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The sixth installment in George A. Romero’s long-running horror serial (est. 1967), Survival of the Dead follows Sarge Crockett (Alan Van Sprang) as he leads his gone-rogue unit of National Guardsmen from the zombie-pestilent mainland to “Plum Island, Delaware.” There the returned departed are feuded over by two family-armies led by Irish patriarchs. Once ashore the island, seemingly preserved in the 1880s, Romero piles on plot lines and Western tropes: six-shooters, an Anthony Mann Oedipal ranch hand, a bona fide scalping and a homo-flirty mentor-student rapport between Van Sprang and Devon Bostick, an orphaned teen he picked up. Bostick’s character allows seventy-year-old Romero to indulge his uncomprehending fascination with gadget-addicted Millennials talking about things “on the ‘Net,” an obsession that made Diary of the Dead the worst Dead movie yet. In Survival, Romero’s own embrace of new technology includes silly CGI violence like a noggin blown clean away, leaving the scalp to plop on the neck stump, or zombie eyeballs sproinging out of sockets like novelty glasses. The script reunites the writer-director’s familiar preoccupations with the family-as-hell, creeping Catholicism and stock rednecks. The inevitable all-you-can-eat orgy of zombies pulling stringy mouthfuls away from red, wet rib cages may satisfy gorehounds, but big set pieces showing how atrophied Romero’s cutting and tactical framing have become is depressing to anyone who has valued his films for more than just splatter.
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