Diary of the Dead (R) ** | Not horrible, and that's not good
Posted on Fri, Feb. 15, 2008
BY RENE RODRIGUEZ
In Diary of the Dead, George A. Romero reboots his long-running zombie saga for the YouTube generation. Romero pretends the previous four Dead films never happened, taking us to the exact moment the dead starting rising from their graves to eat the living, only this time Internet surfers are posting all the mayhem online.
After a prologue in which a TV news crew gets a little too close to a breaking story about corpses sitting up to chomp on people, the rest of Diary of the Dead consists of a documentary, The Death of Death, made by a student director, Jesse (Josh Close), his crew and one of their professors as they flee a Pennsylvania college campus in a Winnebago and head home to their families.
The kind of obsessive filmmaker who can't put his camera down even when his friends are being eaten by decomposing cannibals (he's a mirror twin of Cloverfield's documentarian), Jesse is making his movie to let people know what is ''really happening.'' Like all of Romero's earlier zombie pictures, Diary of the Dead has an extremely paranoid and skeptical view of authority and civilized society, arguing that in the face of an unthinkable apocalypse, the systems we have in place to help us -- police, the military, the news media, broadcasting -- would instead become weapons used to deceive and control us.
Even if that theme, like much of Diary of the Dead, feels a little familiar, Romero still does this end-of-days stuff better than any of his imitators, who are legion. The same goes for the series of gory adventures the characters experience on the road: A visit to an eerily deserted hospital, a stay at the home of a deaf-mute Amish farmer and a long sequence at the mansion of one of Jesse's fellow students all deliver effective scares, ghoulish humor and even a couple of entirely new ways to kill a zombie. Ever wonder what would happen if you zapped someone with defibrillator paddles on either side of the head? You'll find out here.
Shot on a low budget with mostly unknown actors, Diary of the Dead isn't exactly involving on a dramatic level: You really never care who lives or dies, a fatal flaw for any horror film. And despite Romero's attempt to invest the movie with substantial subtexts, his takes on Internet culture, the fragile nature of civilized society and the base nature of man are as subtle and nuanced as a hammer to the head.
Diary of the Dead is at its best when Romero is just goofing off, like when he shows us home video footage of a children's birthday party in which no one realizes there's something not quite right about the clown entertaining the kids -- until his nose falls off and he decides it's time for a snack.
Cast: Michelle Morgan, Josh Close, Shawn Roberts, Amy Lalonde, Joe Dinicol, Scott Wentworth
Writer-director: George A. Romero
Producers: Peter Grunwald, Artur Spigel, Sam Englebardt
A Weinstein Co. release. Running time: 95 minutes. Vulgar language, extreme violence, heavy gore, adult themes. Playing at area theaters.
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