Fantastic Fest: 'George A. Romero's Survival of the Dead'

They've got their fist, they've got their plan, they've got survivalism.

We love George A. Romero for all that he's given us, from original Night of the Living Dead to Creepshow and from Martin to, well, at least the trailer for Monkey Shines. It's his creepy dead folk, though, that will live on. From Barbara to Bub and beyond, Romero's characters are all dead in one way or another.

This sixth installment in Romero's ongoing zombie mythos takes place – according to the director's pre-screening Q&A – a few days after the events in the superior series reboot Diary of the Dead.

Pennsylvania National Guardsman Sgt. Crocket, a minor character in Diary who was last seen as a newfangled highwayman robbing what remained of the living to give to the corps, is Survival's central character here. Like all of Romero's unlikely and often unwilling protagonists, Crockett is battered, physically, mentally, and spiritually by the return of the dead, as are his four fellow soldiers.

When the Guardsmen hear of an island off the coast of Delaware that is reputedly "under control" (i.e. no flesh-eaters), they commandeer a Brinks armored car and hightail it to the coast. Once there, however, they find themselves caught up in a vicious, generations-old blood feud between the island's two rival families, both of whom have differing opinions on how best to deal with their deathless kinfolk.

One one side is crusty fisherman Patrick O'Flynn (Kenneth Welsh) who looks like he just stepped off a package of Gorton's fishsticks. O'Flynn's philosophy on zombie problem is straight and to the point: aim for the head and put 'em down.

On the other side of the island are opposing clan the Muldoons, led by the Bible-thumping Seamus (Richard Fitzpatrick). A cowboy high on Christ and good old Irish whisky, Muldoon chains his own zombie family to their former lives, literally, while he and his increasingly jangled islanders await word of a "cure" from the mainland.

Enter the National Guard. Bloody chaos and Romero's patented brand of jet-black humor ensue.

Survival of the Dead is a mess that feels most of all like a vague do-over of the original Day of the Dead. Unfortunately, Romero's feuding humans – awash in thickly barnacled Irish accents and all manner of cliché – are barely as interesting as an old episode of Bonanza (Romero has compared the film to the old Barbara Stanwyck television show The Big Country). Survival also suffers from some truly lousy (although exceedingly creative) CGI gore.

Romero's inherent nihilism – his entire oeuvre is one long epitaph for humanity – is laboriously enacted here, and even the zombies get short shrift. They seem like an afterthought to Romero's real story, which, when you get right down to the chewy red marrow of it, is as old and overtold as humanity's lack thereof. Alive, dead … who cares? We're all just worm-chow in the end.