23/07/2017

Survival of the Dead

               
For the last film in Romero's dead series, he seems to have given up on getting any kind of meaningful insight across. That's a bonus, as far as I'm concerned, as the last film stank and the one before was too blatant and silly. This one is silly too, but it's not trying to be anything more than a fairly light-hearted zombie western about two old guys with grudges and a band of ex-military survivors lead by a Hugh Jackman lookalike.
                
              
The imaginative zombie dispatching is dwindling at this point, and the editing (one of the strongest elements of his classics) has become bland and formulaic. You can tell that nothing about this is an independent picture any more. Romero never suited mainstream Hollywood, he was at his best telling off the cuff stories that took a lot of feeling from their location and grew into cohesion in the editing.
I liked this one more than 'Diary of the Dead', but not quite as much as 'Land of the Dead'. While I hated the clunky commentary of that film, I did like the setting and general concept. This film was far more run of the mill, and while it was watchable, it was often comically uninspired.
           
Survival of the Dead: 33.2