GEORGE A. ROMERO'S SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD will play in limited theatrical release at the end of this month. A list of which cities and theaters it will play at is easy enough to find online. If you get the opportunity to see it on a big screen, that's the way to go. If, like me, you don't live somewhere that booked the film, it's available On Demand now, via your cable outlet or as a download from Amazon.

The first review I read of this film, maybe six months ago, predicted this would be Romero's most divisive film yet. Boy, they weren't kidding! I've read rave reviews from the likes of Chris Alexander, Fangoria's new editor in chief, and Michael Marano, one of the smartest film critics I know; along those lines, indie filmmakers Scooter McCrae and Mike Watt - both of whom have made indie zombie flicks (SHATTER DEAD and THE RESURRECTION GAME, respectively) that show their devotion to Romero, have defended it online. My good friend RJ Sevin, who co-runs Creeping Hemlock Press, and may be the biggest Romero fan I know, has been cautiously positive in his remarks (wisely so, I think; it's somewhat pointless to throw your best gauntlet down before most people have had a chance to see the movie).

And then there have been scathing reviews, such as Brain Hammer's (hilarious, I thought) piece on Horror Yearbook, and Tom and Dick, if not Tom, Dick and Harry, on message boards and Facebook. Oh, I love my FB horror fan friends. Everything is subjective, one man's hamburger is another man's steak, to each his own, and all that... Not only is everyone a critic, but thanks to the internet in general, and FB in particular, everyone has a platform. I'm of the opinion that everyone's opinion is equally valid, but if you want your film criticism to contain a certain degree of film history and context, it's still worth seeking reviews from actual critics (whether you agree with them or not). I guess I fall somewhere in the middle on that score. I don't know more than you do, I just think I do.

I don't want to turn this into a me-Me-ME review like Harry Knowles does, but SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD is George Romero's sixth feature length zombie film, and his 16th feature film as a director. That's a significant body of work by any measure, and if you somehow track all of the projects the man has developed which fell through, he's been a steady workhorse, and one who has been a fierce independent spirit, for 40 years. While I agree that every film must rise and fall on its own merits, I also think it would be ridiculous to evaluate SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD without context, and since SURVIVAL has already found itself mired between pro-and-negative Romero critics, I'm going to delve into my own feelings on the man and his work. If you know me, you already know all this, so skip ahead (way ahead).

I probably saw NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD when I was 13. I was lucky to see it on a big screen. I dreaded seeing it; for years the images I saw from it (mostly ads for the novelization) in Famous Monsters unsettled me. The film did not disappoint: it scared the shit out of me. Other than STAR WARS, it was probably the most significant filmgoing experience of my life. And then I saw MARTIN and DAWN OF THE DEAD during their theatrical releases, and I knew I wanted to be George Romero when I grew up (a recent issue of Video Watchdog, featuring a mediocre/negative review of my book CHEAP SCARES! LOW BUDGET HORROR FILMMAKERS SHARE THEIR SECRETS, pointed this out - and then declared I was more of a John Russo. Ouch!). Other than the films mentioned above, Romero's other significant personal film was KNIGHTRIDERS. For horror fans, it's probably CREEPSHOW, which didn't rock my world. But NIGHT, DAWN and MARTIN are three of the greatest horror films ever made and always will be.

When DAY OF THE DEAD came out, it didn't blow me away. In fact, I was disappointed by it. I'd read Romero's original, epic screenplay, so I went into the film with raised expectations - probably the worst thing you can do for any indie effort. As Romero fans know, he had a choice: cut his budget in half, or make an R-rated movie. Romero made it his way, on a smaller budget. To do so, he cut the script to ribbons. I saw DAY at the Criterion in Times Square, and found much to love about it despite my misgivings. The film takes a lot of knocks for its acting, but in fact all of the sympathetic characters are portrayed very well; only the villains overact. But the music, cinematography, and special effects are topnotch, and I've grown to love it over time (and Romero's gone on record saying it's his favorite in the "Dead" series). I liked MONKEY SHINES, shrugged at THE DARK HALF, yawned during TWO EVIL EYES. I've never even seen BRUISER.

