Diary of the Dead

Director: George A. Romero

Starring: Michelle Morgan, Shawn Roberts, Joshua Close and Amy Lalonde.

At the Gerardmer Festival of Fantastic Arts 2008, George Romero's Diary of the  Dead was awarded the Critics Award.  Coincidentally, Cloverfield was also playing  at this festival and the similarities between the two are obvious; both are shot  handheld guerilla-style and cover a catastrophic event through the eyes and lenses of amateur moviemakers and both were released within a few months of  each other at the end of 2007 and beginning of 2008.  What makes this  important?  Well, seeing as Cloverfield is a tight and exciting thriller and Diary of the Dead is tedious and embarrassing; how on Earth did it win?

Diary is the latest in George A. Romero's line of zombie movies, but instead of continuing the narrative built through Night, Dawn, Day and Land of the Dead, it sets itself up at the start of a zombie plague in modern day.  A group of student filmmakers happen to be shooting a horror movie when the dead start to walk and the director, Jason Creed, decides to document the events to bring the truth to the people via online video.  His documentary is called The Death of Death and this is what we watch as Diary unfolds.  Creed is accompanied by his leading man and lady, his girlfriend, his professor and a couple of other forgettable non-characters, all wanting to return to the safety of 'home'.

It's not the idea behind Diary of the Dead which is bad, it's the execution.  To see the dead returning to life filmed intimately by terrified citizens has the potential to be a frightening movie, in the way Cloverfield is a scary personal view of something invading Manhattan, but instead it concentrates on bickering characters and their pointless exploits, while the zombies are treated as a distraction who serve only to stop Romero from returning to the endless, meaningless dialogue.  The script issues are only part of the problem though.  Because we are watching a film within a film, the inclusion of editing and musical queues tend to make you forget it's supposed to be 'found footage' and you catch yourself thinking it's just a very poor horror movie.  Unfortunately, it is.

For a start, it's packed full of cliches.  We get characters stating the obvious at every opportunity, we have a gun jamming at an inopportune moment, a dead family terrorising their daughter and a zombie we thought was dead leaping back to 'life' to deliver a shock.  If it didn't say it was directed by Romero at the end of the movie, I would assume it was directed by Catchphrase host Roy Walker, whose only advice to the cast consisted of  'say what you see'.  Even the voiceover offered by Creed and his girlfriend Debra gives up halfway through as if they ran out of things to say.

Thanks to the poor script, the actors fall into one of two categories, bland or irritating.  Either way, you won't care when they are inevitably picked off by the zombies.  The only character who offers some originality and the movies one and only laugh is Samuel the Amish guy – and he is featured for less than five minutes.  The zombies themselves should have been an ever-present terror, however when they do turn up, they are despatched with ease but only after they have done the damage they need to in order to move the plot forward.  The bare minimum of prosthetic make-up is used (if any at all) and is substituted instead by CGI, which fails to match the wonderful wetness of Dawn and Day's FX.  

Cloverfield absorbs and thrills for 85% of its 75 minutes, Diary of the Dead bores for 99% of its overly-long 90 minutes.  Fans of Romero's previous work won't even find anything to like, as none of his trademarks, such as social comment, suspense and unique characters, are present, giving the film a faceless hack-at-work feel.  Diary of the Dead deserves to be forgotten both as an installment of the Living Dead saga and an example of Romero's ability as a writer and director.  He, and you, are worthy of spending their time on far better things than this.