Synopsis: On an island off the coast of North America, local residents simultaneously fight a zombie epidemic while hoping for a cure to return their un-dead relatives back to their human state.The latest installment of George Romero's classic zombie series has the tagline "death isn't what it used to be" and I think that goes for this series as well, it's not what it used to be. But it's still a good series, it's just tough to live up to the massive expectations set by his original trilogy.
If you've lost track, here's where we're at:
Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Dawn of the Dead (1978)
Day of the Dead (1985)
Land of the Dead (2005)
Diary of the Dead (2007)
Survival of the Dead (2010)
So this time we follow a group of mercenary National Guardsmen who very briefly appeared in Diary of the Dead. To escape the zombie apocalypse they follow a man to an island where he says they can escape it. What it turns into is sort of a Hatfield vs McCoys type of thing with the mercenaries on 1 side and plenty of henchmen on the other. The zombies? Well, they're sort of caught in the middle and for the most part don't present much of a threat to anyone until the grand finale. Most of the movie they're just easily dispatched and occasionally appear to remind you that it's a zombie flick.
It's still a horror movie though with quite a bit of gore and guts, just not too suspenseful or at all scary. It would fall a lot closer to a good old Western shoot-em-up maybe than anything else. I got a kick out of how the guys could hit a zombie right between the eyes with a shot from their pistol from 100 feet away on the first try, but when they were having a shootout their aim seemed to be a bit less consistent.
Nobody stars in it that I remembered ever seeing in anything before, but the acting is pretty much what I expected. It feels like a b-movie, looks like a b-movie and I guess that exactly what it is... a b-movie.
All-in-all it's entertaining enough and has a decent story, but probably is only going to be really liked by fans of the Romero series and surely won't win any new fans. That's not to say I don't want to see more of this franchise though and I hope he churns 'em out until he's headed to the grave himself. I'll keep adding them to my collection.
5.5/10
