SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD (2010) - Went to see this tonight and found it to be pretty much what I expected - fair to middling, enjoyable but no great shakes. I found it better than DIARY - which may have had a better concept behind it, but at least SURVIVAL doesn't have that terrible clunky, explain-everything dialogue DIARY had.
The story is pretty straightforward, if odd for a Romero zombie film - a long brewing conflict between two family patriarchs that run halves of a small island off Delaware doesn;t end when the dead rise, it just continues on for different reasons. Inject somje fleeing National Guardsmen to tip the scales and you've got a strange Irish/Zombie/Western film in which the walking dead are almost secondary to the family drama.
While this had moments, in my book it's still less than LAND OF THE DEAD (which also had its problems). This, instead, feels more like the first episode of GEORGE A. ROMERO'S LIVING DEAD cable television series. I get the feeling DIARY allowed Romero to abandon the kind of escalating scenarios we'd seen up to LAND (and their resultant broader social commentaries) for more particular, personal, prosaic stories and scenarios. Which is both kind of nice (he probably can't expect to beat bigger budgeted films like the DAWN remake or RESIDENT EVIL films at effects-laden apocalypse) and kind of underwhelming - I know it's only supposed to be 3 months into the zombie plague in this, but minor plot points (the armored car money, You Tube advertising to lure in suckers) and major plot points (the personal conflict of the patriarchs) just seems so, I don't know, besides the point compared to what we've experienced in the other movies, where we've been trained to understand that the whole situation demands a rather brutal, hard-edged attitude towards everything previously thought important by civilization. And I know the Dead movies have had their absurdist humor moments since DAWN's pie fight but most seem ill-considered here, undermining the sense of threat (in a way, the "goofy zombie kills" seem now straight in line with the "creative kills" aspect of slasher movies that I've almost always disliked, for the same reason).
I don't mean to sound completely negative - the movie is filmed nicely (outside of some clumsily staged gunfights) and there's some especially beautiful rural scenery. The characters and actors are mostly engaging as well (Alan Van Sprang's acting seems shakey at times). I found the image of the horseback riding daughter, at least early on, to be very striking - like something out of Celtic mythology. The final "face off" image was nicely done as well, black-humored as it drives the point home.
I can't see this winning over the young zombie fans that resulted from the DAWN remake. Still, it was an amiable time-waster for the older fans, I guess.