My first thought on seeing clips from George Romero’s latest zombie film, Survival of the Dead, is simply that this doesn’t look as cheap as I feared. Diary of the Dead looked absolutely atrocious, right from the first clips, so this is giving me some hope. As is the official Toronto Film Festival synopsis, which actually sounds intriguing:
In a world where the dead rise to menace the living, rogue soldier Crocket (Alan Van Sprang) leads a band of military dropouts to refuge from the endless chaos. As they search for a place “where the shit won’t get you,” they meet banished patriarch Patrick O’Flynn (played with zeal by Kenneth Welsh), who promises a new Eden on the fishing and ranching outpost Plum Island. The men arrive, only to find themselves caught in an age-old battle between O’Flynn’s family and rival clan the Muldoons. It turns out that Patrick was expelled from the isle for believing that the only good zombie is a dead zombie, while the Muldoons think it’s wrong to dispatch afflicted loved ones, attempting to look after their undead kinfolk until a cure is found. But their bid for stability on the homestead has turned perverse: the undead are chained inside their homes, pretending to live normal lives – and the consequences are bloody. A desperate struggle for survival will determine whether the living and the dead can coexist.
You’ll remember that Crocket appeared in Diary, making Survival Romero’s only actual sequel in the Dead series.
Survival of the Dead plays Fantastic Fest, where I’ll be damned sure seeing it. Look for my review then.