George A. Romero’s Survival of the Dead (2009)

Survival of the Dead, if nothing else, gives the perfect solution on how to tell identical twins apart: Make one of them into a zombie! Now we know, and knowing is half the battle!

George Romero has brought to life another zombie film with Survival of the Dead, taking a bit of a different approach with this one. Instead of shooting every zombie you see first and asking questions later, this film explores the possibility of coexisting peacefully with the living impaired. What!?! How!?! One human gets the idea to keep the zombies alive and teach them to eat something other than humans. His efforts are made extremely difficult by a rival group of people who formed to wipe out the zombie menace. Who will achieve their goal first? I must say that I would be in the “shoot the zombies” group. It’s all about survival!

Survival of the Dead is one fine film. It doesn’t hold a candle to the great zombie films like Dawn of the Dead (2004) and is not one of Romero’s greatest movies, but it is definitely watchable. The violence/action was very cartoon like, gory and very obviously fake, as was the CGI; however, it was funny, contained a different outlook on zombies, and showed plenty of zombie killin’. It wasn’t overly exciting or scary, but it wasn’t boring either.

Time Until First Headshot: ~ 30 seconds

Baddies: Zombies…or people. Whose side are you on?

Best Line: “Boats, they’re like women, there isn’t one I can’t fire up.”

Best Kill: Human vs. zombie, the human grabs a fire extinguisher and lets the zombie chomp down on the hose. Human pulls the trigger filling the zombie head with CO2 goop. If you are wondering how a head would fare while being filled with CO2 goop, let me be the one to tell you. It does not fare well! Goop started flowing out of the ears and popped the eyeballs out of their sockets!

Best Explosion: One of the humans throws a grenade at some other humans holding up in a shack. It blows up like a Looney Tune cartoon! The explosion clears away quickly, leaving a perfectly square opening in the side of the building.

Action Rating: 2 ½ Zombie Mailmen, out of 5.

Illustration by Alex Langley. Rocket Llama World Headquarters.

This is the Action Flick Chick, and you’ve just been kicked in the ass!