Film Review: Diary of The Dead

Diary of The Dead @ IMDB

So, zombies are cool again. What to do next? Let's, oh, I don't know, get the Granddaddy of Zombie films to make another one.

George A Romero (or glass face if you've seen any recent pictures of him) made Night of The Living Dead for virtually no money, massive success, heralded the extreme horror films of the seventies, birthed an entire sub-genre, made some more zombie films, dropped off the radar a bit. In case you didn't know.

So what do we have here? A re-imagining of Night of The Living Dead, set in contemporary times. Only instead of a farm house in the middle of nowhere it's a group of student film-makers trying to get home. All this is seen from the students perspective as they film their journey.

So far, so Cloverfield. But the difference here is we're watching an actual finished documentary by one of the students. So you get voice-over and music and editing. When this is explained at the beginning, I groaned a bit. Inserting the music seems forced and a bit silly. It helps when about half way through the student filming the action sits down and edits a sequence you saw a few minutes previously. Very web 2.0.

And that's the main thrust of the film, a commentary of todays citizen journalism, weblogs (hello), YouTube, all of that. Social commentary has always been a staple of Romero's film but whilst it does sometimes seems forced and a bit trite at least it's trying to say something. This immediately lifts it above the normal torture porn fare you get these days.

But, nevermind all that high brow nonsense, bring on the zombies! And Romero does and they fuck people up and people fuck them up in various imaginative ways.

Problems: the students are a bit vague and not that interesting. The film feels like it's never building to a climax. The best character in the film is introduced and killed off in five minutes.

But it's good and solid and scary and bleak as anything. Very bleak. The last scene? Bleak.

In a word? Bleak.