Then came LAND OF THE DEAD. My disappointment was profound, but unlike DAY, I didn't even like the original script. Author John Skipp, who edited the amazing BOOK OF THE DEAD anthology, defended the film on the Shocklines message board: "So what? It's a FUCKING GEORGE ROMERO ZOMBIE MOVIE!" I've never cottoned to this defense of the film; I'd rather see a good George Romero zombie movie than a bad one, and I thought LAND was a bad movie on most counts: bad characters, uninteresting setup, zero suspense, and that Dead Reckoning vehicle - pilfered from the kiddie TV show ARK II and the terrible movie DAMNATION ALLEY - was just plain stupid, a word I never associate with Romero's work even when it disappoints me. If you don't care about the characters, and those characters are NEVER in jeopardy, what the hell's the point? I saw the damned thing three times in a theater, as I did DAY, desperately seeking anything to like about it, and came up empty handed. I bought the DVD, hoping I'd have a change of heart. Nope, I still think it's a bad film.

But as a filmmaker with some insight into the process, and some insight into the production of LAND, let me point out that Romero busted his ass on that film. He was given a decent budget, but shortly before filming, the value of the American dollar in Canada dropped, so the value of his budget dropped as well, even though he'd agreed to deliver an R-rated cut to Universal. So once again, Romero was dealt a lousy hand by the suits. And he shot in Toronto, rather than Pittsburgh, and Toronto is a lot colder than Pittsburgh. It was a miserable shoot and people around Romero were very, very concerned about his health. The film suffered because he couldn't get the shots and coverage he needed. Hollywood fucked him.

I watched DIARY OF THE DEAD with extremely lowered expectations, and you know what? I thought it was okay. Oh, Romero created a much weaker "horror verite" than other filmmakers before him, and I think it was a mistake to go back to the original "night," and found the film a mess, but I liked two of the characters (a black militant and a very unlikeable female - prime Romero characters!) and there were at least a few moments of suspense. I know fans revile the film, but I found it more than worth the price of a rental.

When "--OF THE DEAD" was announced, I thought (like many others), "Oh, for Christ's sake, who cares? Let it die already!" Then the full title was announced, and I laughed.

Let's take a step back and review some of Romero's other misfortunes with the "dead" series. When DAY was released, it was more or less in direct competition with RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD, which received a better release than DAY because of its R rating, and which tapped into both Romero's audience and a younger horror audience as well. That must have hurt, seeing as the film was an "in title" only adaptation of the terrible novel written by John Russo. Then LAND had to compete with Snyder's remake of DAWN OF THE DEAD, which was a hit. Horror fans fall over themselves praising the DAWN remake; I thought it was stupid. Really stupid. But after watching LAND, I had to admit that at least it delivered the basics, and that tricked out school bus worked better as a film device than the Dead Reckoning.

And now SURVIVAL comes out in the midst of a zombie boom, and most horror fans couldn't care less. That's just wrong, man. George Romero created the zombie genre. (Russo deserves credit for that too, but while Romero perfected the form with DAWN, Russo has just ridden on the original's coattails. It's a tough world, especially for indie filmmakers). 28 DAYS LATER was heralded for making zombies scary again, but I'm dumbfounded that fans don't realize - or care - that its story, and many of its images, were lifted wholesale from the 1962 DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS movie. There's that pesky film history again. I suppose that those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it, and those who ignore film history are doomed to wear their ignorance online. For the record, Romero acknowledges that NOTLD ripped off Richard Matheson's I AM LEGEND, an opinion which Matheson shares; I think it owes much more to Hitchcock's THE BIRDS. Either way, Romero and Russo did their own spin on the material and created some thing new. In some respects, the lack of regard for film history is generational; it's one thing to know when a film was released, it's another to have experienced that release and remember first hand the impact it had on the genre. Peter Jackson, Sam Raimi, Stuart Gordon - in some way, all of their early careers were inspired by Romero.

