Survival of the Dead (2009)

(In French, On Cable TV, October 2019) For horror completists, there are a few good reasons to watch Survival of the Dead, the biggest reason being that this isn’t just George Romero’s sixth zombie movie, it’s also the last one he directed before his death. As such, you can expect the film to go beyond just the usual post-apocalyptic premise: Romero has done all of that already, and he’s free to explore a different kind of world, farther along the timeline than the zombie uprising and its immediate aftermath. At times, we do get a glimpse at this restlessness to go beyond the obvious. Our characters are growing comfortable in the zombie-dominated world, the Internet somehow remains operative, and there are a few settlements advertising for new inhabitants. CGI means that zombies are grosser than ever and dispatched in evermore creative ways. Survival of the Dead being shot in and near Toronto, there are a few likable Canadian actors in the mix despite their lack of name recognition: I particularly liked seeing Athena Karkanis as a tomboy soldier (her introduction is remarkable), and Alan van Sprang does have screen presence. Alas, none of this is enough to outweigh the script’s bad ideas and bland development. Recreating a Hatfield-vs.-McCoy family feud on an island off New England’s coast really isn’t as interesting as Romero must have supposed, and neither is the progressive domestication of zombies into something that doesn’t have to eat human flesh. Let zombies remain targets, I say. It doesn’t help that Survival of the Dead, like almost all of Romero’s zombie movies, ends up going over the same fatalistic territory: the centre cannot hold, humans will kill each other if the zombies don’t, and the human population past the apocalypse will just keep getting smaller and smaller. After six instalments, this is tiresome and should have been the first assumptions to be revisited if Romero truly wanted to explore new territory. In the meantime, Survival of the Dead ranks low in his filmography—dull, meandering and meaningless, it would have been utterly unremarkable in anyone else’s hands.