I had a chance to see George Romero’s Survival of the Dead last September during Fantastic Fest in Austin, TX. You can read the full review here. Or, if you don’t want to click a link, I will sum it up by saying I wasn’t in love with the movie.

That’s not to say the movie doesn’t have its good points and isn’t any fun, it does and is. It’s just not a great movie and I was hoping for more.

My opinion aside, the movie will finally be released and to begin the push for that, the studio has dropped the first poster from the film on us. It contains your typical mix of unholy zombies bent on one thing: brains.

Plus, a tag line that actually does a pretty good job of relating one of the central premises of the movie. Nice work marketing team.

Check out the full sized poster after the jump. Survival of the Dead premieres on VOD, Amazon, Xbox Live and Playstation April 30 and in theaters on May 28th.

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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.

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