On Film: George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead

Directed By: George Romero
 

If you don't know George Romero is one of the most influential filmmakers of all time.  He single handedly made the zombie subgenre of horror film what it is today, for better or for worse.  His originally zombie trilogy; Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, and Day of the Dead are the go to films to see where the genre began.  There are other zombie films from the same era that are influential to filmmakers working in the genre such as Lucio Fulci's Zombi but Romero's films are pretty much considered the benchmark.

The Movie

Romero is one of those filmmakers who has always deserved more opportunity than he's ever been given.  How do you make a seminal film like Dawn of the Dead and have to struggle to get funding for follow up films?  This is the case for George who ahs to always seek out venture funding to get his films made and when they hit they always make money, even the less than great ones.  Well a little film called 28 Days Later came along a few years back that brought the world's attention back to Romero's genre of choice.  There was also a fairly successful Dawn of the Dead remake that came out around the same time.  The popularity of these films caused the studios to turn their attention back to the master and he was able to make the moderately successful Land of the Dead.

Romero's new film Diary of the Dead is a return to the old school filmmaking where he is comfortable, basically making a zombie film with an almost nonexistent budget.  He says (he introduced the film when we saw it at a small art house theater last week) that Land of the Dead actually got to big for him and it slipped out of his control a bit.  I can see this because most of Romero's trademark humor wasn't in that film other than the tuba playing zombie at the beginning of the film.  So this film is totally his baby, again for better or worse.

In this film a group of film students are making a horror film for a class project when the zombie outbreak begins.  The leader of the group decides she must get home to her family and the rest of the group decides to go along for the ride.  The director of the horror film becomes obsessed with documenting the zombie outbreak and the effect it has on his friends via his video camera and an additional one that he finds along the way.

There's a ton of melodrama and a tone of self important narration from the director and from his girlfriend.  The story is extremely basic and so full of plot holes I can't even count them.  For example the characters can never seem to get cell service to make calls but they don't seem to have any trouble downloading videos from You Tube.  Also, the girlfriend discusses the fact that she ended up editing the video that we are now seeing (the movie itself) and added music to get us emotionally involved in what happened to these people but the assembly features gaps and blue screen blips that any editor worth his/her salt would have easily deleted.  So there are conflicting messages with the film.  Are we watching raw found footage or a final cut of a film edited by a film school student that seems to know what she's doing?  Here's another thing, the actors are all universally terrible with no exceptions.  There are degrees of terrible with the female actors being the worst but every person that appears on screen is just bad.

Now, with that said, there are some glimmers throughout the film that show just what made Romero a great filmmaker.  The gore, while done modernly, and cheaply, has that classic retro zombie feel and there are tons of bits of that awesome Romero humor, especially relating to an Amish man the group meets during their road trip.  If you're not a Romero fan or a zombie fan then this is definitely a pass but if you love Romero's classic films and you're into the zombie genre Diary of the Dead still might be worth a matinee. 

5/10

Stephen Lackey