Movies
BD Review: A Second Opinion on ‘Survival of the Dead’
It’s no secret that I despise George A. Romero’s Survival of the Dead as I wrote this negative review way back in September. After the rash of screenings through TIFF and Fantastic Fest, I started to think I was in the minority, and maybe I still am, but for now it looks as if Bloody Disgusting’s Michael Panduro agrees with me. Below you’ll find his negative thoughts on Romero’s latest zombie opus — and don’t forget to write your own review and tell us what YOU think. I’m dying to know.
What the trinkly fudge just happened!? I feel betrayed, humiliated! This is comparable to something like my girlfriend through 6 years suddenly showing me a lump in her panties and saying she hasn’t been totally honest with me. This feels like when George Lucas butt-fucked a generation with The Phantom Menace. Worse yet, this feels worse than seeing a modern Carpenter or Argento flick!
After sitting through the most ridiculous hour and a half I’ve ever had with the living dead I wanna re-evaluate my entire perception of George A. Romero. I wanna rip out my numerous copies of the dead trilogy (seriously, screw everything after Day), piss on them and set fire to the very memory of ever being a devoted fan. But I’m not gonna do it. Because I remember this exact same thing happening before. It happened when I watched Carpenter’s Ghosts Of Mars and it happened when I watched Argento’s Phantom of The Opera. What the hell happened to these guys in the mid-90s!? Did the drugs stop working or something!? Does talent, judgment and common sense evaporate when you hit 60? I have no idea, but the fact remains that Romero has now conclusively joined the ranks of nonsensical horror-directors who once blew my mind with edgy, relevant and original stories and are now cranking out movies so bad I almost feel sorry for them. The classics are still classics. Question is, how does a filmmaker – a creative artist, if you will – go from greatness to utter shittiness?
I was out there on the frontline defending Land Of The Dead, when it first came out. I thought it was kinda good fun, the production design and acting was kinda ok and the script kinda made sense. But I was wrong, I’ve realized that on repeat viewings. And Diary really sucked, that was apparent first time around. But still it couldn’t have prepared me for the filmic abortion that is Survival of The Dead. I mean, ABSOLUTELY NOTHING works in this film! Every single solitary aspect of filmmaking is flawed to the point that it reeks amateur. This looks like a shitty student film, made not by people with decades of experience, but by snotty teenage stoners wanting to do a huh-huh-zombie-flick. It’s ridiculous, it’s not funny, it just pisses me of. Apart from a monumentally faulty script with everything from valleys of plot-holes, stupid dialogue and scenes that are just nonsense, Survival suffers under poor digital photography that looks horrible on film, clumsy lighting, loose editing and goofy music. And that’s not even counting the acting. My god, the acting! Horrible dialogue gives birth to uneven performances, but it doesn’t necessitate accents that are all over the place or actors that sound like they’re reciting. Furthermore, the fact that nobody garners the least bit of sympathy, nobody is a convincing badass and absolutely nobody embodies an interesting character in any way, pulls the film down to simply being boring and unengaging.
Romero fucks up his film even further by employing cheap CGI and uninspired and misplaced humor, rendering the end result one of the uttermost uninspired crapfests I’ve ever experienced. Survival of The Dead goes beyond bad, because of it’s context, though. I mean, this guy used to pack a punch, we all know that! So what the fuck happened!? I still don’t know who or what to blame for the collective downfall of my teenage icons, but I know that in George Romero the fallen ones just got a new bunkmate. I haven’t felt this ridiculed since watching the shitpiles of his contemporaries as mentioned above. You have broken my heart George Romero, and I never thought I’d be saying that to a 70-year old man.
Rating: 1/5 Skulls
Screened at CPH:PIX 2010
There’s been a lot of talk about how Christopher Nolan snuck in some horror elements into his epic adaptation of The Odyssey. However, even before the Cyclops began to eat Ithican soldiers and Circe subjected them to magical body-horror, cinemagoers were already witnessing supernatural terror through a certain trailer that was attached to most IMAX screenings of Nolan’s film.
It turns out that this trailer was for Rob Savage’s Other Mommy, an adaptation of Bird Box author Josh Malerman’s horror novel, Incidents Around the House. With the teaser now available online and revealing that the award-winning Jessica Chastain is playing the titular antagonist (as well as her ill-fated human counterpart), not to mention the fact that the picture is being helmed by the director of hits like Host and The Boogeyman, genre fans are understandably hyped for this upcoming thriller.
That’s why I’ve decided to take a closer look at the trailer and share four things we learned from this sneak peek at Other Mommy!
4. Rob Savage is Going Back to His Supernatural Horror Roots
I know I’m in the minority when I admit that Dashcam is my favorite Rob Savage movie, but even I understand why the filmmakers’ fans have been waiting a while for the director to get back to telling more grounded paranormal stories as he did with 2020’s Host.
Other Mommy obviously isn’t a found footage movie, but moments like the poltergeist activity on the kitchen table combined with the nature of the source material, which actually features a full-on exorcism, indicate that this adaptation is more than a simple creature feature. That’s why I think Savage is once again going to borrow from the same ghostly narratives that made his debut film such a viral hit.
3. Other Mommy is a More Convincing Doppelganger in the Adaptation
Part of the horror from Malerman’s original novel came from the fact that the entity taking on the form of Bela’s (Arabella Olivia Clark) mother wasn’t very good at passing itself off as human. This resulted in several uncanny moments where other characters began to notice that there was something visibly wrong with the family and decided to keep their distance.
Savage’s film appears to be taking a different route, with the trailer showing a version of the entity that can, at least physically, imitate Chastain’s character perfectly. This change is likely the result of the filmmakers wanting to incorporate more paranoid scenes where Bela and her father, played by Jay Duplass, are confused about which Mommy is safe to interact with.
2. The Family is Also Better Off This Time Around
Incidents Around the House featured some interesting subtext about how poverty can negatively affect American family dynamics. After all, the main characters were already feeling scared and isolated before the entity emerged from Bela’s closet and began scratching at their emotional wounds. The trailer for the movie, however, depicts the family as being relatively well off before these incidents begin to occur.
I can only imagine that this part of the story was changed so that the family’s fall from grace can be even more dramatic as the mom and dad’s pasts are revealed and Bela falls further into the clutches of the demonic antagonist.
1. Jessica Chastain is Embodying Evil Dead Rise’s Alyssa Sutherland
Mothers turning against their children is one of the most disturbing horror tropes out there (just check out classics like Hereditary and Carrie if you need proof), but it takes a remarkably skilled actress to pull off such a monstrous transformation. This is especially true when both a regular, loving mother and the Other share the screen in the same film.
That’s why I appreciate how Chastain appears to be channeling another evil redhead mother that recently traumatized audiences with her performance. It’s too early to be sure, but I’m fairly confident that Chastain’s character has at least some amount of Ellie in her cinematic DNA – Ellie being the iconic deadite brought to life by Australian actress Alyssa Sutherland in 2023’s Evil Dead Rise.
Let us know in the comments if you think we missed any important details from the trailer, and don’t forget to check out Other Mommy when it hits theaters on October 9!
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