I was lucky enough to catch Romero's Survival Of The Dead, and Joe Dante's The Hole, at the Venice Film Festival last week and, seeing as nothing seems to have turned up about them on the site, here's my thoughts.
First off, Survival Of The Dead. I love George Romero. I would have liked to have given that big bear of a man a big bear hug. I enjoyed Diary Of The Dead, but was left a bit cold by Land Of The Dead. It came across a bit rushed to me and it felt like it had been interfered with. Diary played like a fun experiment and I could go along with that, but it also seemed a bit below such an icon as Romero. After watching only one clip of Survival online, a less than great scene of the guy catching a zombie on his fishing line, my hopes were low, but the film is a pleasant surprise or unpleasant, depending on where you stand with gut munching. If anything, it's his first western.
The story revolves around two feuding families on a small, east coast island and some mercenaries who turn up there to find a safe haven. The mercenaries were the guys in Diary who dressed like they soldiers or maybe they'd gone AWOL - you might remember them stopping and stealing from the kids in the Winnebago. The main guy with the beard is the lead character here. Anyway, the islanders and families have different approaches to the epidemic. One wants to keep the Zombies alive, train them to eat animals and give them some sort of quality of existence until a cure can be found. The others want to shoot em. The mercenaries are now looking for a home and after seeing an advert on the internet about Plum Island, they set off. They pick up an annoying hipster on the way when they rescue him from a bunch of looters who keep zombie heads on sticks for fun. When they get there, the island has degenerated into a sort of asylum for survivors and zombies alike. Which is an idea I'd like to have seen played out more. The zombies are chained up and repeatedly try to post letters or chop wood. Like I said, the island stuff plays like a western. The end has a definite Wild Bunch feel to it and there are probably other references that I didn't catch as Westerns have never really been my thing. There's even a zombie on horse back, which is better and spookier than it sounds.
The film is not without it's faults. There's a twist about the zombie on horseback that seemed like a bit of a cheat to me and the guy who wants to keep the zombies around out of respect for the dead goes a little gun crazy in the middle of the film. The audience loved it, though. They gave George a five minute standing ovation before and after the film and politely applauded the big kills. Flare gun and fire extinguisher stand out, but there's plenty of chomping, splattery gunshots and gut chewing at the end. It's the film Romero should have made when Universal were throwing all that money at him to make Land and I think it's his best since Day Of The Dead. With the glut of sub-par zombie stuff around these days it made me really happy to see the man who wrote the rule book so appreciated.
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. [click for more]
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Originally Posted by Mike70
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