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Netflix Instant is a wonderful thing. For less than 10 bucks a month you get unlimited access in addition to your one-at-a-time DVD mailer allotment, with the only limitation being you need some sort of broadband-enabled hardware to stream it (your computer will do if you don’t have an Xbox or Wii to work with). Only a small portion of their total inventory is available this way, but there’s more than you might think, from new releases all the way back to the silent movie era.
I regret to say I’m not very efficient with this abundance of riches, however. My instant queue has had upwards of 30 shows in it for some time now, and I can’t just excuse that by saying Dawn uses the same account. The classic version of Phantom of the Opera has been sitting there for quite awhile, staring at me with sunken-eyed accusation every time we browse on through to watch another episode of Pawn Stars.
Honestly, part of it really is the fact there’s another person sharing the living space who really isn’t interested in watching Phantom of the Opera at that moment when you have the time and inclination to do so. So it has to wait for that celestial alignment when you have time on your hands, are in the mood to watch, and the roommate/significant other is out of the apartment so that their own mood doesn’t factor into things. The last time this alignment occurred, I still regrettably betrayed the Phantom, and instead fired up some of the leftover zombie movies I’d queued up just prior to Halloween, including George A. Romero’s latest offering, Survival of the Dead.
If you remember my review of Diary of the Dead, you’ll know I feel the father of the modern zombie genre has lost a step (or many steps… perhaps even a leg…) since his early days. Sometimes I feel like one of those grumbling old men complaining it was all better in the olden days, and certainly Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead had their share of cheesy moments and sketchy characterizations. In fact, I’m not even a hater on Land of the Dead, since it touched on the concept that zombies might find a new consciousness emerging on the other side of death, a thought he’d already brought up in Day of the Dead with Bub. Bub is what elevates Day of the Dead to being a great movie for me even through the cheese, partly because Romero managed to make a zombie the most sympathetic character, but also because it was a twistedly hopeful message going beyond the human survivors escaping: Bub doesn’t backslide into mindlessness, even after his “father” is murdered. In fact, he ends up attacking someone in a properly civilized manner–shooting them–with a properly civilized motive: revenge. It’s still markedly antisocial behavior, true, but it’s reasoned behavior, and that implies that somewhere down the road in Romero’s Day of the Dead world, zombies could be reasoned with.
Whether or not that notion is sacrilege to you, it was still an interesting one to leave us with. Land of the Dead expanded upon it, culminating in having Big Daddy lead his horde in a semi-organized assault on the humans that had been “persecuting” them (shades of I Am Legend, there), but after that Romero took a big step back with Diary and started the apocalypse clock over again, in the process telling a story I felt he’d already told, and told better.
Which brings me to Survival of the Dead, a movie I felt was meant as a spiritual successor to Day of the Dead, but one that became very confused along the way. Rather than go into all the details, I’ll refer you to a review that pretty much sums up both the (very odd) plot and my reactions: Click Here
Long story short, at the core of this I think Romero was again trying to explore the idea of somehow reaching out to the zombies and modifying their behavior, but this time the only result is that they decide to broaden their eating habits. Along the way, there’s a lot of half-developed headscratchers, such as two clans of Irishmen fighting over an island within ferry distance of the coast of modern day Delaware. There’s also some zombie wrangling in a sort-of-cowboy-setting, which is of course something I wanted to see, but it’s somehow developed even less than the limited wrangling scenes they did in the original Day of the Dead. Any social commentary message seems to be all over the place, as well as the characters’ motives. The same man will lecture people one moment about not showing proper respect for the (un)dead, then soon after is casually lighting his cigarette off of one he just needlessly set on fire. A teenager met just a few days after the outbreak is inexplicably competent with all manner of weaponry, and instead of getting his back story we get the back story of another man which is not especially relevant or interesting. Not that the teenager’s story would have been interesting either, perhaps, but I wish Romero had at least given a wink to us in terms of accepting his gun acumen.
Maybe I just go into these things expecting too much from Romero, or hoping to see some of the old magic. I admit, I had the same long run with John Carpenter before finally giving up on him… and frankly, even a crappy Romero zombie movie is still better than at least half or more the zombie movies out there, because you can still see the neat ideas wanting to break through. Hell, Romero inverts the Zombie Ranch aesthetic by having a zombie woman riding a normal horse… which I suppose isn’t much stranger than a normal woman riding a zombie horse, but sooner or later people are going to want to know why that’s happening, and probably particularly how a Romero-style uncoordinated shambler can mount and ride a horse successfully. That’s after all one of the big things people like about Romero: he stuck to his guns with his original vision and hasn’t jumped on the “fast zombie” bandwagon… but because of that, there’s some activities his zombies probably oughtn’t to be doing without it being commented on as a big anomaly. Here it’s just “Oh yeah, she’s still riding”. At a gallop. Jumping fences.
I don’t mean to get on my high horse about this (heh heh), since there’s many bits of the Zombie Ranch world that ain’t been explained yet… but on the other hand, I have the luxury of taking my time with them. The story’s not over yet. Survival of the Dead has 90 minutes to tell its tale, and by the time it’s over the only real reaction I had was “Well… that happened”. Somewhere in there I do believe the themes of Day of the Dead were there, wanting to be revisited in a more modern context… but the story had already been told, and told better the first time around.