Reviewed by Stuart O'Connor
Stars Kenneth Welsh, Richard Fitzpatrick, Kathleen Munroe, Devon Bostick,
Alan Van Sprang, Julian Richings, Athena Karkanis | Written by George A Romero
UK certification 18 | UK RRP £19.99 | DVD Region 2 | Runtime 90 minutes | Directed by George A Romero
George A Romero's undead began walking the Earth in 1968 ... and they're still going strong. This latest outing, the sixth in the series, is a real mixed bag – but a thoroughly enjoyable romp nonetheless.
Plum Island, off the coast of Delaware. A group of rogue soldiers – who we met in the previous film, Diary of The Dead – find their way onto the island ... and smack into the middle of a feud between two Irish families. We're still in the early days of the zombie outbreak, and the heads of both families – Seamus Muldoon (Fitzpatrick) and Patrick O'Flynn (Welsh) have differing ideas of how the newly-risen dead should be handled. The Muldoons want to chain them up, and train them to eat anything but people; the O'Flynn's just want to shoot them in the head, believing that the dead should stay dead.
I love a good zombie film, and Survival of the Dead is terrific. It's not perfect – Romero relies a little too much on CGI blood and gore effects, and I'd rather he goes back to the practical effects pioneered by the genius Tom Savini – but it's got a terrific look and feel to it. Romero has really gone back to his indie roots, and has taken to digital filmmaking with a passion. The acting is terrific, particularly from veterans Welsh and Fitzpatrick.
The film is, for the most part, a western, with plenty of gory kills and a great sense of humour thrown in. And unlike more recent zombie films, Romero keeps his undead as the brainless, shambling flesh-hungry beasts that they should be. There's the usual subtext, too – with the dead now walking the Earth, it's the living that turn out to be the real monsters. This is easily Romero's best zombie film since Dawn of The Dead.
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