Anyone else cave and buy the Survival dvd?

[AcesandEights]

Damn, you guys are weakening my resolve. Didn't someone mention it would be available for stream on Netflix later this month, anyway? Maybe I will wait after all...

[Neil]

You know, I was left so luke warm by Diary, I've still not watched Survival? Should I ban myself from the site?

[DEAD BEAT]

I hoped to pick up the mostly bare bones single disc version that included nothing but a Romero commentary track. Three stores later, it seems that the 2-disc ultimate edition is the only one available for purchase, (while the single disc is available to rent). I have previously shilled out money for deluxe dvd editions before, even for Romero films, but frankly, I don’t need a feature length documentary detailing the making of ‘Survival.’ It’s really, well, just not THAT good of a movie. The Disc 2 documentary has some interesting behind-the-scenes insights, but it’s is mostly disposable. When the host is not trying overly hard to be funny, he shoehorns his own blowhard partisan political views into the making-of doc. My own similar political views notwithstanding, this is out of place. George never passes up a chance to attack Republican politics in his movies. That should be more than enough. My feelings on the actual movie itself remains mostly the same. I still think that while "Survival" offers up headshots aplenty, it is sadly lacking in the gore department. With George’s writing faculties somewhat dulled, a few more dismemberments can make all the difference between a rental and a buy. "Land Unrated" provides the goods, while "Diary", and now "Survival", sadly come up short. It is, however, one of George’s most beautifully shot movies – whatever the DP got paid was probably not enough. O’Flynn and Muldoon remain two of the most over-the-top scenery chewing characters in Romero’s cannon since Kaufmann, and maybe even Rhodes. As others have noted, upon the main characters arriving on the island the plot gets stuck in neutral. Scenes of the Muldoons teaching the dead to eat pig are reminiscent of Dr. Frankenstein with Bub, and help break-up the monotony, but things don’t really pick-up until the climactic zombie chowfest, which feels strangely underpopulated. C "I SURE BOUGHT IT" was takin' a narley shit the other night (after hours of course) and wouldn't you know it TP runs out and no store open in site, all i can say is..... "THANK GOD FOR NET FLICKS!"

[darth los]

Damn, you guys are weakening my resolve. Didn't someone mention it would be available for stream on Netflix later this month, anyway? Maybe I will wait after all... It was mentioned by me in another thread and this one as well. It's gonna be available on the 23rd to stream via the instant q. You've waited this long, 3 weeks isn't gonna kill ya. And does anyone know what the pick a side feature (humans or zombies) on the page before the movie begins means?

[MoonSylver]

Yeah, I caved, I bought it. Here was my reaction: Whelp...pay day is here. So I bought it. I watched it. My reaction?... I liked Land. I liked Diary (flawed though it may have been). I went into it fully prepared to embrace it & refute all the claims of those who have been hating it, but in the end...eh.... I'm not going to go into hysetrics & claim it's the worst thing since Adolph Hitler. But I didn't enjoy it very much. Bad dialog. Bad performances ( a shame as I REALLY was looking forward to Van Sprang's character.) Didn't think the over-the-top zombie kills would bug me...but they did. I dunno. Can't 100% put my finger on what didn't work about this one for me, but it just didn't click. I'll probably give it another view sometime & I have a feeling I might like it a tad better now that I know what to expect. But right now I'm a bit disappointed. And sad. Been thinking about it a lot, & my opinion hasn't changed. Only other thing I could think of was after seeing the awesome trailer for "The Walking Dead" it kinda pointed out a glairing flaw: All of the older moves (& even the newer ones really), were more about the characters. It was average people against this backdrop of the dead returning to life & then watching what happened to them & how they delt with it. This one didn't feel like that at all. It felt like it was all about A) the gags & B) cardboard characters being trotted through a railroad of a script - "We've gotta get to the island, we're getting to the island, we're on the island, big showdown, message about not getting along, roll credits." I love George. I really do. I wanted to like this one SO BAD. And I just didn't. It didn't even feel like a GAR movie, more like some hack trying to do a rip off of a GAR movie.

[Danny]

You know, I was left so luke warm by Diary, I've still not watched Survival? Should I ban myself from the site? B-but YOUR THE ONLY MOD THAT STILL VISITS!?! what would become of the forum then?

