When George A. Romero turned 70 this past winter, I hope at least one friend approached to say: “Dude, seriously. Enough with the zombies.” Yet here comes “Survival of the Dead,” the sixth in the “Dead” saga that ran out of life two pictures ago.
This time, the National Guardsmen who crossed paths with the student filmmakers in entry No. 5 (the 2007 flick “Diary of the Dead”) are back. They’re busily attacking zombies (I knew how they felt — I was fighting z’s the whole time) when they see a Web clip about an island where things are relatively zombie-free. Why this should be is a mystery, since the undead aren’t fazed by water.
On Plum Island, two clans of feuding Irishmen are having a vigorous disagreement over what to do about the small zombie population. The family led by Patrick O’Flynn (Kenneth Welsh) believes the best policy is to shoot on sight. But Seamus Muldoon (Richard Fitzpatrick) and his folk insist on keeping the z’s alive (albeit chained up and locked in stables). They have high hopes that someday a cure for zombiefication might arrive — or that the undead might be trained to eat something other than human meat. Perhaps a nice pork chop?
The allegory is as brainless as the cement-footed cast of extras. Romero delivers the following idiotic moral: “In an us-versus-them world, pretty soon no one remembers who started the war in the first place, and the fighting becomes all about these stupid flags.” Let’s hear it for moral equivalence!
Not a lot of effort is put into real-world implications, though. What Romero still seems really, really interested in is the splattery meeting of bullet and brain, or torsos being feasted upon like pizza at a keg party. We learn that a zombie bursts into flames when you fire a flare into his chest, and that his skull might burst if you spray gallons of fire-extinguishing foam into his mouth.
I suppose it’s nice that Romero has a hobby, but he couldn’t be more of a bore if he were showing off his pine cone collection.