Survival of the Dead

City Paper Grade: C

by Shaun Brady

GETTING HANDSY: The undead get a little touchy-feely in zombie movie god George A. Romero's latest.

[ City Paper Grade: C ]

George A. Romero's budgets have often been at odds with his ambitions — witness the compromised Day of the Dead, vastly scaled back from the apocalyptic finale the director had planned for his initial zombie trilogy. Offered the chance to finally realize that climax via the FX-helper of CGI, he came up with Land of the Dead, a clumsy if entertaining jab at the Bush administration. He then rebooted his zombies in Diary of the Dead, where the shortage of funds led to a cynical exploration of new media mixed in with the gore. But in the series' sixth installment, it's inspiration that is the resource most lacking, and the corpses are the only thing animated.

For the first time, Romero follows characters introduced in the previous film, a rogue military group who appeared briefly to hold up Diary's Winnebago-driving crew. The soldiers now find themselves on a small island off Slaughter Beach in Delaware, where two feuding Irish clans bring the proper handling of the menace into their perennial animosity. It's an excuse to basically remake William Wyler's The Big Country with zombies standing in for water rights, but as realized, none of the elements gibe — the anachronism of cowboy standoffs coexisting with iPhones is never resolved, and thus feels like (at least) two movies uncomfortably stitched together.

The strength of Romero's zombie films, as opposed to those of his legions of gore-hound followers, has been that the horror takes a back seat to some form of social commentary, no matter how broad. That's still the case in Survival, but the message essentially boils down to a statement about the futility of war, a simplistic point delivered with little more than a disinterested shrug. For the first time in the series, the zombie elements — especially the cartoonish kills — feel like an obligation, met with one eye on the marketplace and one rolled up into the director's head.