George A. Romero's Survival of the Dead: Critic Reviews

There are some memorable images, including the sight of a beautiful, horse-riding ''dead head.'' But for much of the movie, Van Sprang's zombie fatigue seems to be an echo of Romero's own.

Placidly photographed and lacking in urgency, Survival shows us the living flailing at fate and the dead just flailing.

It has been six days since the dead began to walk, and a powerful emotion is gripping the land. Boredom.

Romero's Hatfields-and-McCoys setup feels more random than creative, and the idea that they're all Irish -- or cowboys! -- is more desultory still.

At best, Survival's ending, with a riff on "beating a dead horse," may be taken for evidence of self-awareness.

Survival of the Dead almost never snaps into focus. Even its oxymoronic title doesn't work. It feels marginal, like an extended footnote.

After you've seen, oh, I dunno, 20 or 30 zombie movies, you sort of stop caring very much, unless something new is going on, as in Zombieland.

At long last, the Dead series may be ready for that final bullet between the eyes.

Like the literary monster mash-ups that have invaded the best-seller lists, Survival of the Dead mixes genres and milieus with absurdist glee.

Shuffle, shuffle, limp, limp. That's not the shambling gait of the zombie hordes in George Romero's Survival of the Dead, but the draggy pace of the movie itself.

Steeped in fan-pleasing gore but woefully thin on ideas, originality (beyond new zombie-offing methods) or directorial flair.

I suppose it's nice that Romero has a hobby, but he couldn't be more of a bore if he were showing off his pine cone collection.

The hurtful truth is that others -- many others -- have co-opted Romero's whole living dead thing and have been doing it with more style than the Pittsburgh zombie auteur is capable of these days.

What we've got here is a just a B-movie western with buckets of gore, which might be fine coming from a Romero wannabe but not from the genuine article.

Even Romero's staunchest fans might conclude their hero is going through the motions here. Yes, almost like a zombie.

There's little here that's new or interesting; the movie is for hard-core Romero devotees only, and even they should approach this picture with expectations kept in check.

George A. Romero's entertaining new zombie feature shows that you can't keep a good man down.

Romero is using better actors than in the past, which helps. But they are hobbled by a sometimes nonsensical script with logical lapses even genre fans will find hard to swallow.

Are George Romero's late-career ghoul operas fatigued retreads of his seminal zombie classics, or eccentrically satirical twists on the genre tropes he pioneered? Survival of the Dead isn't about to clear things up.

full review at Movies for the Masses

"A man dies, he gets stupid," someone observes in the film. Maybe if a man makes too many films about the dead, the same fate awaits him. Mr. Romero, you are on notice.

Romero has freed his story up for a lighter, more amusingly misanthropic take on the worst tendencies of people.

An exercise in beating a dead horse as well as eating a dead horse, the film demonstrates that the metaphorical usefulness of the zombie genre has reached a state of near rigor mortis, if not putrefaction.