Survival of the Dead

[abhorrent scowl]

I didn't have high hopes for this based on what I heard... and it turns out with good reason. Sure, there are going to be problems with this sort of movie. Over-acting, awkward diagloue, weak plots, and so on. Let's face it, none of the actors in his early movies were going to get an Oscar. But they were still good.
This one... sadly, no.

I can let the plot slide, despite it's idiocy. How dumb is it?
"Hey boss, there's zombies all over the place. What should we do?"
"I know, let's teach them to eat stuff other than people!"
"Huh?"
"Yeah! Like horses! Let's train them to eat horses!"

Like I said... it's a zombie movie. I'm not looking for an Inception level of plot. But there are a couple of things I can't forgive.
1) Using CG instead of practical effects. It just doesn't look right. Even as crude as the effects were in the original Dawn, they were better than this. When the first thing you think is "Wow, that's some bad CG", your movie has problems.
George admits this is largely due to the fact that practical effects are more time consuming (in other words, they cost more), but vainly tries to defend CG's use by saying it allows him to do things that couldn't otherwise be done, citiing the fire extinguisher scene in Survival as an example. As much as I love the guy, he's wrong here. Folks like Savini and Nicotero had to be creative as hell to pull off their effects, and I for one appreciated the effort.

2) Not. Enough. Zombies.
To me, this is a cardinal sin in a zombie movie. My favorite parts of these movies are when the humans are hiding in a house (or mall or army base) with waves of zombies coming in on all sides. Remember how cool it was in Day when that elevator platform came down loaded with a shitload of zombies?
Well, not here. Aside from the end, there is never any significant number of zombies on screen. And even then, they are just kind of dispersed and wandering around. If the zombies aren't making a beeline for your ass... they just aren't scary.

Overall, it's better than Diary of the Dead... but not by much.

[BUYMECAR]

i thought it was just plain stupid. it started out promising and i forgave the bad CG, but when they crossed paths with the old irish fella, it just all went downhill.

the zombie attack scenes were lame, the conflict between characters were meaningless and the shootouts were as logically defunct as the random million dollars worth leaving behind.

[Morbid Angel]

It's streaming on Netflix next month, so I'll wait until then to watch it.

BTW, I actually liked Diary.

[omg_bbv]

Aw... I was hoping it'd be a good one... I'm watching it tonight or tomorrow...

[Veruka_Salt]

For me this was the worst of the whole series, which have been progressively embarrassing. The whole Irish Spring / Lucky Charms accent was seriously grating and as the OP said, the CG was shockingly cheap-looking. Romero really needs to stop and rethink the franchise or let it go. "Diary" was flawed (stupid hand-held camera crap years after it was already passe, and that friggin' annoying chick with the ponderously portentious voice-over) but it was overall watchable. We couldn't get past 30 min with this one.