Diary of the Dead

Diary of the Dead (2007)

Moderately Trashy
Ranking: No

Latest episode of Romero's Dead saga, following Land of the Dead, though chronologically, I'm not sure exactly where this fits in, or if it's even really part of the same timeline. I don't really care that much.

This is the first person account of what happens when a bunch of film students out filming a horror film in the woods learn that the dead are coming back to life and eating the living. They then drive around in a van for a really long time until everybody dies, pretty much.

I know this film was ever so slightly pre-Cloverfield, but I had a hard time not thinking of that one, and how it was considerably better than this.

Yeah, the characters in Cloverfield were two dimensional and the plot was simplistic. But the characters in this film were horrible (it wasn't just that I didn't like them particularly. I wanted the fucking assholes to die) and the plot didn't exactly have that much depth.

It's the same problem with all of Romero's zombie movies (I haven't seen any of his other movies - I don't think anyone has...), only Night and Dawn get away with it on account their well made and interesting to watch.

This one also comes with it's own little statement about the saturation of media images and desensitization of the population or something. Maybe it was about technology. Fuck, whatever. It was stating something, somehow.

Anyway, I found it kind of annoying (chickie's narration bugged me, as did the music) and somewhat... contrived maybe. I dunno. It had a lot of potential, although it was sort of unnecessary. There are enough damn zombie movies as it is.

Okay, Romero can make as many as he likes seeing as he basically invented the genre, and he probably did a better job with this than some other people would have, but still, it could have been much more interesting.

END

Written and Directed by: George Romero. Starring: Michelle Morgan, Joshua Close, Shawn Roberts, Amy Lalonde, Scott Wentworth, Philip Riccio, Chris Violette, Tatiana Maslany.