Diary Of The Dead

A clever movie-inside-a-movie premise of combining college students filming a low-budget documentary with George A. Romero’s trademark zombie monsters fails to live up to its Blair Witch Project potential in George Romero’s Diary of the Dead, the veteran horror filmmaker’s first independent zombie film in twenty years.

Horror fans will leave disappointed at the film’s low number of original shocks

Diary of the Dead ‘s best moment occurs at the beginning. A Pittsburgh TV crew films a domestic dispute that ends with dead family members being loaded into an ambulance. After the once-still bodies begin to stir, a pretty TV reporter becomes the first victim of Romero’s latest zombie plague, a kill soon available to watch on the Internet.

That night, nearby college students making a low budget horror movie become involved in the surrounding chaos. Once zombies disrupt their shoot, the students, accompanied by a boozy professor, hit the road in a Winnebago to escape the zombies. They film their journey as a documentary titled The Death of Death.

Despite Romero’s fame as a master of horror, Diary of the Dead shows little value as a theatrical release except for a limited platform targeted specifically at diehard horror fans in territories where Romero’s name remains best known, the U.S., Europe and Southeast Asia. Diary of the Dead looks better suited for a straight DVD and Home Video release.

Other scenes involving the growing zombie menace fail to match what has done Romero in earlier movies. In fact, if one were to rank Romero’s zombie movies, Diary of the Dead would rank as his worst, below Land of the Dead (2005), Day of the Dead (1985), Dawn of the Dead (1978) and far below his best effort, the film that started the series, 1968’s Night of the Living Dead

More importantly, Diary of the Dead offers at best half of the entertainment of director Zack Snyder’s 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead and none of the originality of Danny Boyle’s 2002 zombie thriller 28 Days Later or director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s worthy 2007 sequel 28 Weeks Later.

Romero fails to come up with something fresh; editor Michael Doherty fails to keep the story sharp. Horror fans will leave disappointed at the film’s low number of original shocks. The only standout scare worth noting is when a student uses Defibrillator paddles to explode the eyes out of a zombie’s sockets.

Midway into the movie, Diary of the Dead begins to move as slow as a zombie. Diary of the Dead claims bare production values, arguably a creative choice by cameraman Adam Swica and Rupert Lazarus. After all, Diary of the Dead is supposed to be a student film. Because the film fails to keep one scared, the cheapness of its production comes to the fore.

Romero’s young cast blurs together as the Pittsburgh college students seeking to escape the zombies. It’s hard to imagine that their Diary of the Dead work will lead to future projects. For Romero, someone who still retains respect and admiration for previous work, Diary of the Dead points to the realization that it is time to close the door on zombie movies and move to other horror subjects.