Diary of the Dead (2008)
By Willy Greer
If anything, the ultra-low budget that George Romero had to work with on his latest feature, Diary of the Dead, was insurance that he could get another Dead movie out just a few years after his previous, as opposed to twenty years after. I’m very thankful for that. And, despite the budgetary limitations, Diary of the Dead definitely bears all the trademarks of a Romero film, for better and for worse. Is it a classic? No. But thankfully, it’s solid enough to make it worth our time, and to make us curious about what he’s going to do next.
Romero throws a curveball to die-hard Dead fans by basically calling a do-over, giving us a brand-new zombie plague in Diary. It’s the same phenomenon he explored in the four previous films; it’s just that Day One happens to occur in the present. A group of film students are shooting a bad horror film out in the woods on the night the dead begin to rise, and they decide to film all of their adventures as they trundle across Pennsylvania in a Winnebago, trying to get to their respective homes. The director decides that he wants to document the plague from their point of view, uploading their footage onto the Internet in order to give the public a “true” account of what’s happening. But, as usually happens in films about truth in media, the filmmaker’s vision begins to supersede the truth anyway.
Though many comparisons have been made to The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield (read our review), I believe Diary has more in common with the film The Last Broadcast (read our review). Blair and Cloverfield were played out as nothing more than recovered raw footage, but Diary shares Broadcast’s sense of completion, with post-production music, editing and pompous narration. Romero’s sense of melodrama is in full effect here, in spite of the faux-documentary format. This is a good thing. It keeps Diary feeling more like a real Romero movie, rather than another “you are there” camcorder movie.
Diary draws parallels between making a movie and fighting in a war, and the pun about “shooting” movies is made many times. If there’s anything that falls flat about Diary, it’s that Romero is more ham-fisted than ever with the social commentary. He doesn’t seem to trust the audience to get it this time around, oftentimes having the characters explain the subtext to us. It can get truly annoying. But in Diary, it’s the little details rather than the big picture that make it worthwhile. There are some absolutely wonderful set pieces in Diary: a zombie clown, a swimming pool zombie burial, an encounter with a deaf Amish farmer (about whom a whole movie could probably be made) and many more. There’s a jaded, alcoholic professor character who’s probably a stand-in for Romero himself. And of course, there’s some pretty fun splatter.
If there’s a main point to be made by Diary, it’s very similar to the point made by The Last Broadcast: one cannot really get the truth from any second-hand source (like media) because the reporter’s experience taints it. The only truth in life is what you experience for yourself.
Diary is far from perfect, but so are the rest of the films in the series. It’s not the weakest (that, in my opinion, is still Day Of The Dead, though I’m probably alone in that opinion), it’s not the strongest, but I’d rather have this one now than a more polished one in ten more years.
Popularity: 23% [?]
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