Survival of the Dead (2009)

Now this is a return to form for Romero. After suffering the unlikeable Riley in ‘Land of the Dead’ and the horrendous...everyone in ‘Diary of the Dead’, we get a much more improved film from the Master of Horror.

First of all, Romero had never thought of any of his Dead films (past ‘Night of the Living Dead’) as sequels, as they never featured any characters from the previous films. ‘Survival of the Dead’ breaks that tradition, as the leader of the military group from ‘Diary’ and his comrades return. Now, we actually get background with these guys! Yeah! We learn a little about the events which lead to Sarge, played by Alan Van Sprang, and his group becoming highwaymen. We hear his thoughts and feelings about the situation, and we begin to like him. Then again he did rob the group in ‘Diary’, so I already liked him.

I’ll come back to the other characters in a minute. The plot starts off with two families on Plum Island, the O’Flynn’s and the Muldoon’s. They had never liked each other, and the zombie Apocalypse took their rivalry to the next level. Patrick O’Flynn, played by Kenneth Walsh, wants the dead to stay dead, but Seamus Muldoon, played by Richard Fitzpatrick, would rather keep the dead around, wanting them to remain part of society. A standoff with Patrick and Seamus and their respective groups results in Seamus exiling Patrick and some of his men from the island, after Patrick’s daughter Janet persuaded Seamus not to kill him. Why does Seamus listen to Janet?....I dunno.

Anyway,  after Sarge and his group pick up a boy, played by Devon Bostick (and he is actually listed as ‘boy’, check IMDB if you don’t believe me), boy tells them of an online video of Patrick telling people of an island which they can use to escape the zombie horde. Sarge and his group go to Patrick and his group, a shootout occurs with each other and some zombies. Francisco, played by Stefano Colacitti, commandeers a ferry, but bites a zombie’s finger off. Patrick, the only survivor from his group, steers Sarge and his group to Plum Island. On the island things fall apart; Kenny, played by Eric Woolfe, is shot, Francisco is shot by the lesbian Tomboy, played by Athena Karkanis, before she is kidnapped by Muldoon’s men, Sarge collapses after being shot and Patrick finds his daughter has been turned into a zombie. Meanwhile Muldoon’s right hand man Chuck, played by Joris Jarsky, is tasked to find his old flame-turned-zombie Janet as the other zombies had failed in trying to eat something that isn’t human.

 

Now, here’s where I thought Romero had gone against what most films have; a love interest. Yeah! Well Tomboy’s a lesbian, Janet is dead and there’s no other female character. So who else is there for Sarge to have a romantic involvement with except...Janet? But you’re dead! Oh okay, it’s her twin sister Jane!...Who was never mentioned before....or any indication of existence was made about. Yeah, that was really stupid.

So the plot is pretty good, except for one little tiny problem...there’s little to no zombie involvement. Every so often we see captured zombies, but they have little impact. They only have a rampage twice, once when Sarge’s group face off with Patrick’s, and when Patrick’s and Muldoon’s forces clash. The violence mainly occurs between the human characters. This does give us some much missed character development, but for a zombie film, there really should have been more involvement from them. Actually, now that I think about it, that’s probably the underlying message, that, in times of crisis, the enemy isn’t some dark malevolent force, but ourselves. I don’t know if that message was intended, but I’d like to think it was.

And bizarrely, there are some funny scenes in the film, such as Sarge throwing a grenade at Patrick and his men, which blew apart the front of the shack they were in, prompting Patrick to say "What the bloody Hell was that?" or something along those lines. And of course Patrick is a great laugh. Then there's some ingenuity when Francisco becomes infected by biting a ZOMBIE! That was clever, you have to admit that.

One thing I almost missed though was the fact that for the whole film, Sarge’s group holds onto over $1million cash in an armoured truck, and they really want to hold onto that cash. Boy even asks Jane what she would do with that amount, which apparently made her return to help her father’s group. But, like I said in ‘Land of the Dead’, money doesn’t work in a world where civilisation has collapsed! So why Patrick also blackmails money from folks he sends to Plum is also irrelevant!

The characters are a huge improvement on the last two films, pretty much everyone was likeable in their own ways. The actors and actresses portraying them were very good as well. Patrick is a funny and has a very strong personality, Sarge is what Riley from ‘Land’ should have been, Chuck is very interesting and Kenny was underused.

Even Muldoon was a great character, his views on keeping the dead with us and not letting go is one that is viewed by many, and one which even intrigues us, the viewer. Despite the fact that we’re on Patrick’s side because we’ve followed him and also agree with the ideology that zombies need to be shot, it is still a theory that will stick in everyone’s minds. Muldoon is even right when the zombies start eating the horse...sort of. I mean, whilst this means that the zombies have started to eat other meat, I feel that this just means that we’ll now have zombie animals running around also trying to eat us. Plus I am one of those people who think animals should be zombies, like in the Resident Evil franchise.

The zombies have also started to get smarter...even though they’ve only been around for three weeks. Personally I think it should take longer for them to get smarter, like it took four films for them to get smarter in ‘Land of the Dead’, but Muldoon has them chained up in their past jobs, forcing them to remember, which, again, actually works; the mail zombie continuously puts mail in the mailbox, the woodsman zombie continuously chops some wood...sort of, and the woman farmhand zombie uses a plough. Then again it’s not just them. A zombie on the ferry remembers how to start a car, and the Janet zombie remembers how to ride her horse. Why are they smarter? Who knows and who cares?

In fact, now that I think about it, the boy was probably the least favourite character as they made him a jack-of-all trades, making him an annoying know-it-all. Jane/Janet was also one of the least favourites as, well, Janet was only alive for five to ten minutes, and Jane just moaned a lot.

The film itself, isn’t really that scary or creepy, to be honest. Maybe because of the lack of zombies. But the feel of it is much closer to the original trilogy than ‘Land’ or ‘Diary’ were, and that made it superb. Is it better than the original trilogy? No. I like this movie, I really do, but I feel that the original trilogy has set the bar for zombie films; it’s going to be extremely hard for any zombie film to be good compared to ‘Night of the Living Dead’, ‘Dawn of the Dead’ and ‘Day of the Dead’.

So, yeah, I like this film, I really do. It’s the best one of the modern trilogy by far. But should Romero continue doing ‘...of the Dead’ films? I don’t think he should, personally, as I feel that he will make the zombie film genre, the one he made famous, old and tiresome. Also, how many ‘...of the Dead’ films can he make? How many can anyone make? I mean, how about...’Dance of the Dead’? Can you imagine if that happened?

What do you mean it happened?