[AcesandEights]

It was mentioned by me in another thread and this one as well. It's gonna be available on the 23rd to stream via the instant q. You've waited this long, 3 weeks isn't gonna kill ya. Ah, thanks for re-confirming the info, Darth. I think I will wait and save the cash. If it's decent I can always pick up a DVD or BR version later. That's a big if, though... B-but YOUR THE ONLY MOD THAT STILL VISITS!?! what would become of the forum then? A scary, yet very good point!

[ChokeOnEm]

I'm sorry I bought it. The first dvd was defective (kept freezing at the 80 minute mark). I exchanged it, only to get home and find that the second copy had a big ugly scratch down the cover (note to self: never let the sales clerk pick out merchanise for you). Now I have a third copy. I sooo don't wanna waste 90 minutes sitting thru this pos again!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Still more entertaining than Diary tho.

[DubiousComforts]

Nope, didn't cave and buy the DVD. I bought the Blu-Ray. Very nice package with a cool lenticular cover and a choice of either Living or Dead-themed menus. Not bad for $15. I was too busy during the weeks that 'Survival' was screening in NYC, and couldn't be bothered with all this VOD crap, so the blu-ray was my first chance to view the movie. I enjoyed Survival and honestly don't understand what all this bellyaching is aboot. Of course it's not going to have the impact of the original trilogy films. But then, no film has been able to match the experience of seeing NIGHT for the first time in the mid-70s, so my expectations are grounded in reality.

[MoonSylver]

I enjoyed Survival and honestly don't understand what all this bellyaching is aboot. Of course it's not going to have the impact of the original trilogy films. But then, no film has been able to match the experience of seeing NIGHT for the first time in the mid-70s, so my expectations are grounded in reality. Honestly though Dubious, I didn't even enjoy it compared to Land & Diary, & this is from someone who LIKED both of those films, enjoyed them very much, & defended them from their detractors. I don't think this one suffers in comparison just to the older films, but from the last two as well. I've already enumerated my reasons why, & honestly there's still a nagging SOMETHING that I can't put my finger on. I really need to sit down & watch a second time. Who knows? Maybe I just ate a bad chili dog & had an unpleasant viewing experience the first time & will walk away from a second viewing w/ a totally different view...

[Wyldwraith]

