1968's Night of the Living Dead reflected the anti-establishment disillusionment with Vietnam, race relations, and slain political leaders. A film where things start out bad and grow terrifyingly worse, Night’s bleak nihilism was a stark contrast to the 1950’s genre pics where the noble scientist inevitably saved the day in the end.
A decade later, Dawn of the Dead saw Romero skewering the consumer culture while expanding the sequel into a true horror epic. 1985 brought us, Day of the Dead, Romero's bleak criticism of Reaganomics, the renewed threat of nuclear winter, and the country's military industrial complex. 2005 saw the post-9/11 Land of the Dead tackling the issues of class division, terrorism, the Iraq war's "shock and awe" campaign and immigration head-on, with Romero's largest budget yet.
Now we have Diary of the Dead, Romero's self-professed return to his roots of independent, low budget film-making. The premise is simple but intriguing: what if the beginning of the zombie outbreak was documented on tape by film students as it happened? When Romero announced his idea behind Diary, many fans balked, fearing it would simply be The Blair Witch Project with zombies. To call it such would be a disservice to both. However, the film's concept is not as unique as Romero might have hoped. Diary's release comes in a year that has brought us several "narrative posing as documentary" films such as Brain De Palma's Redacted, J.J. Abrams Cloverfield, and Adam Rifkin's Look, a film shot completely with surveillance cameras.
Diary opens with a voice-over by Debra (Michelle Morgan) telling us that what we're about to see is a documentary (called The Death of Death) of recent events shot by her boyfriend, Jason Creed (Joshua Close). Debra has uploaded it onto the Internet because "the public needs to know the truth about what's really going on." We're then shown uncensored footage of a news team covering the aftermath of a family murder-suicide. (Once again, Romero has his finger on the pulse of society. The story could have been ripped from any number of recent headlines.) As a reporter covers the paramedics loading the corpses into the wagon, they revive and chomp down on the rescuers and said reporter - live on camera. Police open fire but by the time they get the situation under control, the carnage is heavy.
The scene shifts to a forest at night where a University of Pittsburgh film student named Jason and his crew are shooting a short film about, what else, the undead. (a poorly costumed Egyptian mummy in this case) As isolated reports of the dead returning to life start to trickle in, the students (and one instructor) decide to pile into their Winnebago and hightail it back to campus and then their families.
The remainder of Diary tells the story of how the students cope with the collapse of society, flesh eating zombies, and their attempts to get home, all chronicled through Jason's ubiquitous video camera, under the guise of him wanting to document the truth.
For me, Diary of the Dead is an uneven film at best. On one hand, nobody does horror as social commentary like George Romero. This time the big target is You Tube/Face Book and media perception in the age of the Internet.
And there are times in this film where he hits the bulls-eye. For example, throughout the film Jason seems more concerned with getting footage than survival. When he brags about how many hits his Facebook page with uploaded footage is getting, it's hard to believe he's doing it to help others as much as his own ego. "If it didn't happen on camera, it never really happened, right, Jason?" Debra admonishes him.
Another highlight is when the students stumble upon a large stronghold occupied by heavily armed African-Americans. When Debra asks them how they managed to acquire so many weapons and supplies, the leader tells them that everybody with a suntan has fled. He then cradles his gun and grimly states, "All I know is that, after all this time we finally have the power." This continues Romero’s oft used theme of minorities being more in control and better equipped in times of crisis. In that moment, the old Romero is back.
Unfortunately, moments like that are few and far between, and therein lies the first problem with the film: Diary often sacrifices story logic for heavy-handed social commentary. Jason is so enamored with his project that he even keeps filming even when his colleagues' lives are in danger. The first time is understandable and drives home the film's theme. But when it keeps happening to the point of absurdity, you wonder why his friends don't just feed him to the zombies. One of the brilliant things about Romero's previous Dead films was the way he surreptitiously slipped in political/social observations that often weren't apparent until subsequent viewings. They never seemed obvious because they flowed naturally from the narrative or characters. In Diary Romero's so intent on telling us what he feels, that he often has his characters spout dialogue that's so over-the-top and on the nose, that it pulls you out of the picture. "I wonder if we're worth saving?" one character opines. "It used to be us against us; now it's us against them," says another. "They are us," is the reply.
