent...

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  6. I actually own it. Mostly for completion reasons, since I own every other Romero zombie flick (and multiple versions of some). I have Survival sitting in my preorder too, so it's gonna be added to my collection the second it comes out.

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  7. Well, I can't help but commend your dedication... Hope your collection also runs in DOS :P

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  8. Nope, BUT I can run it on a software dvd decoder in Win95 on one of my virtual machines :)

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