With everyone packing cameras built into their cell phones, dozens of news networks airing 24 hours a day, and widespread Internet access, information can travel faster than ever before. It's that sort of thing that can change the world, as evidenced by how quickly news of the recent political protests and revolutions in the Middle East spread and sparked other countries in the region to do the same thing. And that information can be spun in a million different directions. Whoever's telling the story can pass it along however they feel, embellishing and omitting things as they please.
This proved to be a prime target for George A. Romero, the horror maestro whose zombie movies have almost always been flavored with a touch of social commentary. The prevalence of social media and news spin led Romero to combine it with the "found footage" genre for his 2008 movie Diary of the Dead. Taking things in a different direction than Romero's four prior zombie movies, Diary of the Dead is one of his more blatant attempts at a social commentary to the point that it's almost overbearing. But we'll get into that later.
Rather than continue the ever-worsening zombie apocalypse depicted previously, the movie takes us all the way back to the beginning. We're quickly introduced to a group of University of Pittsburgh film students creating a low-budget horror movie — boasting the rather apropos title The Death of Death — out in the Pennsylvania woods. During a lull between takes, the group overhears a radio newscast about widespread rioting and mass murder. These stories soon begin to include reports of cannibalism committed by reanimated corpses.
Project director Jason Creed (Josh Close) has the bright idea to turn The Death of Death into a documentary chronicling the zombie outbreak. He and the crew pile into an RV and hit the road, heading for the house owned by Jason's girlfriend Debra (Michelle Morgan). As they journey across the state, Jason continues to chronicle every tiny detail while life as they knew it crumbles to ruins around them.
Every time I've sat down to watch one of Romero's zombie movies, I've come away having enjoyed it. But while I didn't outright hate Diary of the Dead, it disappointed me. Comparing it to the other chapters in Romero's zombie saga, I felt it represented a rather steep decline in terms of quality. Granted, it's gotten some rather positive reviews online. (The ones I've read were positive, anyway.) But I didn't really get it. Diary of the Dead just didn't do anything for me at all.
I would imagine that utilizing the "found footage" style after spending forty years as a traditional filmmaker would be a rough transition, but Romero's direction isn't that bad. It's not without its flaws, though. The whole mockumentary thing seems like a cheat at times, since the characters start splicing in footage from security cameras and news reports as the movie goes on. That's forgivable, though, since the whole concept of the movie is that the characters were making a documentary. But it becomes a little distracting on occasion.
I can get past that, but the other problems were a little harder for me to overlook. There are very few moments of tension or suspense, and not many scares either. It's like Romero got so wrapped up in his social satire that he forgot horror movies were supposed to be scary. And let's not forget the CGI gore. Yeah, CGI gore in a movie directed by George Romero. That was tolerable in Land of the Dead, but for a movie supposedly shot with handheld cameras, the gore looks tremendously fake. It usually looks fake anyway, but it's faker than usual here. Could they not have gotten credible practical effects for the movie?
But at least Romero's direction is better than his screenplay. The lame dialogue is bad enough, but his social satire is even worse. I thought his satire of class warfare in Land of the Dead was bad, but wow. The whole "new media is evil" commentary Romero goes for is really bad. It's incredibly pretentious, and done rather poorly to boot. All it does is make the characters stupid and annoying, And oh boy, are those characters stupid and annoying. I spent the whole movie wanting to jump into the movie and feed them to the zombies.
And the acting isn't that great either. Due in large part to how badly the characters are written, none of the cast are very endearing. The vast majority of them are actually rather forgettable. The only one who stood out in my mind was Michelle Morgan, whose bitchiness and stiff line delivery put her a bit on the insufferable side of things. I also didn't particularly care for Josh Close, but that was mostly due to just how awful Romero has written his character.
I wanted to like Diary of the Dead. But while I appreciate Romero taking a rather novel approach to his bread and butter, I simply couldn't bring myself to like the movie. It simply wore out its welcome way too quickly. That's really a shame too, because Diary of the Dead could have been awesome. It could have been one of the coolest movies in Romero's filmography. Sadly, it's not. It's just one big 95-minute disappointment. Maybe if somebody ever remakes Diary of the Dead like they have some of Romero's other movies, they'll do a better job with it.
Final Rating: **
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