DIARY OF THE DEAD

Available at Amazon for £13.98 in awesome steelbook packaging! In a world where we have the 28 Days/Weeks Later series and directors like Zack Snyder and Edgar Wright making the best movies in the genre we have seen in years, you really have to wonder whether George A. Romero - the famed creator of zombies really has a voice with the undead anymore. A shocking statement, though it's not particularly a new ponderance. Depending on your view, Romero ran out ideas in this genre after his magnificent 1978 horror Dawn of the Dead and has just been re-tooling and slightly variating his excellent original premise from Night of the Living Dead for three decades now. Certainly if you saw his last film, the tame Land of the Dead, you would be hard pressed to say this was the same innovator to whom modern day horror owes so much. I've made it well known on this site that I didn't enjoy Land of the Dead. With that flickI thought Romero played it a little safe by only half-heartingly trying to evolve zombies, always being bogged down once again by his restrictive "rules of the genre" which he should have thrown out the window years ago if he wanted to continue making movies with these creatures as villains. In that film, he had zombies learning how to use weapons and beginning to communicate with each other but to what end? By the final act, they were still as dumb as ever, they hadn't evolved at all, it was more of a case that Romero had ran out of ideas of what to do with them than any serious evolution in his over blown series. Thankfully to me, his latest effort Diary of the Dead - the fifth movie in this series and his first fully Independent zombie film in two decades actually leaps out of the restrictive continuity he created. This one goes back to where it all began, when the dead started to walk the Earth for the first time but something is different here. Set very much in the modern day America, Diary of the Dead is the second movie to use the "real world, handheld camera" gimmick of recent months... i.e. what you see on screen is everything that has been shot amateurishly by the characters within the film. Sadly and again I will praise Romero to the hilt for trying something different but one of the biggest crimes perpetrated by him here is that he really didn't have much of a clue how to use this gimmick. Unlike Drew Godard who was smart enough with Cloverfield to cleverly weave in backstory, showcase the passage of time and reasonably (albeit a tad stretchingly) account for why everything was shot, Diary of the Dead never once feels creative and rather the gimmick gets in the way of the story. What we are suppose to believe is that Debra (Michelle Morgan) has edited together footage shot by her boyfriend Jason (Joshua Close) guerrilla style during the zombie outbreak, and pieced it together with an "eerie background score" to make it "creepier", so conveniently we are left with a film that uses multiple camera angles and a traditional movie score. The much smarter and more faithful to it's audiences attention span and it's own concept Cloverfield... had none of this and is the far superior. At it's core, Diary of the Dead isn't much different than the basic zombie premise. A bunch of self important fresh faced college students battle off zombies until they are killed off one by one. That is essentially, it. There's the cliched truck that runs over zombies, the same character traits, the same "shoot them in the head", the same "get out of dodge". It's not quite that original and exciting premise that works in your head when you hear The Blair Witch Project meets Night of the Living Dead, the original tagline that got this film made. Diary of the Dead would have worked so much better if it was actually a rip-off of The Blair Witch Project and took place all in one night in a creepy woods. Instead Romero stretches the film out to a non sensational conclusion which leaves non of us satisfied and open for a completely unnecessary sequel. And it's not particularly a subtle film either. Romero's message this time is the dangers of media intrusion on our lives. It's hard to believe how far down Romero has fallen on the ladder to have a scene where one guy is holding a camera staring at another character shooting a camera on them and frequent mentions to "they're us" as the media reports the impending doom of the world to zombies. The acting is below par, the whole movie feels like a director trying to be Romero rather than Romero being Romero. Less misguided than Land of the Dead but Cloverfield is better in everyway to this movie and actually succeeds in being a media satire far more than this effort. Does Romero still have a place with zombies? Maybe... but I'm not sure the classic zombie can scare us the way the new breed of movies can in this day and age, we are just too familiar with the conventions of it all now.

rating: 2

EXTRAS Really good DVD this one, packed with a brilliant second disc. A nice commentary track with Romero, the editor Michael Doherty and director of photography Adam Swica which tells us what the film clearly lets us in on anyway. It's a media satire movie... yeah really! Decent enough interviews with the cast and crew, a highlight from Romero speaking at various festivals around the world. A detailed look at the special effects making of the film, a "play by play" making of from the p.o.v. and an awesome 90 minute long documentary look at Romero and his work. AWESOME! There's tons more extra's too, this is one of the best DVD sets I've seen in a long time. Good job for a movie that had barely a budget and no stars... and a beautiful steelbook packaging. I'm not sure what could be on this DVD that isn't already present, it's perfecto!

rating: 5

OVERALL If you a huge Romero nut, then there's no question you should pick this one up as it's a pretty fascinating look at a veteran director going back to his Indie roots but failing to scare us the way he did in the 70's. It's not a great movie but certainly worth a watch and is in fact better than the average Hollywood glossy horror film. Worth buying for that awesome documentary alone, don't miss this one.