The second leg of Romero’s zombie epic takes a page from “Day of the Dead” in where our characters seek refuge in an island out on the water and are continuing an ever going debate on whether or not the walking dead can be adjusted to eat an alternative to long pig. Once again Romero splits audiences down the middle with “Survival of the Dead,” a definitely polarizing zombie entry from the master who continues to entertain me in spite of audiences continued misunderstanding of what the king of the zombies is pushing for.
Branching off from his underrated “Diary,” Romero centers in on protagonist Crocket (Alan Van Spring who I know for all the wrong reasons*). You may remember him as the military crony who stole supplies from the film students in “Diary” from their trailer by threat of death. Now here he’s a misunderstood protagonist, a victim just like everyone who has been driven insane by the sheer abundance of lives taken by the clutches of this unforeseen infection. What with our perceptions of the world twisted with “Diary” showing the military now an utterly untrustworthy entity, Crocket and his small band of soldiers now must seek the trust in the civilians they pilfered from when they look for an island out in the sea.
“Survival” has its own relevance and message with its depiction of a somewhat vague pro-life/pro-choice debate that ranges between two warring families on this island. Like what we’ve seen today, each side can not stop arguing about the small things enough to focus on their own happiness, and Crocket and his crew watch as the world sinks ever deeper in this salvation where even the smaller families with the potential to offer peace refuse to lay down their arms and work together to restore order in this new world. They have the resources and know how to keep the dead at bay, but like we saw in “Night,” they’re too wrapped up in their territory and pride to actually work side by side and keep their land pure and healthy. The dead litter the grass and religious matriarch Muldoon (like all pro-lifers) wants to restore their own view of life while never afraid to take actual human life in the process of getting his message across.
Meanwhile O’Flynn is more based around atheistic and pro-choice beliefs where he thinks cutting down the dead has nothing to do with religion at all but more about personal welfare and consideration to our own well being. That is all pushed aside because who is right and who is wrong becomes irrelevant when the dead begin to gain leverage on the families and prove once and for all that they’ve become the dominant race. Continuing to push his rather entertaining dark comedy in the process, Romero is still capable of bringing us sharp and bleak horror films with a view of this small island who claim to be better than the world outside the water but are just in the same muck and grime as everyone else in the cities and metropolitan areas.
Van Spring gives a very good performance here as this man simply observing from a distance like the kids in “Diary” behind their cameras. Like everyone here, he’s trying to figure out where to lay his loyalties and once he gains a full perspective of the lunacy taking place in even the most level headed of characters introducing himself, he realizes that perhaps if he lets them take each other out, he can possibly build his own salvation free of this endless debating. Which is left ambiguous when his young partner (played by Devin Bostick) offers up the only logical conclusion: that perhaps someday they’ll be at war for completely new reasons. When you witness the final scene, it doesn’t seem like a far gone conclusion.
Sadly, Romero breaks his own rules to offer up some camp value by showing moaning and groaning heads of the dead when he explicitly states constantly in his previous pictures that the dead will be brought down when their heads have been separated from their bodies. Meanwhile, I never sympathized a bit for the character Fransisco since he becomes such a blatant plot device by the second half of the story. Turning in to a zombie with enough convenience for the plot to roll along he sets in to motion Tomboy’s inevitable kidnapping which ultimately brings forward the climax.
Altogether it’s a rather cheap dive from Romero to move forward the climax instead of allowing for natural plot progression and cheapens the ultimate believability of the character’s actions. Is Romero out of touch with the world or is the world out of touch with Romero? I guess we’ll never find out, but I’m prone to believe the latter. “Survival of the Dead” will not change the genre like “Night” and “Dawn” did, nor is it at all perfect, but it has its own relevance and message like its previous entries and I enjoyed it all to hell. Romero still stands tall among ants; long live Romero.