Review: SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD (2009)

 SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD (2009) USA/Canada 1hr 30mins

Dir: George A. Romero

"Last time anyone counted 53 million people were dying every year, 150 thousand everyday and 107 every minute" Sarge "Nicotine" Crockett

"Shooting the living and sparing the dead... that BASTARD!" Patrick O'Flynn

A few weeks into the outbreak a small team of soldiers led by Sarge (Alan Van Sprang) go AWOL in the hope of leaving the massacre behind and finding a safe place to ride it out, somewhere quiet and out of the way...like an island or something. It just so happens that the perfect place, Plum Island just off the coast of Delaware is but a mere drive away. Unbeknownst to them though Plum Island is in the midst of a civil war. If the walking dead weren't enough, two rival families, the O'Flynns and the Muldoons, have been feuding for years over just about anything and everything. The ensuing zombie apocalypse has done little to change this. Patrick O'Flynn (Kenneth Welsh) the head of the family believes that the dead should be put down whereas Seamus Muldoon (Richard Fitzpatrick) wants to preserve the people of Plum and believes they can still be of use. Will Sarge and his team show the inhabitants the error of their ways and build a safe community on the island or will the whole thing go completely tits up??!! Place your bets now...

SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD is the sixth and final instalment of Romero's franchise and to many it is the least popular. In my opinion this is the joker of the franchise and is not afraid to take the piss out of itself. I guess it kind of follows on from DIARY OF THE DEAD as it's main focus is on the team of soldiers that rob the guys from DIARY in their winebago. You may recognise the name of one of the lead actors in this; Alan Van Sprang. He played Brubaker in LAND OF THE DEAD and,of course, played Sarge as he first appeared in DIARY. This continuation of the Sarge "Nicotine" Crockett character is a wonderful thing as you don't particularly warm to him in DIARY. The underlying message or social commentary here is all about family values, rivalry and hope, or at least that is what I get from it anyway. It follows a fairly standard format but gives it a comedic twist wherever possible. You would think in a zombie apocalypse an island would be the perfect place to go. However, getting there could be a bit of an upheaval and you would not expect that when you got there a bunch of Irish crackpots would be keeping zombies chained to their kitchen sinks, keeping them in stables like farm animals or letting them ride around the countryside on horseback like they own the place.

The characters here are back to good ol' classic Romero likeable people. Okay, yes some are quite generic. For example; Tomboy (Athena Karkanis) the token female who's a hard nut to crack, Francisco (Stefano DiMatteo) the token ladies man who is trying to crack said hard nut, oh and Kenny (Eric Woolfe) Sarge's nerdy best friend. Once again there is another young kid character known as The Boy (Devon Bostick) and twin sisters Janet and Jane O'Flynn (Kathleen Munroe) who are the eye candy. There are many more not totally awful family members and henchmen to provide the all important zombie chow. Oddly devoid of cameos unless you count Julian Richings as part of the O'Flynn clan. Welsh and Fitzpatrick provide immense comic value with their more than a bit dodgy Irish accents and childish antics but are so much fun. Van Sprang growing his role as the Sarge is almost the star of the show for me. Just pipping him to the post on this though are quite obviously the wonderful hordes of the undead. Romero seemingly thought long and hard about the lack of walking corpses in DIARY and decided to go back to his old ways and use them in as many shots as possible. Still going on the understanding that they were gaining in intelligence but assuming this is before LAND OF THE DEAD so they are not there yet he has a lot of fun devising humorous circumstances and bizarre kills. Always aiming to shock we have zombie children chained to beds, a zombie riding a horse, a man fishing for zombies and a hilarious man bites zombie incident. Muldoon is adamant that he can subdue the undead if only he can get them to eat something other than humans so tries a few methods to get them to nosh on other things with some interesting results. Known in this movie as "Dead Heads" or "Dumb Fucks" they certainly meet some grisly ends. One munches on a fire extinguisher causing his head to explode and another gets a flare to his chest. They do get their own back, of course, as there are plenty of great hoarding sequences. At one stage the zombies escape from the stables and attack the feuding families causing Muldoons right hand man Chuck (Joris Jarsky) to suffer a similar fate to that of Capt. Rhodes in DAY OF THE DEAD. 

Once again though this suffers from some very bad CGI effects that are really quite cringe worthy and unnecessary and do affect it rather severely, you certainly miss KNB's influence. However, the story and humour are there in spades and it has a pretty good soundtrack to boot. SURVIVAL is by no means a master piece but to me it is a long way off being terrible. I have a strange affection for this movie and I love it for the zombie action, humour and batshit craziness of it all!! You are all, of course, entitled to your opinion of it and who am I, other than a lonely ghoul with a lot of time on my hands, to push my views on you? I do urge you to just give it another go and you may end up thinking to yourself "you know what... Mash was right! This is actually stupid good fun!". oh, and you are welcome in advance.

I score SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD a solid 3 brains out of 5!!

I unfortunately only possess the bog standard DVD of SURVIVAL which has no extras to talk about here but if you are interested there is a SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD: ULTIMATE UNDEAD EDITION Blu ray floating about which is surely worth checking out... right??