Plum Island, off the coast of Delaware. Six days after the dead began to walk, two Irish families, the O'Flynns and the Muldoons have taken different approaches with the former killing any zombie they see and the latter feeling it is a better idea to contain them in hopes of an eventual cure. This leads to the expulsion of Patrick, leader of the O'Flynns who is forced to the mainland where he encounters survivors from the military. Weeks later with his newfound allies he returns to Plum Island to confront the Muldoons only to discover that things have taken a sinister turn in his former home.

After cramming fifty horror flicks into last month's 31 DAYS OF HORROR 2023 project even I was burned out. On one hand I was looking forward into reviewing a bunch of Westerns, which I usually do in November, but on the other I knew that I had one more ...of the Dead film that I couldn't finish by the end of October 31st but needed to watch nonetheless. I had a feeling that Survival of the Dead was going to suck too so it resulted in my completionist mentality and horror fatigue causing me to take a few days off. Well, I finally got the drive back, not to review this film, but to get to my Westerns, so it's time to finally tackle this crap with my reward of the old west waiting just over the dung hill.

At this point I feel George Romero had been checked out for a few years and just phoned it in for a paycheck. It's exactly how I felt after watching the last film in the franchise Diary of the Dead and Survival of the Dead continues on that path as an embarrassing way to finish the franchise. By 2009 CGI FX were pretty solid but you'd never know that if this film was your only point of reference. Here we are presented with some of the worst examples that I've seen and if you don't believe me just look at the scene where a person's head is blown off and the scalp with hair settles on the neck stump like a piece of stiff wood. Shit like this is unforgivable in a Romero series that was always applauded for it's awesome gore FX. Hell, even video games looked FAR better at the time this crap was shat onto DVD and thrown into Walmart bargain bins.

This is a direct sequel to Diary of the Dead even sharing an unremarkable character, the asshole military guy in the Jeep. These are the only two films to share such a connection in the Romero dead-verse so it figures that it's the two that suck. With that in mind it makes sense that the characters suck too. In fact all of them are insufferable aside from maybe Patrick. Survival of the Dead is basically a low budget comedic version of the Hatfields VS. the McCoys with zombies and one of the dumbest military units in history. Speaking of the military, in one of the early scenes in which we are introduced to them, one is giddy about getting a signal to watch the tonight show and the other one is just masturbating in public, because why not?

Its a damn shame that this is the last film directed by the legend George A. Romero because it is absolute trash. He has made a few turds but this is probably the worst. Many of the previous films in the series knew how to properly balance horror and great practical FX with just the right injection of comedy. Here the balance is fucked and the result is a film that tries too hard to be funny and looks bad doing it. I always suspected that the final trilogy would be ass but I discovered that Land of the Dead was salvageable and the two that followed were just progressively worse leading to this colossal dumpster fire. My recommendation is to just watch the first three films and leave these three alone. If you decide to truck through them all just know that they get progressively worse after Dawn of the Dead.

I'm sure George meant that final scene to have some hard hitting social commentary in it, and maybe it would work in a better film but in this case it just sucks. The final gag in the clown show known as Survival of the Dead.

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