Survival of the dead Review

George Romero has totally lost it. In fact, his latest zombie opera, Survival of the Dead, is so bad that I’m beginning to doubt he ever really had it. Romero, like everybody’s other least-favorite George, has been tainted by his early success, and is now every bit the carelessly misguided, ineffectual storyteller Lucas is.

It’s actually astounding that Survival of the Dead comes from someone who’s been in the business for forty years, because it positively reeks. The writing is dense and talky, with stilted, masturbatory dialogue, and some of the laziest attempts at horror I’ve ever seen. Not only is Survival not scary, it’s not entertaining, and for all its attempts at social commentary, it’s not even insightful.

It’s like Romero spent the last few decades reading essays on Night and Dawn of the Dead endlessly stroking his own ego as both a Master of Horror and a respected sociological voice. But where his early Dead films were dedicated zombie pieces with a muted social backdrop, Diary and Survival of the Dead are full-blown, pretentious soapbox films that just so happen to start the walking deceased. In fact, the big zombie sequences this time around are used more too artificially herd our protagonists than they are to exhilarate audiences. 

But even the most over the top kill is rendered meaningless when it’s executed at the hands of such uninspired characters. Romero’s cast is comprised of uniformly cartoons, stereotypical surrogates for human beings that prove not only that Romero doesn’t know his craft, but also that he doesn’t particularly understand people. It might not be so embarrassing if he wasn’t desperate to stay relevant, but he jams in a superfluous teenager who says things like.


Romero’s rotting carcass of a career. The man simply cannot write and relate a coherent story anymore. It’s tough to even summarize Survival of the Dead. I mean cell phone kid and a ragtag team of ex-military something-or-others clash with two feuding Irish families on an island off the coast of Delaware… a place apparently so far removed from modern society that they settle their disputes with 19th century rifles. It’s all just tacky garnishment around Romero’s big question, which is whether or not euthanize the living dead is a humane practice. It’s an intriguing premise, but one that doesn’t have any real world application. Plus, he posits that a zombie can learn, but also that it’s no less hungry for flesh. Hypothetically, if they’re real, they’re dead, and they want to eat us, I’m not sure it really matters that they have some minuscule capacity for intelligence.

Survival of the Dead goes beyond a forgivable exercise in over-thinking, it’s so sloppily conceived and ineptly executed that it casts doubt on any talent I once thought Romero had. Like with Lucas and his later Star Wars films, the director has, at best, faded into a distant echo of the artist he once was. At worst, his audience is forced to consider that maybe he was never the genius we hailed him as. Now there’s a scary thought.