SHAUN OF THE DEAD has become my favorite zombie movie - even more than Romero's DAWN - and it succeeds because it is an unabashed valentine to Romero. I wish that feeling was contagious. Everywhere you look, people are making money off Romero's ideas: authors, filmmakers, comic book writers. And the "fans" don't care that Romero is being ripped off; they support this shit without reservation. Anyone who wants to make a buck off Romero's ideas can, it seems... except for Romero himself, who can't get funding for anything but a zombie movie, and even then can't get the kind of budget that all these other "artists" get for treading in his swimming pool. "Let's go see RESIDENT EVIL III! Let's buy WORLD WAR Z in hardcover! My mother hates horror, but she'll love PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES! 28 WEEKS LATER? I'm there! DAY OF THE DEAD: CONTAGIUM? I want to rent it, I want to own it, I want to jerk off to it!" They're all playing in Romero's sandbox, and he gets left with lumpy cat shit. How many of these cocksuckers even bother to thank Romero for his ideas, let alone give him a piece of their action? I'm hoping Frank Darabont sets a precedent with this upcoming WALKING DEAD TV series, but I'm not holding my breath.

How's that for an epic digression?

SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD was a very pleasant surprise for me. It's better than LAND OF THE DEAD and DIARY OF THE DEAD. It has characters I liked - hell, characters I loved! - and a wealth of cool ideas, even if they're presented in a slender manner due to the budget constraints. For those who don't already know, it follows the rogue National Guards from DIARY (led by Alan Van Sprang as Sarge "Nicotine" Crockett) to Plum Island, where two old men - O'Flynn (the excellent Kenneth Walsh, who was so good in TWIN PEAKS) and Muldoon (Richard Fitzpatrick), both with Irish accents for reasons I don't understand, have been engaged in a decades long feud, which, with society crumbling, has escalated into warfare.

The film is narrated by Crockett, but it's O'Flyyn's story. It actually starts before DIARY, with a flashback depicting why the guardsmen went AWOL, and features a brief clip from DIARY (a first for Romero in this series). We meet O'Flynn when he and his gun toting boys raid a house where a family is suspected of harboring their kids, who have become undead. It's a low budget approximation of the SWAT assault on the projects in DAWN. Romero delivers none of the horror from the earlier film, but the kid zombies are both creepy and funny, and the sequence has a nice reversal for a payoff: before the zombie exterminators can execute their prey, Muldoon shows up with his own gunslingers and forces O'Flynn's team to drop their weapons. You see, Muldoon has this crazy idea of preserving the zombies, even though he's more than willing to kill the dead. This scene points out both SURVIVAL's strength - its thematic richness - and it's weakness: it's never really scary. And this is why I say you have to acknowledge what Romero's done before to appreciate his work here.

The characters are for more interesting than those in any of Romero's previous "Canadian" zombie flicks (which all pale in comparison to his Pittsburgh work) - Crockett has a real blue collar quality him; the action heroine is a lesbian; there's a Hispanic who DOESN'T overact like those in DAY... in other words, characters that reflect Romero's liberal values. There's a young guy on hand, I suppose as a token Romero created to appease a younger horror demographic (an effort as useless as liberal politicians "compromising" their values in the hope of engaging conservatives in bipartisanship for the good of the country). Romero has stated that he should have waited until he had "something" new to write about, but I'm glad he didn't; I personally found the so-called "social commentary" in LAND overstated and ham-fisted. The commentary in SURVIVAL succeeds because it's subtext, and natural to the storyline, ala NIGHT and DAWN.

Not only did I care about the characters, and cared enough about the story to wonder what would happen next, but I loved the visuals. This film has some very nice cinematography, direction, and editing; you can tell it was made by a real filmmaker, even though Romero's moves lack the energy of days gone by. Hey, we all slow down. Some of the shots are truly beautiful, especially those involving the water and the island (I wonder if this was a jab at the "shock" ending in the DAWN remake).

