With the release of George A. Romero’s Survival of the Dead only a few days away, it’s about time for a trailer to drop and it has. In this video we get our first real look at the latest installment of Romero’s zombie saga that started with Night of the Living Dead way back in 1968.

In case you’re just joining us, Survival immediately follows the events of Diary of the Dead and concerns an island off the coast of Deleware called Plum. On the island are two families, the O’Flynn’s and the Muldoons, who are ocked in a struggle for power and approach the zombie plague with two very different attitudes.

The O’Flynn’s are forced to exile family patriarch Patrick (Kenneth Welsh) by boat to the mainland, where he meets up with a band of soldiers, headed by Guardsman Sarge (Alan Van Sprang). They join forces and return to the island, to find that the zombie plague has fully gripped the divided community.

Check out the trailer after the jump. Survival of the Dead is available on VOD, XBOX Live, Playstation and Amazon this Friday and in theaters on May 28th.

Continue Reading →

As a big fan of horror movies and the zombie sub-genre, I really wanted to like George A. Romero’s Survival of the Dead and was prepared to give it the benefit of the doubt as much as possible. Although, my expectations were pretty low after Romero’s last two zombie movie efforts Land of the Dead and Diary of the Dead. Sadly, this film didn’t even manage to rise up to the level of my lowered expectations and is, instead, a heavily flawed and often very bad addition to Romero’s body of work.

Still, this is the man who basically invented the zombie film genre, so attention must be paid and respect given for his enduring legacy as one of this country’s innovative artists. But something has obviously gone a bit off kilter and the writer/director seems to have lost his way. I’m not sure how this phenomenon works exactly, but somewhere along the way a director seems to lose his vision.

After several great and innovative films the later films start to get worse and worse. Unfortunately, George Romero seems to have fallen into that trap, much like another acknowledged master of horror John Carpenter seems to. Look at Carpenter’s last few films and tell me they are as good as his earlier work in The Thing, Starman, Escape from New York and, of course, the original Halloween.

Continue Reading →