YMMV / Survival of the Dead

• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The Asian guy fishing for zombies. What was his deal?
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Patrick (for getting some creative zombie kills and arguably being A Lighter Shade of Black in the relatively unpopular Feuding Families plot) and his zombified horse-riding daughter Jane are just as popular as the main characters, if not moreso.
• Franchise Original Sin:
  • In a series that made one of its recurring themes that Humans Are the Real Monsters and delivered said message with all of the subtlety of a shotgun blast to a zombie's face, this is the film in which many critics believe the message hit rock bottom: the "protagonists" are a bunch of AWOL soldiers who ditched their posts to become violent looters, and the Wacky Wayside Tribe that is most important to the plot is a pair of Feuding Families that are willing to keep trying to kill each other even when zombies are chewing on them both. While the main characters in past films at least had some redeeming qualities, here Too Bleak, Stopped Caring ensued, and it was one of the factors that made it a Box Office Bomb and a Franchise Killer.
  • From a special effects standpoint, this isn’t the first Living Dead film to be criticized for very obvious CGI, as both Land of the Dead and Diary of the Dead also used CGI. Those films, however, still utilized mostly practical effects and only used CGI sparingly (and Diary used a Found Footage style, helping cover up some of the flaws in the CGI), so it was more forgivable when it did pop up. This film tends to use more CGI than ever before, and given its much lower budget, it’s much more noticeable by comparison.
• Narm Charm: The fact that Crockett looks a great deal like Billy Mays makes the film far more amusing.
• Sequelitis: Whereas the previous two films divided fans, this one was pretty unanimously condemned as being George A. Romero's worst zombie film, and arguably his worst film, ever. Although, there are some who see this film as a step up from Diary of the Dead.
• Signature Scene: For better or worse, the Asian man fishing for zombies. Many people consider it to be one of the only scenes that actually felt like a Romero movie, if not the only.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Few fans have anything good to say about how ultimately insignificant and unfortunate of a role Only Sane Woman Janet gets.

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