Ah, the zombie. It is perhaps the only true American movie monster, the others – vampires, Frankensteins, Godzillas, and wolf men – are all foreign imports. Only the zombie, with its senseless consumerism, its hoardlike mentality, its mental and physical sluggishness, and its utter refusal to acknowledge a natural process of death and aging, can be recognized as nightmare of the American dream gone wrong. And, unlike the typical horror movie, there is no return to normality at the close of a zombie movie. The zombie arrives, and it destroys the world. Our greatest fear is that our excesses will be our own undoing, and that there will be no eventual victory, no return, no normalcy regained, only chaos, only death, only a shack in the woods, or an empty mall, and no where to go, no one to save us.

And the man responsible for modernizing the zombie genre is unquestionably George A. Romero, who first captured the paranoia of the cold war with his Night of the Living Dead, and then laughed at consumers becoming the consumed in Dawn of the Dead. These films are horrific, they’re sharp visions of an America we should not let happen. If Romero had continued making films of increasing quality, he would be among our greatest filmmakers. Or, if he had stopped with those two films, he might have left the zombie genre a respectable one. Unfortunately, Romero did neither, instead releasing zombie film after zombie film, each a reduction in social critique, each a reduction in storytelling, until we come to the sixth film in Romero’s Dead series, Survival of the Dead.

We’ve now spent an uncertain number of years since the original wave of zombies. Not long enough to find a cure, but long enough for the living survivors to loose all fear of zombie attacks. In fact, on an island off the coast of North America, the two families that reside there – the O’Flynns and the Muldoons – disagree about just how dangerous zombies actually are, and what should be done with them. The O’Flynns want the traditional, shoot-em-dead treatment, while the Muldoons want to work with the zombies, treat them like animals to be trained, and keep their undead family members intact until a cure is found. The Muldoons muscle the O’Flynn leader Patrick (Kenneth Welsh) off the island in a speedboat, and Patrick – through the use of a YouTube ad that plays on iPhones – recruits a renegade gang of mainlanders to ferry back to the island, and once there, join him on his quest to rid his home of the Muldoons and their zombies. 

This much plot takes about half the movie, and although we’re treated to a few zombie attacks, they’re not especially frightening and not especially entertaining. The renegade gang contains Sarge ‘Nicotine’ Crocket (Alan Van Sprang), a tough guy military type that Romero fans will recognize from past films in the series, the unspeakably bad Devon Bostick (so underdeveloped his character is simply called “Boy” in the credits), whose presence seems more designed to appeal to a younger audience rather than serve any sort of narrative purpose, and Tomboy (Athena Karkanis), a butch lesbian who we meet with her hands down her pants, and whom, we suspect, is the result of a group of screenwriters who have never met a lesbian, possibly never talked to a woman, for that matter, and have based all knowledge of her traits on the hackneyed manly women of James Cameron films.

The film has a cheap look, as if it were made for the Sci-Fi Channel, on a budget minimal even by TV standards. The dialogue is as dead as the zombies, and the only thing original about the Survival of the Dead seems to be that Romero has a zombie ride a horse. Even this seems like a diluted copy of the much creepier Headless Horseman of Sleep Hollow, but Romero doesn’t seem aware of this, and we get no scene that makes much use of a horse-riding zombie. There’s no using small intestines for a lasso here, nor anything half so imaginative.

What we ultimately have is a not a zombie film but a zombified director, one who goes through the motions and gestures of his prior cinematic life, but without the intelligence or skill to carry it off. At this point, the title Survival of the Dead seems more apt in describing Romero’s career: he just keeps plodding on, mindlessly, soullessly. Horror audiences can only hope someone shoots this franchise in its indiscriminate head, and does us all the mercy of a double-tap.