Survival of the Dead (2010)
Review by Chris Jacques
**There might be a spoiler or two…not plot points or twists, necessarily, but spoilers**
It’s been a few months now that I’ve been seeing previews for George Romero’s latest installment in the “Dead” saga, Survival of the Dead. Those few months hadn’t left me very interested in the film at all; unlike days of yore, I didn’t look for a release date, midnight screening or anything of the sort. I can’t put my finger on why I didn’t care; I just didn’t. I should have.
I still don’t know that release date, and I don’t care, as I’ve now seen it twice because Comcast finally decided to make one good move in the course of its shitty, awful history by making it available on-demand before it can be found anywhere else (except torrents, I’m sure). This is precisely the kind of move that should have been made with Diary of the Dead, in all honesty, but I’ll take it where I can get it.
In order to talk about Survival of the Dead, one has to bring up Diary of the Dead, the last Romero flick and a monstrous failure on which the horror community took a massive shit. This wasn’t without warrant, as the movie felt dated when it came out and was very heavy-handed in its message. It was severe and excessive, but the horrible marketing and limited release methods employed on a movie that speaks specifically about the new media revolution is mind-blowing. Simply put: Diary, if it sucked, sucked because we got it a year too late. The traditional, butts-in-theater-seats paradigm should’ve been eschewed in favor of a new media assault, so that it could’ve been tied into the movie while delivering the message when it was fresher…you know, before everyone was killing office productivity by spending the entire day on YouTube!
That out of the way, the reason it had to be mentioned is because Romero gave the horror community a giant “suck it, fuckers!” by making Survival of the Dead a SEQUEL TO DIARY OF THE DEAD!
“Hey George, what’s your next project, after Diary bombed?”
“I’m gonna go ahead and make its sequel.”
Yeah! It’s pulled from a little fraction of Diary, a minuscule plot point where some military types raid the RV. The lead jerk there is our protagonist in Survival, and I absolutely love that Romero did that. Just that little bit of background immediately gives both movies more gravity, and is a fantastic way to tell the viewers that a direction was planned and wouldn’t be abandoned.
“Good for that,” as far as I’m concerned, as Survival of the Dead felt very fresh, like something just killed over a long-dead horse like Land of the Dead. Land was a fun movie, good in my opinion, but I also felt it left us with nowhere else to go that was actually going to be exciting. I didn’t want to see a war film between the increasingly-smart zombies and the ever-dwindling resistance, and not much else could’ve been done with the story arc that wouldn’t have made the whole thing a farce.
So Diary of the Dead shook up the concept, and no one liked it, and then Romero followed it up with a beautifully-shot, very personal story. Survival of the Dead is so cool in that it takes that previous movie, rips off that hand-held webcam style that it employed, and instead shifted towards what is easily the most visually attractive film that Romero’s ever done. It’s indicative of what Romero’s doing with the story on a whole, which is to provide the subjective view.
The story isn’t re-written; it’s just another view of the same object, and it looks radically different. In this instance, we have a group of AWOL mercenaries and their tiny entourage going to an island, where zombies are the least terrifying inhabitants. Alan Van Sprang, as Sarge “Nicotine” Crocket, goes from being a monster-sized douche in Diary to a very engaging, passionate and fun character to follow in Survival, and watching him get caught up in the middle of the intense drama already present on the island is a great way to present the tale told, which I’m purposely trying to avoid talking about because it’s a huge part of the movie and a great idea for a back-story with depth.
The gore is hit-and-miss, as digital effects once again sneak in where make-up would’ve been perfectly fine. All of the acting is generally fine, although there are the occasional slips. And the movie is funnier than I remember previous Dead movies being: sometimes very intentional, sometimes very accidental. It all mixes to make a really good soup with a few sour notes, but is secondary to the importance of Survival of the Dead’s future importance in the sub-genre of zombie flicks.
It’s what I loved most, and it’s just at the end…and it kills the zombie movie. Zombies will still be represented differently, and dumb assholes will continue to make tons of shitty zombie flicks so that they can film simulated violence for the pleasure of others. The stories might even be good! But what Romero does with his zombies, the zombies to which all that came after are compared and all that came before are confused, essentially ends the game. It’s a definitive end…or, at least, it could be…
…Despite the beauty of the film, despite the solid acting and cool/funny gore and fresh feel and anything else, the best part of the film is that it’s just one view. Barring the technological advances present, the stories are so basic that Night of the Living Dead could have happened at the same time as Diary of the Dead, and then Survival is just an extension of a tangent, one which would easily fit in around the same timeline progression as Dawn of the Dead. Somewhere, somewhere else, Survival of the Dead expresses how certain people try to survive the same problem in different ways. Ultimately, the zombie plague spreads the living population so thinly and widely apart that all of it could happen. The next film could be a new tangent or a sequel, and Survival of the Dead ensured that if either event occurred, it’d be all right. Basically, it answers the question, when taken in with all of the Romero mega-fans’ experience and knowledge of the “Timeline of the Dead,” of “what would you do?” It’s different everywhere, for everyone, and now that question that stoned horror fans so often ask each other finally has an answer. The best part: it’s not the only answer.
Thanks for that, George.
Available on-demand from Amazon
Coming soon to DVD on Amazon
Watch the trailer:
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