Survival of the Dead (2010)

Directed and Written by: George A. Romero
Cast: Alan Van Sprang, Kenneth Welsh, Kathleen Munroe, Devon Bostick, Richard Fitzpatrick, Athena Karkanis, Stefano DiMatteo

I'll get the good part of George A. Romero's Survival of the Dead out of the way. It's a big one - do you like the Moon? Great. So do millions of Americans. If you like the Moon, Survival of the Dead has the most enormous image of the Moon you have ever seen.

It is so gargantuan, it surpasses even an image of the Moon about to crash into the Earth-the kind a sage and steady African-American President, like Morgan Freeman or Dennis Haysbert, is needed to save humanity from. This Moon has already slammed into the Atlantic and is cleaving away the last moments of life on the planet. That is how unrelentingly ginormous the image of the Moon is.

Otherwise, George A. Romero's Survival of the Dead has nothing going for it. It is, from the first voice-over assisted frame, to the last gratuitous image of zombies eating a pony, one inexplicable assault on sentience after the next.

Trying to relate the story would be an exercise in humiliation. Suffice it to say that it's a metaphor for war. The viewer gets that - if only because a character explicitly says it in the wrap-up scene. Now, granted, that character goes on to be shocked when her zombie caressing results in being bitten. So, one questions how much she knows, really. But, much like she looks at the moaning, slavering zombie and wonders aloud, "What could she want?" before shoving her hand at its mouth, she also says that the plot is all about senseless war.

Every other aspect of Survival of the Dead-the dialogue, plot, framing, editing and special effects-is utterly random and deformed.

It would be too easy to say this is the case because the story of Survival of the Dead is based around an entirely demented concept: that a group of people would want to keep zombies around, living out their un-lives, and that such a group would convince enough people to prevail in a power struggle. This is the "war" in the film.

One family on secluded Plum Island, the Muldoons, manages to sucker and bully the surviving population into zombie husbandry. The rival family, the O'Flynns, have their cantankerous patriarch booted off the island. He then returns with a band of Guardsmen who are as inexplicable as any other element of the film. A series of completely unreasonable events ensues, serving as an analogy for war.

I didn't feel educated about war, though. I just felt a personal violation. The film touched the place where my sanity covers. I am scarred, and not in the usual good way that horror films do. I want to fight back. It's a very personal feeling - not a review so much as self-defense.

But where to hit first? The editing, perhaps, which was worse than a YouTube star wipe tribute with cigarettes and characters and tears appearing and disappearing, seemingly without much effect on any character's emotional state. Maybe the almost total lack of any emotional state expressed by any of the actors. Maybe the truly total lack of logic to the character's actions. Maybe the random foleys. I don't know.

I can start with the foleys, I suppose. They were so meek and blameless, that I don't really want to hurt them too badly. Perhaps Stephen Barden, the sound editor, or his evil Italian clone, "Stefan Barticelli," the foley "artist," were to blame. Maybe they were, ironically, afraid of sound, the very thing that puts food on their tables. Maybe someone just got the recordings wet. Whatever the cause, every sound in the film seemed to happening on some distant hillside. When it involved guns, it sounded like someone playing "Russ 'N Attack" on a distant hillside. Sadly for my ears and heart, there were a lot of guns in Survival of the Dead. It was a film all about war, you see.

It was definitely not a film about zombie special effects. The Visual Effects team that Romero enlisted was the folks at SPIN FX, who were to be blamed for the last two films ...of the Dead - or credited, if you like visuals that resemble cough syrup-induced hallucinations painted over real people, and Lord knows I do. The zombie costuming was unoriginal and unconvincing, and in a society where films like 28 Weeks Later and The Crazies can produce original-looking flesh-eating legion, there is no excuse.

Also, when horrible things happened to people and computer graphics was involved, it looked no more realistic than Wiley E. Coyote's injuries. Given that the film was already espousing happy cohabiting with zombies as a legitimate lifestyle choice and people kept teleporting due to bad editing, things did not need to get more surreal. Watching a zombie's head blow up into red sparkly pixels like one of those animated gif files with a unicorn jumping out of the sun did not make me feel saner. It made me feel confused and vaguely ripped off thanks to lack of unicorn. By the time the film was drawing to a close, I had begun to hate my eyes for being a party to this.

I try not to hate the actors. They were just enablers for the Writer/Director; he was the real abuser. Still, they were what he used to flog me with.

Alan Van Sprang - known to his extremely small and random team of surviving Guardsmen as "Nicotine" Crocket - was not bland, but he would snap between a firework display of emotion and near-total apathy like a meth addict attempting Shakespeare after a 5-day binge. He was also immune to bullets, mostly. Bullets will force him to take a small nap. But since that could be said about practically everyone except zombies, it was not as cool as all that.

Kathleen Munroe was the love interest, but nobody was particularly interested in her, except for her identical twin. This got awkward. She has three scenes she is expected to dominate with her presence, but in each case, her lines are a loony word soup that hurts the brain rather than moves the heart. It is like watching Rain Man read his teen poetry. It could be the most beautiful ever to grace Earth's atmosphere, but we mortals would not know it.

That is the only tragedy of the film, because everyone else is extremely annoying or seems non-existent. The Guardsmen, for instance, consist of Sidekick, Lesbian and The Guy Who Gets Infected And Must Be Shot (TGWGIAMBS, or "Twiggy"). And while we realize that we are supposed to be sad that Sidekick and Twiggy die, much like we are supposed to believe "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter" does resemble butter, this is only in abstract. Also, Lesbian is not gay for any reason other than to announce it lewdly, and I am not sure who exactly this is supposed to appeal to.

In fact, I am not sure what the film does except display several zombie-like images and injure the brain. I had thought that Diary of the Dead was extremely bad, but that was a different kind of personal bad, more like a beloved uncle, George A. Romero, suddenly punching me in the eye and laughing as I wept.

With its surreal nattering, time-baffling editing and complete lack of reality, this was like having that beloved uncle suddenly abduct me like Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet, whisking me away to a candy-colored world of nitrous-inspired monologues and sudden, inexplicable harm. I felt like less of a person as I left the theater, with a space in my body where now there was only the empty echo of bitter laughter.

In sum, Survival of the Dead is aptly named - it is like being infected by the zombie plague and having to live a bewildering and hungry existence until one of your friends realizes you're not entirely yourself anymore, and shoots you through the brain. I nightly hope Superheidi will oblige me, but so far I only mindlessly follow the habit of working this keyboard in hollow simulation of once being a writer.

Fans of the genre should avoid this unless they want to feel like those poor Catholic choir boys with the blurred out faces on TV. People who enjoyed the film Alone in the Dark will probably be disappointed by the writing and editing of Survival of the Dead, but will not suffer as much damage to their hit points, being partly resistant to things that abysmally suck. People who enjoy George A. Romero should probably stick to his groundbreaking - no, earthmoving - early work, especially the underrated dark brilliance of Martin, which makes you feel dirty in the good way. People who know George A. Romero, please pass word to him that he and I should not blame, but need to let go of any pain and move on, learning to trust again.

But if you want to keep your love of the George A. Romero zombie film alive, do not let it anywhere near Survival of the Dead! Like the identical twin's zombie, there is a very, very superficial resemblance of a loved one there - but it only wants to madden and destroy you.

Rating: (1.5 out of 5):