George A. Romero and his merry band of flesh-eating zombies are back in the director’s latest gross-out effort Diary of the Dead. Unfortunately, unlike his last entry Land of the Dead this time the results are decidedly mixed. Taking the same route as The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield the acclaimed filmmaker has journied into the realm of reality docudrama, and while the points he’s trying to make about our current media saturated culture are valid the way he goes about making them aren’t exactly captivating. 

The zombies are back in The Weinstein Company's George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead

Why? The biggest misstep here, much like Brian DePalma’s very similar Gulf War drama Redacted, is that he’s cast a whole plethora of unknowns who couldn’t act their way out of a paper bag. You never believe them as college film students trying to survive (and document) the first three days of the undead outbreak. They all overdue it to a spectacularly theatric scale, and if this is supposed to be what real life looks like then the world I’m living in must truly be nothing more than a exceedingly subtle (almost narcoleptic) dream.

As I know that isn’t the case, to say this group of disparate thespians go a bit over the top would be humongous understatement. Their constant shrieks of terror, righteous indignation, moral uncertainty, theoretical musings and murderous carnality is all played with the volume turned all the way up to 11, and after about thirty minutes or so of their shrill voices beating me over the head a part of me couldn’t help but wish an army of the undead would finally just put an end to the entire lot of them.

The thing is, Romero does have something to say. Some of his points about society’s apocalyptic dissolution from within are just as potent now as they were back in 1968 when he started bringing all these zombie shenanigans to the big screen in the first place. The camera lens becomes a weapon just as dangerous and deadly as a fully loaded machine gun, the instantaneous media culture of the World Wide Web and the ability to spin the truth nanosecond by nanosecond a more potent killer than the humanoid creatures trying to eat their neighbor’s flesh.

More, age hasn't dulled the director’s visual aesthetic and knack for surreal comedy just one bit. A whole sequence with a deaf Pennsylvania Amish farmer is both haunting and hysterical, while an early encounter inside a hospital is chilling almost to the bone. There is also a great bit with a bunch of zombies trapped within a swimming pool like goldfish in a bowl, while one a scene with a fully-charged defibrillator is literally eye-popping in its giddy gruesomeness.

It should also be admitted I am being slightly too hard on at least one member of the cast. Michelle Morgan has some great moments, especially a heart-stopping and emotionally devastating sequence inside her parents’ eerily quite family abode. Unfortunately Romero also has her supply one of the worst voiceovers I’ve ever heard, and no matter how good she was in many of her individual scenes I fear the only thing people are going to remember the actress for is having to monotonously recite it.

Made at about the same time as Redacted and about a year before Cloverfield, Diary of the Dead should be applauded for at least trying something different within the zombie horror genre. But like the former (and unlike the truly frightening and briskly entertaining latter) the director is undone by an untalented cast and some heavy-handed melodramatic sermonizing that’s too much to bear.  

“It’s us against them,” says one the protagonists at about the midway point. “But we are them,” another responds. “They are us.” It’s ham-fisted dialogue and logic like this that one has to suffer through, and no matter how glorious the good parts are enduring stuff like that is almost impossible. Romero may have something to say, but if he’s going to be saying it like this the only zombies he’s going to find are the ones past out in the theater from disappointed disgust. 

Film Rating: êê (out of 4)

Additional Links:

-  George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead Theatrical Trailer