Diary of the Dead

There was a time in my life when I included George A. Romero on my list of heroes. I was 12 years old and had just been introduced to zombie movies. In that world, Romero is God. In 1968 he directed Night of the Living Dead, which is the zombie movie all other zombie movies wish to be. Since then he has directed a bevy of zombie movies included in what could be called a "dead" franchise- Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, Land of the Dead and now Diary of the Dead. His movies have been known to be analogies like Dawn of the Dead is set in a mall because humans believe that everything we need to survive exists in a mall and of course, Romero deconstructs that ideal. Does the analogy in Diary of the Dead work? Is it an entertaining movie?

The first thing we see is a sly news report with a woman reporter talking about a man who killed his family and himself. In the background the bodies are brought out on stretchers, but suddenly without warning, the bodies reanimate and bite everyone around. We get a voice over of a young woman who says the news didn't show that: the cameraman uploaded it to youtube himself. It is the only way to get the truth out there. This is after all, a movie about the truth. This faceless woman tells us more information than is needed about how the movie she made and is showing us is brutal and unflinching in its search for the truth. Any edits made and all the music she added were only there to enhance what really happened. So what did really happen? A group of young college students are out in the woods making a horror movie. A mummy movie to be exact. I am not going to list names or actors here because it doesn't matter one bit. The director normally does documentaries but he wanted to make a horror movie. It turns out all of the kids are directors and this is for college credit. 95% of the footage for the rest of the movie will have been shot through his camera. Taking a break from shooting they catch news footage of an outbreak of something. They panic and drive back to college to pick up a girl. Once they are all strapped in, it is just them against the zombies. Along the way they run into a deaf Amish man with wicked scythe skills; a black ops Military group that is all black people and one random white guy; and many many zombies.

Like The Blair Witch Project or Cloverfield, Diary of the Dead is all shot first person, handheld style. However, unlike those two movies, the handheld movement of the camera is not very shaky at all. The people holding the cameras are film students after all; they know how to work a camera. The work is actually pretty engrossing as our view switches from the handheld, to a cell phone video, to surveillance and of course news footage. The main POV camera operator becomes obsessed with documenting the truth. Romero is adamant about this guy documenting life, not living life. He is detached, cool under pressure, unfeeling and obnoxious prying. The script fails him and his friends as he has to ask benign questions because Romero doesn't trust us to follow him. Everything has to be spelled out at every juncture. There are interesting things said and interesting things filmed, but at times, the entire project can be grating. With Dawn of the Dead, Romero was being more subtle about his disdain for malls; for that faux security the malls provide. We were zombies to the mall. With Diary of the Dead, subtly has gone away and replaced with a stark bluntness. Romero hates where the world is going. He is deconstructing our reliance on technology, but at the same time showing its uses. He is operating on a slippery slope.

As the friends start to get picked off by the zombies, the POV character gets colder, choosing documentation over life. He rationalizes it by saying the world has to see the truth. His movie is needed by the world. He even takes time to edit it and upload it onto Myspace and gets some 40,000 hits in 10 minutes. It sets itself up to jokes, but this stuff does happen. Videos are taken of tragedies every day and nothing is done about it. People do not help, they document. Romero is commenting on the absurdity of it, but defends it when a character says that when people see the zombies can be killed by shooting them in the head that can travel the world in seconds. It can save lives. What is more important- saving the lives of your friends, or documenting their downfall to maybe save thousands?

However, this is a zombie movie. It philosophizes, uses camera trickery and everything else, but at its core it is a movie about dead people who come back to life to bite human flesh. As a zombie movie it offers little int he way of gore, well little in comparison to most zombie movies. What gore there is is nice. It is gooey, oozes out and is satisfying, but Romero is economic with it. He doesn't want the gore to interfere with the story he is telling. The acting ranges from pretty good to flat out awful and you could spend hours pointing out flaws, but I respect an old dog learning and trying new tricks. Romero made his name in zombie movies and he remembers that, yet, he wants more and Diary of the Dead is a nice combination of the two. It isn't perfect to be sure, but it is a nice experiment.

Final Grade: C+