Diary of the Dead Review

"Everyone who dies, unless they get a bullet in the head, is gonna come back and try to kill someone else. "

Now that's going keep you up worrying about bumps in the night, huh? 

George(Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead) Romero's latest excursion into the world of Zombies is a return to very low budget film-making.  He borrows from the (not original) Blair Witch Project concept and creates one of the best message horror films in a long long time.   

He sets up the movie like a documentary made by a group of college aged young adults. We get interesting voice over comments from a couple of the characters throughout the film like:

 "It's funny. You spend so much time resenting your parents, separating yourself, building your own life. But as soon as the shit hits the fan, the only place you want to go is home. "

For those of you counting, Diary of the Dead is Romero's 5th (Zombie) Dead film following Land of the Dead from a couple of years ago.   Instead of moving the scenario further than he had gone in LAND (which probably would have had to be called Planet of the Dead),  Romero instead ignores his previous films and creates a new scenario to play with, effectively updating and re-starting  the now 40 year old NIGHT of the LIVING DEAD.

We are watching a low budget student made documentary that began by accident.  A small group of college students were making a low budget horror film and suddenly found themselve filming an attack by zombies. Suddenly in the middle of a real life horror film the students stick clost together, and work with a drunken college professor to try and figure out what is going on, survive the horrific ordeal and document what is happening.

There's very little head ache inducing shaky -cam like Blair Witch or the recent Cloverfield  (thank goodness) and we learn the story and watch the action only through what the young adults are filming with the addition of some voice over.    Since we know, better than the characters that Zombies could be anywhere and past any corner they turn, the suspense is pretty intense.

There's a gross out campiness to all of it--partially because there's been quite a few gory zombie movies and so we think we know what is going to happen most of the time.  Romero has fun surprising us and finding moments to turn a laugh into a very disturbing moments.

"One of my men had a bad heart. He died. Thing is we don't know where he went. "

Since Romero didn't take big studio money to make the film he didn't have to deal with big studio interference (like he did on Land of the Dead) and the results allow Romero to give us the movie--even with some heavy handed message moments-- he wants to give us.

There is too much time spent explaining several times why everything is being filmed and several of the jokes become repetitious.  The audience can go along with the concept without several reminders.  We can also be shown in a couple of minutes that we are watching a low budget finished documentary that has been 'produced' and isn't just raw footage, rather then needing a couple of lengthy dialogue scenes about it.   There's also a few voice over speeches that try too hard...

"It's interesting how quickly we find out what we're capable of becoming. Up until that night, we had lived predictable lives. Now... we would never be able to predict what might happen next. God had changed the rules on us. And surprisingly, we were playing along. "

There's also a bit of slow down as we near the finale' of the film.  Romero may not give us the wild splatter gory finale that he usually does in his other film.  Fear not.. there is still going to be an extremely memorable final shot pay-off.

"The media were lying to us, or the government was lying to them. They were trying to make it seem like everything was gonna be all right. "

As we get into Halloween season... rather than watching a movie you've seen too many times before... get yourself a copy of Diary of the Dead.