Diary also suffers from a lack of scares. Part of this is because you never really feel the zombies are that much of a threat. The reason they were so terrifying in his other films was that while they were individually slow and weak, in numbers they were unstoppable. Here, with the exception of one scene in a barn, we never see that happen, so you never feel the characters are ever in any danger. There is an intriguing scene where a main character discovers the gruesome fate of her family. But by then it's too little, too late. And it's something we've seen before.
Which brings me to my second major problem with Diary: this has all been done before and much better -- by none other than Romero himself. While it's not uncommon for him to repeat or recycle themes and plot points throughout his films, here I felt that Romero was just going through the motions. Even the 2004 remake of Dawn, which can never hope to hold a candle to Romero’s original, showed us a horrific scenario of media incompetence coupled with society’s breakdown better in its first fifteen minutes than Romero does here in his ninety-five.
Although it claims to document the breakdown of society/rise of the undead, we see/hear very little to let us know exactly how that's occurring. For a film with media perception as a major theme, this is a disappointment; especially after the brilliant uses of the media in both Night and Dawn. Who can forget the terrifying radio broadcasts in Night where the flustered commentators reported sudden outbreaks of hysteria and mass murder covering the entire Eastern seaboard and urged everyone to stay in their homes and bolt the doors? Then there was the chilling opening of Dawn in the TV station where a ranting government official tries to convince a reporter of the reality of the situation (“These are not ghosts, these are not your friends and loved ones. These are reanimated corpses! What will it take for you people to listen?”)
There's nothing even remotely that intense in Diary. All we get are a few radio sound bites (voiced by no less than Wes Craven, Quentin Tarantino, and Guillermo Del Toro) but they're so quick and insubstantial that they have no real impact. At one point Romero even throws in an old audio clip from Night when the panicked reporter reads what's causing the crisis and can hardly believe the words he's saying. But all that did was make the other sound bites more meaningless. Romero gives us stock footage from Katrina and other disasters, but like the sound bites, the narrative is so disjointed they're impact is nil. I realize that Romero was working with a very limited budget ($4 million as opposed to Land's 17), but his past films have proven that's no obstacle to his creativity. With 2008 being the age of the camera phone, you'd think that Romero would at least show us other survivors' horrifying home movies or more news clips on the Internet. But other than a brief report from Japan and the opening newscast, we get nothing. The result is a wasted opportunity to scare us and exploit the film's main theme.
Whereas well-drawn characters have always been a staple of Romero's movies, here he drops the ball. The characters in Diary are your generic twenty-something stereotypes who could have been plucked from a myriad of other horror flicks This in itself isn't necessarily a bad thing; the same claim could be made for Cloverfield. The difference being that Cloverfield forced you to care for its characters by maintaining a constant level of jeopardy. Diary doesn’t. That’s unfortunate, because the plot of undead loved ones coming back to devour you has the potential to be much more terrifying on so many levels. There were many times during the film that I felt that the characters failed to realize the gravity of their situation. The one student who does stand out from the others due to their reaction to the crisis is dispatched early on.
Where Diary does exceed expectations is in its makeup effects.
After forty years of dispatching the undead, you'd think that Romero would have run out of techniques. But Diary contains some of the most innovative zombie "kills" ever captured on celluloid. KNB maestro Greg Nicotero returns to provide prosthetics that are seamlessly integrated with digital sleight of hand. Diary's gore is moderately restrained in comparison with Romero's previous zombie films. This lends it a much needed air of realism.
Reading this review you might surmise that I didn't like Diary of the Dead. On the contrary, I did. But for me, its flawed execution of a brilliant concept prevented me from seeing it as anything more of a disjointed failed experiment. The bland characters, lack of terror, and recycling of dialogue and scenes from the other movies, all made me feel like I was watching one of the many cheaply made zombie knock-offs you see on the Internet, not a film by one of the greatest horror directors of all time. How much you enjoy Diary will depend on your familiarity with the previous films. While I'd definitely recommend Diary to others, I'd do so with the caution of lowered expectations.
Diary of the Dead
directed by George Romero
Starring
Michelle Morgan ............... Debra
Joshua Close ................... Jason
Shawn Roberts ................ Tony
Amy Ciupak Lalonde ....... Tracy
Joe Dinicol ........................ Eliot
Scott Wentworth ............... Maxwell
Philip Riccio ...................... Ridley
Chris Violette .................... Gordo
Tatiana Maslany ............... Mary
Rated R for strong horror violence and gore, and pervasive language.
