Writer/director George Romero started his “dead” series 40 years ago with a low budget black-and-white shocker called “Night of the Living Dead.” His fifth film in the series is more like a re-imagining of the original story idea than it is a continuation of existing framework. Unfortunately, “Diary of the Dead” plays like Cliff’s Notes of the political themes he’s already explored more effectively with his other movies.
At 68 years old, Romero is no spring chicken, but he does have the foresight to recognize a big change out there in video and media land. The proliferation of cheap video camcorders and free user-video websites like YouTube give the public an all-access pass to whatever anybody else uploads on the Internet. Take that and apply it to the paranoid nightmare of the dead returning from the grave, and you have a brand new premise for a zombie movie.
The terror in “Night of the Living Dead” partly sprang from the fact the characters didn’t know if this dead-alive thing was localized or happening all over the globe. In “Night,” it was radios and TV that clued Romero’s protagonists into what the crisis was on a bigger level. In “Diary of the Dead,” the broadcasters are Web-based, and the whole film is told from the point of view of one group of student filmmakers who continue rolling after the realization sinks in that the world is being overrun by zombies.
Jason (Joshua Close), who is behind the camera for most of the film, keeps saying he wants to document the truth. Like everybody else at the beginning of the movie, Debra (Michelle Morgan) is annoyed at his pedestrian probing. “How does all of this make you feel?” is typical of the questions he asks his fellow filmmakers while turning the camera on them. Apparently Debra eventually came around to his way of thinking, though, because she has edited her boyfriend’s film together to make the cut we are watching in the theater—titled “The Death of Death.”
Got that? It’s a little confusing, especially when she explains that she has added in music to make it scarier—her excuse? She wants us to be scared. Essentially, it’s a cheat so that Romero can add in noticeable postproduction and get away with it in the context of the film’s setup. Debra must be a pretty good editor, too, because the “reality” montages interspersed throughout the movie contain tons of sources and all kinds of advanced tricks.
The problem with this premise is that I’m not sure how anyone could miss the truth. There’s not much to cover up, really, when zombies have run amok everywhere. There are Internet videos coming in from all over the world, as far as even Tokyo. From that standpoint, it is interesting to see Romero re-working his classic zombie movies in the modern communication age, but he’s still rooted too much in the past. Jason’s declarations feel like late-1960s sloganeering and date the movie in some weird time vortex.
Besides the advent of global communications, the modern zombie apocalypse doesn’t feel all that much different from the ones of Romero’s earlier movies. You still can’t believe the government, military groups are still corrupt, and racial divides continue to widen. One scene in “Diary” is so much of a throwback that it actually depicts an armed Black Panther-type group holed up in a warehouse.
The film has some inventive new zombie kills, which horror enthusiasts will appreciate, but the overwhelming dread that should envelop everything (and has in his past films) never quite takes hold here. It’s just not a scary movie at all. Blame it partly on some amateurish acting and corny dialogue. Sure, this is supposed to be real life captured on video, but it seems that these days to approximate that, the actors really have to be on their toes. Even “Cloverfield” showed that hokey moments are hard to avoid with this “reality captured” premise. Maybe actually scaring your actors out in the woods à la “The Blair Witch Project” is the only sure-fire method.
By utilizing more than one camera (and still fitting it into the context of the premise), Romero has more freedom than “Blair Witch” or “Cloverfield,” though. This means that his characters had to collect security cam video and Internet video, and edit it all together with their own footage, which stretches credulity—but it does keep the movie from being bogged down with too many cinematic limitations. Unfortunately, “Diary” is stagier than both of those films, and none of it ever remotely feels real. That’s kind of a deal-killer when it comes to a cinéma vérité feel.
