Review"Are we worth saving? You tell me." - Debra MoynihanGeorge A. Romero sets out to make a movie that incorporates the new holy grail of Hollywood horror movie making, found footage, and layers on social satire, wit, and something fairly unique in the annals of zombie movie making, and still gets attacked. It's like you can't win, and considering everyone thought The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield were the duck's nuts you have to wonder if people have been dumbed down so far by Boredwood that they wouldn't know a decent horror movie if it leapt off the screen and bite them on the arse. We are definitely them, the mindless consumers of the latest internet trend, the latest advance in advertising prowess, the latest consumers of the big budget brain dead blockbuster. Who needs to go see a movie that asks you to think when you can catch a super hero doing shite and upholding the American way! Romero has a good point, and reiterates the Japanese fear of technology turning against it's creators, isolating people's emotions and determining their actions. This could very well be the best of Romero's "dead" movies, yet also the most loathed. There's a reason for that I believe, read on. A group of student film makers are out in the woods filming a horror movie. We learn the Director, Jason, wants to make documentaries and his friends are surprised by his choice of making a mummy movie of all things. Naturally Jason will get to make a documentary to his heart's content, The Death of Death as a zombie outbreak is just happening. Actually considering this is Romero returning to day zero are we meant to forget the four previous movies in the series? Clearly during the first three movies the internet wasn't readily available. Anywise our group of students and their permanently plastered teacher try to get back home, in some cases, as the full extent of the zombie outbreak becomes apparent. Government and News agencies are trying to cover up and play things down, bloody hard to do with the internet, while gradually things head into chaos central as the media starts shutting down followed more importantly by internet broadcasts. Who is going to survive to the end credits, are they going to complete the documentary, and what else might be out there? As Romero is apt to put it, the zombies aren't the only things you need to worry about. The movie is presented in “found footage” style with shoulder cam, hand helds, phone cam, and internet sequences spliced into the movie as each scene requires. Deb, our narrator, can inform us this is the finished documentary and that she has added a soundtrack where she thinks it's required. Romero here getting over a few problems Cloverfield had that no amount of advertising spin was going to be able to compensate for, regardless of what the sheep thought. Surprisingly we have Students with stabilisers in their cameras, not much in the way of shaky cam, rather than the normal budding movie makers who seem to have equipment that's a decade or so out of date. So no you are not going to get motion sickness watching this one, which is just as well for audience members with weak stomachs as the gore isn't exactly being hidden behind closed doors. Zombie flesh eater movie what did you expect? There's some solid and shrewd parts of Diary that should have horror fans in particular grinning. Romero up front points the bone at fast moving zombies, their ankles wont support all that dead weight, and throws in any number of points raised against the dark genre. The rather eye catching Tracy, our hottie for the evening, wonders why in horror movies the pretty girls always have their dresses ripped and fall over while running away from the monster. That comment is going to come back to bite her. There is a fairly tongue in cheek approach being taken here with Romero able to laugh at himself and his movie, it is after all absurd and perhaps Romero is winking at an audience that can't get enough of zombies, a sub-genre that Romero re-ignited himself. Romero has lined up the news media and people's compulsion to watch things unfold both on their televisions and on the internet as worthy targets. As Deb puts it a couple of times, if it isn't on film then it didn't happen, at least one character supports that idea when the national guardsman wants the cameras stopped. Maybe one of the reasons people are attacking this movie is Romero's assertion that we are them, we don't want to have a mirror held up to our faces, and just how invasive the camera has become with us the ready accomplices to the degeneration of all things to phone cams etc. Everyone is dragged into Jason's documentary, at the risk of their own lives, except Tracy who has had enough and exits stage left as obsession begins to get real fatal. A final point, Jason gradually gets dragged into his own documentary as his companions come around to seeing the validity of his documentary, but he also becomes the tragic figure of the documentary. There's a message there if you think about it, which of course the great unwashed aren't apt to do as it takes them out of their safety zones. To put it in neon sign post terms, the shite is happening right now, Jason and crew did not need to document it, they are living it! I had a hoot with Diary of the Dead and finally got to see a “found footage” movie that doesn't cheat and that presents people in an extraordinary situation that is fixed in the real world. There's a reason the acting isn't apparently Oscar worthy, the cast here are playing average people not cardboard cut outs as we saw in Cloverfield! Romero shows he still has the ability to make social satire that will make a lot of people uncomfortable. Real horror is subversive, Romero knows it, people should embrace this movie rather then going passive aggressive when confronted by it.
ScaryMinds Rates this movie as ... Romero delivers perhaps his best "dead" movie.
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