Tag Archives: George A. Romero

Survival of the Dead (2009)

garbageLet’s make something absolutely clear up front — Survival Of The Dead is garbage.  I rate it Red Blood, and it is on my List Of Zombie Films To AVOID.

What’s worse than that is that it clearly had a chunk of money behind it — not loads, but more money than many zombie films — which in my mind was money that could have been split to make at least 2 other cleverly-made lower budget better films.

The Core Problem — No Story

My impression of Survival Of The Dead is that someone — maybe their name was George — had a stack of admittedly clever zombie gags written down and sitting in a pile.  This person wanted to use these in a film, but didn’t otherwise know how to pull it off — which frankly is what they should have done and just left well enough alone.  However, they got together with their buddies — possibly there were a few beers in the room, possibly a few too many — and they had a brainstorming session that amounted to… “Okay, we’ll use the military ’cause that always flies in zombie films — oh, and to help it sell, everything Irish is popular right now, so let’s throw that in too!”  Having concocted a shoddy story-line they got their funding and started rolling.

grape smuggler
Close but … NOPE!

My guess is that’s how Survival Of The Dead got its start.  But what, no gratuitous possibly-future-famous Z-film breasts to further sell this potboiler?!?  I like bad film, but in this case I would prefer that whoever green-lighted this project read my review:  don’t waste your company’s money and don’t waste the audience’s time.

The Story — Lacking Though It May Be…

Kenneth Welsh hugging some other man on the ground
Uh … this isn’t what it looks like.

Zombies have taken over the world.  A ragtag band of soldiers roams the countryside to scavenging to survive.  The unit is intrigued when they hear of a safe haven on an island off the coast of North America.  Expecting to find a paradise, they instead find the island is torn apart by a wannabe Hatfield–McCoy family feud.  One family wants to exterminate the zombies while the other thinks everyone can peacefully coexists with their undead relatives hoping for a cure to return their relatives back to their human state.

BOOM!
Who want’s a birthday candle?

This turd is directed by George A. Romero.  At least you’ll recognize Kenneth Welsh.

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Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Night of the Living Dead – Green Ooze OF COURSE!

The seminal zombie film of zombie films that wasn’t originally meant to be a zombie film — so zombie-genre fans everywhere just may look at this as a happy accident.  As for the rest of this review, I’ll write it when after I’ve seen it again.

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Apparently there have been remakes of this film &/or re-uses of the name — I’ll have to see….

Day of the Dead (2008)

This Day Of The Dead remake of George A. Romero’s original 1985 film could be a called a cross between 28 Days Later and the 2009 version of The Crazies. From the start the action ramps up, and 30 minutes in it stays constant — intense gore-fest. The zombies are high speed, a bit super-human, and the humans consist of recognizable actors beginning their careers — all with no gratuitous displays of possibly-future-famous-breasts (they’re nice, but it just gets old in zombie films). This piece showed me a few new things to z-films, and the story-line didn’t particularly take any leaps, however I did have a few beefs…

I thought it odd that upon the point an infected human turns into a zombie that they instantly fester sores and rotted skin.

I might be okay with the zombies having slightly super-human strength, but a Spiderman-like ability to stick to walls/ceilings was a over the top — if they’re going to do that, I would have preferred to see that they had the strength to dig their fingers in and hold-on.

Toward the end two survivors who where military broke into a civilian firearms store — there are a few problems with this…..

Usually gun stores are highly secure, you don’t just push the door open

I would have preferred that the film made the weapons realistic.  Civilian versions of military style weapons are only available in semi-automatic, not full-auto (semi-auto: you pull the trigger and the gun fires once, commonly &/or intentionally incorrectly called an ‘assault weapon’ / full-auto: the weapon continues to fire as long as you hold the trigger AKA a machine gun).

Whatever its strengths or weaknesses, I rate the remake of Day Of The Dead as Green Ooze and it was formerly on my Top 10 list.

How do you know your zombie film is cool? It features Ving Rhames!

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