As noted almost everywhere, SURVIVAL is a contemporary western with horror trappings. I liked watching all these people with guns, I liked the horses and corrals, I liked that Romero gave himself the chance to do something different: "Hell, if they won't let me make a western, I'll stick zombies in there and make one anyway!" In shooting a very Hollywood story, Romero gave Hollywood a big old middle finger.

Much ado has been made about the digital effects and blood. Granted, they're not great, and I'd have loved it if everything had been done practically. But I can tell you first hand that this is easier said than done on a low budget these days. Some of the gags would have had much more impact if they'd been done old school, but the ideas behind them remain cool (a bunch of groaning zombie heads impaled on spikes, for example). When some zombies finally did what "fans" want and tore a guy to pieces, I thought, "So what?" We've seen it all before. Why should Romero care about recreating the stuff for which he's already set the golden standard? The answer is, as an artist, he shouldn't. And I laughed out loud at several of the gags, CGI or no.

I really liked a scene in which the guardsmen clear out the zombies from a ferry. Romero was supposed to direct a feature version of THE STAND at one point, and I suspect this was his nod at Stephen King's infamous tunnel sequence. Another bit I liked: O'Flynn's zombie daughter riding in circles around the island on horseback. Cool image, great idea. And I appreciated all the western tropes.

Is the film perfect? Not by a long shot. It's still a low budget film, and it's clear that Romero is more interested in the old men, the horses, and the island than he is in the zombies or in scaring horror fans. As mentioned, the story is slim. But it's a story, goddamn it! I was bored with Romero's trick of having a zombie suddenly lurch around the corner about the fifth time he used it, and he probably did it 20 more times after that. The climax is weak; our heroes have very little to do, and basically stand around watching the real main characters behave stupidly instead of intervening and, you know, playing an active role in the proceedings. And I really wish that Muldoon had been as well fleshed out as O'Flynn; he's as poorly developed as most of Romero's villains in these films, which undercuts the tension and makes the story less interesting. Only in the epilogue do Muldoon and his crazy idea become really interesting, and that's when Romero plays his most interesting card of all: that all of this could be avoided, but won't be. It's a deeply pessimistic notion, much more suited to this series than "Big Daddy" reclaiming the city at the end of LAND.

I suspect most of today's younger horror fans will dislike SURVIVAL exactly because it's about two old men. Guess what? Romero is an old man, and I think this is his most personal film since KNIGHTRIDERS. That alone makes it worthy of appreciation, or at least more thoughtful consideration than it's received from many folks. And the final images - the resolution and coda - are gorgeous. I didn't love this film, and I think it does a disservice to raise people's expectations too much, but I did like it--and I suspect I'll grow to love it in time, as I have DAY. At the end of this day, one film it reminds me of is FIVE DAYS ONE SUMMER, the melancholy, but ultimately minor, final film by Fred Zinnemann, who directed such classics as HIGH NOON, THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA, and JULIA. At age 70, Romero shows no sign of slowing down - hell, he's made three of these films in five years! - but if SURVIVAL should be his last go around at the genre he created, it's a fine piece of work.

I can see why some people don't like it, but to hate it makes no sense to me. I can also see why Chris Alexander, Michael Marano, Scooter McCrae and Mike Watt have praised it, and it would be nice if someone like Stephen King would go to bat for the old master, say, in his Entertainment Weekly column. You know what would be even nicer? If someone would give Romero the budget he deserves to make a movie he cares about. Remember when Spielberg and Lucas helped fund KAGEMUSHA for Akira Kurosawa? Some of us realize that Romero is an important director. SURVIVAL has its defenders - and it really doesn't need them - but why the hell doesn't Romero have his Spieilberg and Lucas? It's a shame, really, that a national treasure has to toil in the world of low budget films. But that's what makes him one of us.

A final note: you can pay $10 to see SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD in a theater, or you can pay $10 to see it On Demand. Hollywood has cast a cold shoulder on Romero for years, and distributors have ripped him off. It's really sad that horror fans are depriving the man of pennies by downloading this film from torrent sites. I know it's pointless to preach integrity of this sort to people who see nothing wrong with accepting stolen property to save a ten-spot, but it really is low to steal from George Romero.