Who's In It: Alan Van Sprang, Kenneth Welsh, Richard Fitzpatrick
The Basics: Off the coast of Delaware is this island where a bunch of Irish people live. And they're feuding over zombies. Should they kill the undead? Should they let them live and try to find a cure for zombieism? Why do they all sound like they're from Dublin? How long have the zombies been around? Since the 1960s? Oh, wait, sorry, you mean since only six days ago? Because... uh... how? And do they have a movie theater on that island? Like maybe one where the Dawn of the Dead remake screened? And if they saw it did they wonder why their own hometown zombies were so boring and unscary? And can someone just put a bullet in the head of this series now?
What's The Deal: George Romero likes his zombie movies to be stand-ins for his own editorial positions on stuff like war and consumerism and media and the culture of fear. For example, Diary of the Dead? All about Iraq. And this one is no different. Like, at all. But don't think it's a sad batteries-running-down entry or anything. No sirree. In fact, it's super relevant because it's all about how war is still, in case you had forgotten, really bad. Not healthy for children and other living things. And how Irish people in Delaware should stop trying to kill each other. That's a really important issue in these times we live in, the heartbreaking level of really sleepy, non-energetic gang violence among Irish islanders and their zombie neighbors in Delaware. In fact, every time I woke up from the nap this movie put me in there'd be a really fascinating level of subtextual discourse taking place. It was kind of like attending a really smarty-pants college lecture.
Advances In Gore Technology: You didn't want your gore to involve actual messes did you? Hope not, because we've figured out a way to make sure that no one has to clean up a thing and the audience gets to indulge in a more fantasy-like level of super-violence. We just set up some guy on a computer to animate all the headsplosions and--bam!--we save on our makeup budget. Filmmaking is really meaningful this way.
The Non-Sarcastic Part Of The Review: Sorry, had to get all that griping out of my system. Limp, boring horror movies inspire a level of anger in me that most other failures don't, especially when they're made by people whose work I've loved before. Anyway, there's one cool new idea here: underwater zombies. It doesn't last very long and it's as fakey looking as all the rest of the digital blahblahblah (though not as horrible as the effects in something like Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus), but it made me excited for a minute.
Not Giving Up: As a zombie movie addict, if Romero makes another one I'll see it in spite of my earlier statement about killing this series. Maybe it could be set in a zombie day care center. Or have this movie's underwater zombies fighting off multiple human centipedes. But please, no more slow-moving metaphors.