Survival of the Dead

Shocking! The best Romero in the last 10 years. The scenes taken out context from the trailer must have been a disappointment for some people. As a whole, though, Survival of the Dead feels like a western with very sophisticated social criticism that is also intentionally (!) funny several times. Something I didn’t expect for a second… PS: The only thing that bothered were a couple of very bad digital effects (even if I may be willing to believe that they are “intentionally” bad). (15.03.2010)

Romero’s zombie movies have always been thesis-driven, satirical and caustic, but this time the director, clearly intoxicated by the deserved positive responses to his previous film, abandoned those features in this unwisely overwrought film. Two years after Diary of the Dead, in which he proved himself to be an innovator not only in the zombie genre, but also in modern horror-movie trends, he has come out with a bombastic film that mostly comes across as an incoherent mess, even though it shows the breadth, ambition and multi-layered nature of the director’s vision in its constituent elements. In Romero’s five previous zombie movies, he succeeded in dramaturgically combining social criticism, a casually sophisticated vision of the world during the zombie apocalypse, genre attractions and presentation of the characters. Paradoxically for a filmmaker who, in terms of ideas and craftsmanship, towers over the dabblers and genre journeymen who cower in his shadow, this time it’s impossible to resist the same impressions that one gets when watching the cinematic attempts of various hacks. Instead of a complex and logically constructed world, Survival of the Dead gives viewers a gallery of characters who are stripped of their own will and are subordinated only to the logic of the formula. During sequences having multiple parallel conflicts or levels, it becomes apparent that the director doesn’t know which is happening concurrently outside of the shot – one can imagine how, in the middle of a dialogue scene or shoot-out between certain characters, the others are just apathetically hanging around off camera waiting for their turn to enter. For the first time in a Romero movie, even the gory zombie attack sequences seem like nothing more than attractions utterly unmotivated by the needs of the plot. However, the main problem consists in Romero’s attempt to combine heavyweight criticism of the patriarchy with bombast that isn’t satirical, but rather has the nature of parody and slapstick. Of course, all of this could be explained away as part of the concept of holding up a mirror to the absurdity of genre movies and the conventions of the glorified patriarchy, but in comparison with the highly cohesive Diary of the Dead and the dramaturgically balanced Land of the Dead, Survival of the Dead comes across as a half-baked and failed work. There is still also the possibility that the whole film is an especially caustic joke on viewers and their expectations. However, Romero doesn’t have the status of an artist who has fallen victim to pigeonholing at the hands of the audience like, for example, Takeshi Kitano, and would thus not consider doing such a thing, but there is nothing in the film that would suggest such an approach. (10.07.2013)

Entertaining bullshit. (12.07.2010)

George A. Romero said goodbye to the genre with Survival of the Dead, and it's clear that it's a rather mediocre goodbye, perhaps even below average for some. Nevertheless, you have to give him credit for managing to get some ideas into a fairly ordinary plot framework that harkens back to the socially critical skills he demonstrated in his first zombie trilogy. (05.10.2017)