Don't feel bad Neil, I've only been able to slog through Survival in bits and pieces, painfully at that. I watched another total crapfest that even derivatively rips off OTHER pieces of crap and mediocre films today Last of the Living. Bunch of Aussies, in a world-setting so lame its absolutely painful. The streets are PRISTINE. I mean absolute ghost-town, not so much as a speck of dust on store windows, utterly absent all vehicles on streets pristine. And this is supposed to be after a MASSIVE global zombie apocalypse. Which brought me to the movies next failing. No zombies outside. Like maybe 10-11 in the entire film. Only 3 scenes with more than a trio of zombies together in the entire film. Then the movie rips off Dawn '04's ending as a close-to-end-of-movie "plot twist" (I gag as I call it that), after already having gang-sodomized Shaun of the Dead for the ENTIRE MOVIE ripping it off CONSTANTLY. The characters are so damned irritating you're LITERALLY sitting there in an empty room talking to the TV screen, begging zombies to eat them, and then when they die, the death scenes are so lame and gore-free that you're not even satisfied they suffered nearly enough for raping your eyes with their hideously bad acting. The zombies are TEN TIMES slower than Savini Night-zombies for 5/6ths of the movie, before moving into Faster-Than-Raptor Mode when convenient to make the painfully failed attempt at a tense plot point try and work for the last 15 minutes of the movie, with no transition or clue as to why these newest zombies are moving at FUCKING WARP SPEED. I mean literally, there's a scene where the last surviving human takes off at a dead sprint through the woods after cold-cocking his zombified former comrade with a golf driver, and they literally show him sprinting flat out for a solid 3-4 minutes. THEN they flash back to his now-zombified comrade ONLY NOW getting off the ground, and proceeding to speed after him in pursuit, jumping from small hilltops a good 15 feet to the top of the next hilltop to avoid the little depressions the human keeps stumbling, rolling down and running back up the other side. Towards the end of the chase the human reaches the coast and there's conveniently a rowboat with oars sitting on the beach. So he starts dragging the rowboat towards the surf, takes maybe 60 seconds to movie this light-ass rowboat to the water's edge, then the zombie crests the ridge, leaps straight off the top of the hill, goes down to one knee after this huge jump Blade-style, springs up, and in one smooth motion charges at a dead sprint towards the surviving human, now brandishing a heavy oar. The human again cold cocks him, repeatedly. Like severe enough the zombie's head shoulda been smashed Gallagher-style, but no, the zombie just falls down and lays there, presumably terminated. So then the camera stays on the guy as he gets in the boat and starts rowing out to sea. For like 3-4 mins (had my eye on the clock)...he's so far out that when the camera pans back to face the island he rowed away from the island is a TINY smudge against the horizon. ONLY THEN does his zombified buddy leap over the edge of the aft/rear of the rowboat, presumably having speed-swam or power-walked across miles of ocean bottom and then swum up at great speed towards the surface. (You can see from the color of the water its deep oceanic light blue and almost transparent. Anyways, the human sticks the golfclub handle through his undead buddy's eye and leaves the driver-head flush against his forehead, but not before holding out the critical blood-vial that the WHOLE DAMNED MOVIE has been about, the cure in its raw form to turning all the zombies back to humans, and letting the zombie knock it out of his hand and into the water while he's whimpering "I've got the cure, stop man, I can cure you" (to the zombie). Then he golf-club kills him and rows off, roll credits. HERE is why I wrote all this out. I kept finding myself talking to the screen, doing an unconscious Stan from South Park imitation "Really? REALLY?!?" over and over...and then in the depths of my disgust at how awful, how much worse than Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave and Day '08 (which it actually ripped off some) it was....this thought popped into my head. "God, that was AWFUL. Meh, least it was better than Diary and WAY better than Survival. So, in conclusion, despite Last of the Living being the 3rd worst zombie movie I have EVER seen, Survival is STILL WORSE. So that's a no, won't be buying the Survival DVD, and would throw the vile thing at anyone who tried to force me to accept it as a gift. Know that I-Phone mocking cartoon? Ie: "It prints money, it grants 3 wishes, even if one of those wishes is for an I-Phone, it will build you an island and then turn into a jet and fly you there...."? I wouldn't accept a Survival DVD if it DID print money, and it DID build me an island and turn into a luxuriously appointed private jet to fly me there. MAYBE if it granted me three wishes, because after I spent two wishes on really cool stuff, I could wish that Romero had remained true to his talent and had made GOOD Dead Films instead of the trash that is Diary/Survival, thus paradoxically erasing/negating/obliterating the copy of the Survival DVD that had tainted me merely by the box touching my flesh.

[MoonSylver]

[clanglee]

Honestly though Dubious, I didn't even enjoy it compared to Land & Diary, & this is from someone who LIKED both of those films, enjoyed them very much, & defended them from their detractors. : I think this is why I ended up liking Survival. I was not a big fan of Land, and Diary was pretty rancid. . . .so my expectations were really very low for Survival. So when I found out it wasn't the shit heap I expected, I was pleasantly surprised. On further watchings of Survival, it has gotten worse tho. So it may be a mood thing.

[DubiousComforts]

Honestly though Dubious, I didn't even enjoy it compared to Land & Diary, & this is from someone who LIKED both of those films, enjoyed them very much, & defended them from their detractors. I don't think this one suffers in comparison just to the older films, but from the last two as well. Your assessment is a fair one: you didn't enjoy it, but you're not threatening to rip out your own spleen over it. My biggest criticism of Survival would be that it's not nearly long enough given the story, number of characters and overall concept. Even the action scenes, such as the underwater attack, could have been fantastic as set pieces if the film had been fleshed out to 2+ hours. But the producers ultimately got what they paid for: the 85-minute digest version. One of the film's strengths is its "villain" characters. Kenneth Welsh and Richard Fitzpatrick are reminiscent of actors like Dennis Hopper and Ray Milland. Too bad we never got to see those guys chew up the scenery in a living dead western!

[DjfunkmasterG]

I have the UK Blu-Ray... so I am not buying it again.