Slowly but surely, they keep on coming. George Romero's sixth instalment of his Dead franchise is Survival Of The Dead, which finds a group of US soldiers taking refuge from the zombie hordes on a remote island off the coast of Delaware. But it's a case of out of the dying pan and into the fire as they're caught in the middle of a decades-old feud between two rival Irish clans, the O'Flynns and the Muldoons.

Romero's 1978 consumerism-mocking masterpiece Dawn Of The Dead is one of my favourite films, so Survival Of The Dead was always likely to be a disappointment by comparison. But it's unfair to judge everything a director does by his greatest achievements and I'm happy to report that this film is a vast improvement on its predecessor Diary Of The Dead. Diary's... found-footage, new technology structure and its intensely irritating twentysomething leads made it look like a half-hearted attempt at a franchise reboot – a sort of zombies tomb point nought – and it didn't work. It was probably the only time in his career where Romero seemed uncomfortable with his own material and, as he himself admits, the Cloverfield found-footage juggernaut blew everything else out of its path.

Survival... is modelled on Hollywood westerns and it uses the animosity between the clans as a basis for exploring the relationship between the living and the dead. The Muldoons believe that zombiedom is an illness and the sufferers should be kept in quarantine until a cure can be found; the O'Flynns prefer to splatter the countryside with shotgun-blasted skulls and brains. Obviously, the latter option is infinitely more entertaining, so it's a cinematic blessing that there proves to be no cure and the desired mayhem ensues. No self-respecting zombie film would be complete without an allegorical element and this time there are specific nods to the Iraq War, plus more general observations about the universality of human conflict.

Survival... still falls far short of Romero's best work and the Oirish blarney occasionally invokes negative thoughts about Gorykissangel or Father Ted Of The Dead. But his trademark dark humour and intuitive understanding of the genre's core premise that the dead are us – and all the personal demons that unlocks – adds up to a well-crafted 86 minutes.

Survival Of The Dead (Optimum) is out now on DVD and Blu-ray. For an interview with George Romero, click here.

Colin Houlson