Movie Review: Survival of the Dead

by KYW's Bill Wine

George A. Romero has spent much of his life among the dead.  Well, the living dead.  Okay, the undead.

Romero is the deadhead who essentially created the zombie genre, writing Night of the Living Dead in 1968, then following it up by writing and directing Dawn of the Dead (1978), Day of the Dead (1985), Land of the Dead (2005), and Diary of the Dead (2007).

And he ain't dead yet.

The last bottle in his zombie six-pack, situated squarely in the middle of his comfort zone, is Survival of the Dead, a straight-faced drama with a not quite delectable but at least detectable sense of humor, most evident in the bursts of zombie slapstick.

It takes place in the postapocalyptic era, six days "after the dead began to walk," as the flesh-eating, brain nibbling monsters, no longer a minority group, have risen from their graves.

The plot involves two feuding families -- yep, it's the Hatfields and the McCoys, zombie-style.  The Muldoons and the O'Flynns, on an island off the coast of Delaware, have their Irishness in common but hold radically divergent views on how they should deal with (and whether they should dispense with) the zombies lurking nearby.

Richard Fitzpatrick as patriarch Seamus Muldoon, a believer in undead rights, feels they should be chained up in the hopes that a cure will someday be found, at which time they can be treated and turned loose.

His rival, on the other hand, patriarch Patrick O'Flynn, played by Kenneth Walsh, wants these shambling meat eaters destroyed on sight.  Hey, counters Muldoon, maybe we can teach them to eat something other than us.

O'Flynn's response?  Muldoon is exiled to the mainland.

Meanwhile, a group of mercenaries, rogue National Guard soldiers led by Sgt. Nicotine Crocket, played by Alan Van Sprang, are currently camped in Philadelphia as part of their countrywide search for a safe haven.  That's when they see a TV commercial for Plum Island, featuring O'Flynn, who invites all to come to this zombie-free island.

They're suspicious, but they make their way there anyway, to an environment where they have been, without knowing it, corralled into joining the family squabble.

Writer-director Romero -- who has over the years also found the time to direct such no-zombie-zone items as Creepshow, Monkey Shines, and The Dark Half -- mixes old school and new school in his approach to the employment of the special effects, which could be described as CGI-enhanced.  They're nimble enough, and he doesn't show them off any more than he needs to accommodate his narrative.

As for the violence, it's a presence, certainly, but it mostly serves as a metaphor, and we get used to it and thus numb to it pretty quickly.

But Survival of the Dead isn't frightening enough to score as a horror pic, and isn't efficiently or sufficiently funny to succeed as a comedy.

The search for thematic subtext that the film occasionally hints at asks us to work much too hard.  Is the abortion debate being referenced?  Is the western genre being deconstructed?  Are the historical troubles in Ireland in play?  Who knows?

What Romero's script really could have used is a protagonist whom we actually cared about and rooted for.  It would have involved us emotionally so that many of the film's other limitations would not have mattered so much.

The acting isn't bad, especially, but it doesn't exactly lift off the screenplay page either.  The characters are -- and blame for this can be shared by the screenplay and the performers -- more or less disposable.

If you can take or leave zombie flicks (although many take, I leave), then perhaps you'll be properly entertained.  But there's not much there there.

So we'll put down 2 stars out of 4 for a zombie flick that only deadheads will appreciate.  Survival of the Dead isn't a dud, as was the 2004 remake of Romero's Dawn of the Dead.  But, undead or not, it barely justifies its own survival.  Two-word review: enough already.