Survivors and Killers

Last week I sat down to watch George A. Romero's Survival of the Dead, having read that it was a vast improvement over his last zombie film Diary of the Dead. Remembering how terrible Diary was, this statement becomes meaningless, but Survival was actually pretty decent.

I'm trying to be generous here. I like Romero, or I try very hard to. Avoiding horror films as a child, I didn't appreciate his classic zombie films until college. I fell in love with their satire and the elegance with which he integrated his social messages into his incredibly entertaining stories. His 2005 return to zombies Land of the Dead lost all of that elegance, and most of the entertaining story. Instead it offered us silly upstairs/downstairs situation in a zombie nightmare land with a hammy and scenery-chewing Dennis Hopper as the evil, rich land-owner, reminding me of his Bowser role in Super Mario Bros.

Survival is most like Land of the Dead. It's silly, campy and mildly entertaining with little character development and a few ideas that don't really go anywhere. It feels overstuffed with characters I feel Romero wanted me to care about, but didn't try very hard to develop into real people. I know he needs people to be zombie food, but he kept some characters around for a while with some important looking reaction shots but without anything to really do.

The plot has a small, tight-knit band of soldiers stumbling into the middle of a generations-long feud between Irish families living off the coast of Delaware. One family wants to kill all of them, the other thinks it is immoral to kill family members and would rather wait around for a cure to present itself. The latter family attempts to train the undead to eat animals instead of human flesh.

It's pretty fun, despite its lack of coherent social messages and lack of memorable performances. One thing I did like is by the end, Romero does give us a little bit of hope. But only for the zombie plague. Humanity? It's doomed one way or another.

6.3/10


I don't believe every film needs some sort of social message. Not everything even needs to be "about" something. But a message, or any sort of higher context would have improved Michael Winterbottom's The Killer Inside Me. Winterbottom has made one fantastic film (Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story) and a couple of good ones (24 Hour Party People, The Road to Guantanamo), but I haven't seen anything that would qualify him as having a real style of his own. Killer suffers from it's flat, boring style. It's dark, noir-ish style echoes other classics like Chinatown or L.A. Confidential. This is no crime, but something new to the table would have been nice.

The real problem is the violence. It's gruesome, hard to watch, but without any real redeeming reason. Yeah, sheriff Lou Ford is secretly a black pit without a soul, but I don't need to see Jessica Alba beaten to a pulp to get it.
Which brings us to the next problem. Alba's not very good. Neither is the rest of the cast. Simon Baker looks horribly out of place. Kate Hudson is boring. The only winner here is Casey Affleck as Sheriff Lou Affleck. His voice doesn't make for a great narrator, but he's got the soft-spoken gentleman with a dark side down perfectly.

But I just really didn't like this movie.

4.8/10



Have you guys got around to The National's High Violet yet? Hot damn that band just gets better and better.