Day 173: Survival of the Dead

I am not here to call this a great, or even very good movie, but it does something I have wanted movies to do for years. A group of National Guardsmen went rogue and robbed the protagonists of Diary of the Dead before going off on their merry way. This movie picks up with those Guardsmen and follows there further adventures in the land of the dead.

Set on an island off the coast of Delaware, the movie is already weird in that it features two Irish clans fighting over how to handle the zombie outbreak on their island. The O'Flynns (I think, they have super-Irish names) want to kill the zombies while the Muldoons want to save them until a cure is found. When the Muldoons win the battle over the island's approach, one of the surviving O'Flynns lures the Guardsmen to the island to help tip the scales back to his side (or just anger the Muldoons, who hate outsiders). The Muldoons have tried to chain up the zombies in places they used to frequent while alive in hopes of reminding them of their humanity. The other big experiment is trying to get the zombies to eat flesh that isn't human.

This is like Romero's Vietnam movie, set in Irish Delaware with zombies. And it plays out exactly as weird as that sounds. This has been the last entry in the Living Dead series so far and it plays more like a folk tale or war movie than as a horror film. There are horseback riding twin sisters, rolling hillsides and the occasional gut munch buffet. I'm not sure who this movie is for but if you've seen all the other Romero movies, you might as well see this one.