Posted: 02/15/2008

George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead

(2008)

by Matt Wedge

The father of the modern zombie film is back and proves he’s still got plenty to say about the inevitable fall of the human race.

This fifth entry in Romero’s Dead saga is an attempt by the writer-director to return to the indie-roots of his iconic Night of the Living Dead. Using the found footage technique that was only partially successful with Cloverfield, the film scores in its creation of an intensely personal look at the end of civilization. While this approach is definitely cost-effective and gets the most film for the money, it also means that the often times giddy, over-the top zombie slaughter spectacles that populated Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead and Land of the Dead are missing. In fact, with the more intimate setting, threadbare production values, low body count and shaky acting by a cast of unknowns, it feels more like a direct sequel to Night than the other films in the series.

This time around, a group of film students are busy shooting a horror film when the news breaks that the dead have returned to life and are attacking and eating the living. Jason (Joshua Close), the director, grabs his camera and takes off in a Winnebago, dragging his crew along for the ride. While Jason is eager to document the chaos that is unfolding around him, the crew is only interested in making it to their respective homes to make sure their families aren’t dead… or worse.

The first act is the weakest part of the film. While the early scenes of the crew working on their film contain some funny moments—including a dig at the Dawn of the Dead remake when Jason admonishes an actor playing a mummy for running, since, of course, dead people can’t run, they shamble—the way each character is drawn and played immediately grates on the nerves. Jason is the self-important director, his girlfriend Deb (Michelle Morgan) is the tough chick, Tony (Shawn Roberts) is the tough-talking guy from New York and Professor Maxwell (Scott Wentworth) is the drunken teacher prone to overly erudite rants. The rest of the crew falls neatly into other clichéd categories worthy of a John Hughes flick: the geek, the horny guy, the Texas debutante and the guilt-tortured Catholic girl.

But once the zombie outbreak kicks in, most of the obnoxious behavior is left behind as each character reacts in a truly believable way to the inevitable downward spiral. While some of the characters find their humanity, others fall in line behind Jason, grabbing cameras and filming the carnage, as all hell breaks loose around them. Once the crew hit an abandoned hospital seeking treatment for an injured friend, the film only gets better, eventually achieving a cynical fatalism that recalls the best of Romero’s work.

As with any of the Dead films, it’s impossible to separate the film from the political and social satire that Romero injects. This time around, he tackles the saturation media in which our culture exists, suggesting that it’s become impossible to separate the signal from the noise. While the film does decry the dissolution of the mainstream media into nothing more than a mouthpiece for the government, it takes just as hard of a line with the often unreliable and sensationalistic rhetoric of the blogosphere and web sites like YouTube and MySpace. This idea is portrayed in an extremely blunt fashion with the increasingly erratic and occasionally immoral behavior of Jason. As he uploads his footage to great demand on the web, he becomes more and more obsessed with gathering shocking footage, no matter how great the danger to himself or his crew.

Lest this all sound slightly heavy and plodding for a zombie movie, Romero never forgets to entertain. He mines the material for some unexpected bursts of absurdist humor—the deaf Amish man the crew comes across who’s pretty handy with a scythe is a real high point—and gives the gorehounds plenty of gruesome images to sate their bloodlust.

Still, it’s not a perfect film. The acting is very uneven, ranging from serviceable at best to embarrassing at worst. The sociopolitical commentary is about as subtle as a bullet to a zombie head, but that’s always been Romero’s style; the man never met a piece of too on-the-nose dialogue that he didn’t love. But the biggest problem with the film is the decision to actually make it look like a student project. With too many flashy transitions, slow-motion flashbacks, over-reliance on stock footage of riots and a melodramatic voiceover by one of the crewmembers, it accurately captures the tone of a film school final. In fact, it’s too accurate. While this straight-faced spoof of amateur self-indulgence is funny for about twenty minutes, it quickly turns the corner into an annoying stylistic choice that should have been abandoned.

While the flaws are too obvious to completely ignore, the fact remains that the film still contains a truly visceral power, not only in the scenes of horror but with the convincing argument that more information isn’t necessarily a good thing, especially when you don’t know where it’s coming from.

With that sense of impending doom that Romero seems to effortlessly call forth for all of his films and a stunner of a final shot, it’s obvious that even flawed Romero is better than the mindless junk that passes for horror these days. It’s only receiving a limited release, so it may be hard to find, but seek it out. It’s a worthwhile extension of one of the greatest horror series ever put to film.

Matt Wedge is a writer and film critic in Chicago.

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