Gingerbreadgirl Productions Movie-tastic Awesometown

A rough trailer for George Romero's next installment in his legendary dead series has surfaced on the internet.  Take a look for yourself, but I have mixed feelings about it.  http://www.screenjunkies.com/movienews/survival-dead-promo-trailer

I was a huge supporter of Land of the Dead, the film which heralded the long waited return to the zombie genre by the very filmmaker that created it in the first place.  It partially due to my excitement of seeing the next installment, but also a huge sigh of relief knowing what a long road it was to get the movie made, punctuated even more painfully by such lacking films like Resident Evil, House of the Dead and the Dawn of the Dead remake finding a place in mainstream cinema.  Sure Land wasn't perfect, but it had a sure handed-ness and maturity that was beyond the other films that had preceeded it in the zombie revival era.  Also, after giving us the incredible and original Dawn of the Dead, which is still the masterpiece of the genre, Romero gets some leeway.

Of course Land wasn't a financial success, and largely passed unnoticed by a public who didn't even know who Romero was.  After all, his last entry in the series was 1985's Day of the Dead.  I think many of us had just come to accept that the Dead series would be quadrilogy and that Land would be Romero's last stab at the franchise.  But a few years later, he made the direct to video followup Diary of the Dead for Dimension which attempted to show video footage taken by a filmmaker during the beginning of the zombie invasion.  It was Blair Witch Project meets Night of the Living Dead. It was also a huge misstep and a thoroughly unimpressive movie.

My impressions upon watching the Survival of the Dead trailer, aside from the awkward title, are that it looks like Romero is going back to doing a dramatic narative and the premise seems like a good one.  A bunch of survivors have fled to an island to escape the zombie apocolypse.  After all, no zombies on an island... at least until someone dies.  The trailer features some good gore, some questionable acting, but overall the promise of something interesting.  What worries me though is I saw a significant amount of slapstick humour put in.  There's nothing wrong with situational comedy in these movies, in fact it makes all the difference and often shows a disturbing element of the humans.  But when I see a zombie holding a stick of dynamite and upon watching the fuse burn down, lets out a perfect comedically timed groan, then I start to worry.

This obviously is a very rough trailer and isn't indicitive of what the final product will be, but part of me worries that Romero just doesn't have it in him to do these types of movies anymore.

Ashley Lynch