It’s a sad fact of cinema that a director’s final film usually isn’t their best and this goes doubley true for the Splat Pack of cult auteurs who regularly changed the face of horror in the 70’s and 80’s. Before his tragic death, Wes Craven’s last output was the double bill of My Soul To Take (awful) and Scream 4 (better than it should be) while Tobe Hooper’s last shout was 2013’s Djinn – a film I’d never even knew existed before I just looked it up. While I mean no disrespect, you have to admit that these titles are a long way from the glory days of A Nightmare On Elm Street or The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and it proves that even if you managed to change the face of an entire genre, it still doesn’t mean you can’t lose a step in the twilight of your career.
This somewhat uncomfortable topic brings me to the final film of George A. Romero, who’s final film, Survival Of The Dead, turned out to hardly be the curtain call the legendary director deserved.
Set during yet another zombie apocalypse, that due to budgetary issues looks far cleaner than it should, we follow the cigarette puffing antics of Sargent “Nicotine” Crockett, the National Guardsman filmed robbing the hapless characters midway through Romero’s previous film, Diary Of The Dead. Declared AWOL as fuck, Crockett and his ragtag group of soldiers attempt to survive in a world gone south who end up stumbling in on two feuding Irish families who both live on the secluded Plum Island located just off the coast of Delaware. One family, led by the roguish Patrick O’Flynn has decided to exterminate rapidly expanding population of the living dead much to the chagrin of opposing patriarch Seamus Muldoon who’s family traditions have very different ways of treating the dead. Expelling O’Flynn off the island at gunpoint, Muldoon believes that the dead can be salvaged if taught to relive their past lives in an effort to stir memories that hopefully will lead to them being weaned off their diet of human flesh; but his tricky enemy has a few more schemes up his sleeve.
Forging and unsteady alliance with Crockett’s team – after he tries to rob them first, obviously – O’Flynn returns to Plum Island with his new “friends” with the intention of ending this bitter feud once and for all and tries to reconnect with his equally willful daughter.
Stuck in a situation that’s rapidly going out of control that wasn’t any of his fucking business to begin with, Crockett and his comrades try not to catch any whizzing bullets (not to mention any snapping zombie teeth) as the key to domesticating the undead lies frustratingly out of reach.
Easily the least of Romero’s Dead Saga, Survival feels less like the final movie of genre cinema’s most influential practitioners and more like a low budget quickie that a newbie hashed out in a couple of weekends. Romero always felt constrained by the last of control that often comes with larger productions but this movie, despite some honestly intriguing concepts, feels thrown together and visually quite uninspired, only showing occasional flashes of the master’s trademark invention or social commentary and instead feels awkwardly staged and even slightly ponderous.
In the defence of Survival Of The Dead, Romero still is and will always be the unbeaten don of chucking in bewilderingly random zombie deaths that repeatedly bring the film to a screeching halt like a gory video game cut scene with the unmitigated champion being the belly laugh inducing but totally illogical sight of a shambling ghoul having it’s eyes blown out by the contents of a fire extinguisher emptied into it’s slack mouth. On top of the occasionally blackly comic zombie death, Romero – always the prolific ideas man – stuffs the rambling main story with little sidebars like the group of rednecks who only torture black zombies and con man O’Flynn suckering in hapless marks by posting messages of salvation on the internet.
However, the film, much like it’s shuffling, glassy eyed zombies, lacks any urgency or energy and is loaded with characters whose final fates aren’t exactly a big deal to the audience. Admittedly, this collection of cranky anti-heroes and duplicitous Irishman aren’t as knuckle-bitingly self absorbed as the fantastically annoying cast of Diary Of The Dead, but then the cast of that movie were supposed to unbearably vapid, whereas the cast of this flick just seem unsure of what they’re supposed to be doing. For a swaggering, anti-establishment lead, Alan Van Sprang’s Crockett simply looks lost as the most repeatedly passive “bad-asses” in modern horror cinema and aside from Athena Karkanis’ openly gay Tomboy (who we’re introduced to while using her vibrator in puplic), none of his crew make any impact whatsoever. On the other side, Kenneth Welsh’s impish O’Flynn is probably the best thing about the film despite (or perhaps because of) an accent that sounds somewhere between Darby O’Gill And The Little People and a 90’s commercial for Lucky Charms – but at least he can do Irish as Richard Fitzpatrick’s Muldoon attempt often sounds like a pirate.
The central theme of two families using the global breakdown of society to continue their generations long beef echoes the real-life Hatfield and McCoy feud from the 1800’s and actually is a pretty neat concept – after all how many other horror movies can you claim that shares basic plot points with Gregory Peck western The Big County – but the themes of willful isolation and the inevitable disaster that comes from someone forcing their views upon others at gunpoint are briefly skimmed over in favour of Crockett lighting one of his endless cigarettes or his relationship with a young tag along that goes absolutely nowhere.
Romero completists should still look this up if they haven’t already done so, but even though the godfather of the living dead regrettably passed away in 2017 due to a battle with lung cancer, it seems his zombie legacy fittingly refuses to be put in the ground with numerous completed, unproduced scripts doing the rounds with the most prominent of these seem to be Road Of The Dead, a script he had imput on with friend and proposed director Matt Birman that would continue on the world first introduced in 2005’s Land Of The Dead which will see the rotted brains of undead finally remember their driving tests and take to the roads. Regardless of the outcome of these projects and despite the dispointment of the relatively bland Survival, it’s good to see the legacy of one of horror’s leading lights is refusing to stay dead.
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