Zombie-movie legend George Romero is
rightly acclaimed for injecting humor and social consciousness into horror
films. But there's a big difference between making a kick-ass zombie movie with
a trenchant sociopolitical subtext, and making a dreary, didactic film about
the ethics and politics of journalism and non-fiction filmmaking that just
happens to have some zombies in it. With his latest undead opus, the
self-consciously low-fi Diary Of The Dead, Romero set out to make the first kind of film, but
ended up making the second.
A zombie movie for the
MySpace/TMZ/YouTube age, when anyone with a camera phone and a website can play
citizen journalist, Diary follows a group of callow, poorly differentiated college
film students as they flee a zombie infestation. But one budding auteur takes
time out of escaping certain death to document the whole miserable experience
with his trusty video camera for a documentary called The Death Of Death. Diary asks some compelling questions about
documentarians' responsibility to the people they're chronicling. Then it asks
them again and again and again, wasting scores of valuable brain-munching
opportunities in the process.
The film gets off to a fantastic
start, with terrific scares and big laughs, at least some of which involve the
Amish. But the horror and comedy in Romero's frustratingly uneven mockumentary
eventually gives way to earnest hand-wringing over the immorality of
documenting tragic events from an ostensibly objective distance, much of it
conveyed via overwrought voiceover narration. Much of the appeal of
first-person subjective horror films like Cloverfield and The Blair Witch Project lies in their brash immediacy, in
the sense that they're chronicling dark deeds and unspeakable horror as they
happen, more or less in real time. Whereas Dead's ponderous voiceover distances the
audience from the horror onscreen, placing it safely in the past and draining
away its urgency. As in the more successful Land Of The Dead, Romero makes an admirable attempt to
update his beloved franchise for contemporary audiences. But this time out, his
heavy-handed intellectual concerns get in the way of a perfectly good fright
flick.