George A Romero’s Diary of the Dead
US 2007
Starring: Michele Morgan, Joshua Close
Director: George A Romero
AFTER George A Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), the screen horror movie – some would say cinema itself – would never be quite the same. With Dawn of the Dead (1978), Day (1985) and Land (2005), Romero continued the saga of a world very much like our own – apart from the crucial detail that corpses rise from the grave to consume the living. Along the way, Romero has shown how genre material can and should explore a wide range of social, political and psychological ideas. And also topical ones: Land of the Dead remains one of the sharpest critiques of American domestic and foreign policy to emerge in the current decade. Evidently, it was too sharp for mainstream audiences: the picture failed to meet box-office expectations, forcing Romero back to his relatively low-budget, no-frills roots.
Reportedly shot in three weeks for less than $10 million, Diary of the Dead follows a bunch of 20-ish media-students – plus their boozy lecturer (droll scene-stealer Scott Wentworth) – who venture into remote woodland to filming a cheapo chiller. They pick up reports of dire, apocalyptic events unfolding in the world’s cities and, piecing together (conflicting) information from various modern media-sources, they realise they face a grim struggle for survival – and also for the truth.
Anticipating multiplex hit Cloverfield by several months (Diary premiered at Toronto last September), Romero adopts a Blair Witch-ish, “found” footage approach – mixing in some Scream-style post-modernism/self-referentiality that’s now somewhat old hat. The results are frustratingly uneven, especially as Romero is clearly still capable of hitting the bull’s eye when he really puts his mind to it: the opening scene (a zombie-attack caught by television news-cameras) is a flat-out terrific combination of the hilarious and the nightmarish; the astonishing last shot is an unexpectedly resonant and moving “kicker”.
What comes between, however, displays distinctly variable levels of inspiration and pacing. Romero shows distinct signs of treading water, making points about society’s ills in a more overt and heavy-handed manner than ever before. He does deliver several stomach-churning set-pieces which impressively transcend budgetary limitations – but audiences seeking gore, shocks and satire may be better served by an upcoming Spanish variant REC, which pays dutiful homage to maestro Romero and is due out here in April.
Neil Young
