Reviews

Diary Of The Dead — Snark Review

Normally when you go to a George A. Romero zombie movie, you kind of expect it to be over-the-top both in the gore and the acting departments. Yet, here in his fifth outing with the living dead, he dials it down. Way down. Although that may sound like a disappointment, it’s nice to see him treading new and extremely different ground with his familiar creations.

Having pushed the living dead taking over the world in each previous zombie film — Night, Dawn, Day and Land — as about as far as it could go, Romero returns back to his roots. Once again we’re in the countryside surrounding Pittsburgh and the dead are only just beginning to return to “life.” The opening sequence recalls the beginning SWAT team invasion of a housing project in Dawn of the Dead. While the ’70s film was a thrilling, action-jammed sequence of bullets and chomping teeth flying everywhere, the new flick only features two corpses walking around feasting on flesh, and while guns are fired, the main weapon of choice is a TV news camera on which the action is captured.

The conceit here is that we are told via narration that everything we are going to see is the product of student filmmakers. That TV news footage has been allegedly downloaded off the Internet and incorporated into the students’ film. Most of the plot has us hanging out with these kids. Jason (Joshua Close), the main “director,” is shooting a mummy movie in the woods with his fellow students when they learn about the growing crisis via a radio news report. So, they hop in their trailer and head back to campus to find Jason’s girlfriend, Deb (Michelle Morgan). Once they pick her up, they drive all over Pennsylvania to find their families.

Jason, we learn, actually wants to be a documentary filmmaker, so he keeps his camera running for the entire trip. Mostly, the conceit works. Jason comes across as a putz who would rather hold his camera than save his girlfriend from being eaten alive.

As the kids and one of their professors try to stay alive to reach their destinations, we’re also continuously presented with the “official” version of the dead rising via different newscasts and more downloaded Internet video. Some of this is faked by Romero and some of it is actual news stories mixed in. While the handheld camera conceit can offer easy comparisons to that other “handicam flick” Cloverfield, there’s also similarities to the recent Rambo. For that film, director Sylvester Stallone set up the backstory by using actual footage of Burmese soldiers slaughtering Karen freedom fighters. Romero, to show mass panic, confusion and devastation, clearly uses footage of the Hurricane Katrina debacle.

Through dialogue and narration, Romero keeps hammering home the point that we the people need to break though the “official” bullshit and record “the truth.” However, as the film goes on and the kids keep recording their experiences, what’s left unsaid is even more insidious: these kids are not the solution. They’re almost a worse problem.

While Jason is continually harangued by Deb and the other students for filming so much, all of them are pretty much solipsistic little twerps concerned with only their own well being. When they learn that others are in trouble, they never think to go pitch in and help out, particularly in one scene in which they hear anguished cries over a radio and they don’t even try to lend assistance. They continue on their merry way to save their own lives. The footage that Jason and the others shoot is never really going to tell “the truth.” It’s all just more noise to add to the cacophony of images. These little bastards needed a Capt. Rhodes from Day of the Dead to kick their asses into shape.

While most of the film is concerned with its message about the media, there is still some good zombie gore in the film and Romero has come up with extremely creative ways to off the living and the dead. However, most of the gross stuff is done with CGI these days. While that can free Romero up to film previously unimaginable grotesqueries, it has the effect of sanitizing the gore to a degree, so that bullets tearing through flesh, brains melting, heads splitting open heads, etc. just doesn’t have the charm of Tom Savini practical effects.

Thus, Diary of the Dead is never really that scary. This is less of an outright horror movie and more of a thematic meditation and a drama. But because of that, it’s a fresh addition to Romero’s zombie oeuvre and, in many ways, more thrilling than the over-the-top path the living series was degenerating into.

© 2008 Cinema Snark.