Zombie movie fans need more than cosmic rays to revive their faith in horror legend George A. Romero after his last effort in the genre—a warmed-over corpse called “Land of the Dead.”
His newest attempt, “Diary of the Dead,” returns to Romero’s classic formula of brain-munching glory in a modern, information-saturated world. However, the film is disfigured by its heavy-handed messages.
“Diary” follows a group of film students who discover the world is coming to the ende—zombie-apocalypse-stylee—from videos they download from the Web. Loading up their equipment RV, they truck it home from their college in Pittsburgh to make sure their families are all right, using every the fancy new media gadgets they can grab.
Their journey is filmed by Jason, a student director who , along with his friends, insists on recording everything “for the sake of history.” It’s shot entirely in the first person apart from brief moments of the security camera footage the students are oddly able to procure.
Romero clearly got the memo following “Land of the Dead,“ and he makes every effort to break free from the Hollywood chains that held “Land” into mediocrity and tries to use “Diary” as a low-budget redemption. The bulk of the film is shot on two cameras, giving the audience a first-person perspective, and features no big name actors, centering on the Romero equation of adding one part zombie slaughter to one part social commentary to yield a cheesy, yet satisfying experience.
The first part of that equation is nailed in spades, delivered with Romero’s signature mastery of the genre. Despite the low budget, special effects got the royal treatment—a healthy mix of CGI stands in for those brains, guts and gushy blood spurts. Because of the first-person perspective, the effects are especially successful, delivering some genuine scares but mostly the gratuitous zombie deaths fans clamor for.
The casting is spot on for the carnage, with a mix of genre staples from the hot girl and the nerd, to more unique characters, like an alcoholic yet insightful professor tagging along for the ride.
The film slips in this magnificent bloodbath when it comes to the social commentary, employing all the subtlety of a sledgehammer in driving home the film’s message about news media exploitation. The audience is never given a chance to draw any parallels between filming of the zombie attacks and filming of real-life atrocities. Plenty of real news footage and voiceovers cut in to tell audience members the message and how to interpret it. All the commentary would have been far more compelling if it had arisen in the car ride home from the theater instead.
The filmmaking may be gimmicky, but it’s supposed to be, and zombie fans will still love it. The heavy-handed messages don’t ruin the experience, but certainly hold it back.
