Movie Review: Diary Of The Dead

3/10

Frankly, it's rubbish.

Sorry, wanted to get that out of the way early on in case you only read some of it and got the idea I didn't find it lazy, trite and predictable.

A little while ago I gave a reasonably positive review to excellent Spanish language Zombie horror quickie [REC]. In that film, a documentary crew get caught up in the moment as things get quickly out of hand in a high rise apartment block - it lasts 80 minutes, is unflinching in its plot and also more than often scary.

I mention this here because if you want to see a zombie movie in which a documentary crew get caught up in the tide rising dead then see [REC], don't bother watching the American remake (what's the point?) and certainly don't watch Diary Of The Dead.

Where [REC] is taught, efficient and scary, Diary is lazy, bloated and toothless.

We are immediately off on a bad one with the VO narration of what sounds like a stoned twenty-something lady - it resembles nothing so much as Harrison Ford's legendary "if I do it this bad they won't use it... or will they?" voice over in the original cut of Blade Runner. She's telling us how, unlike the Spanish film, she will be using all manner of interesting cuts and music cues to "scare" her supposedly terrified and ignorant worldwide audience.

You see, it's all very Zeitgeist - honest! The kidz is on da Yootoobz, innit? Sigh...

Since his two early Zombie movies, Night Of The Living Dead and Dawn Of The Dead (the latter of which I consider the definitive Zombie movie) George A Romero has lost his way. Sorry if you're a huge fan but Day Of The Dead is too nihilistic for my tastes, Land Of The Dead is too Gung Ho and Diary.. well, it's just silly.

It's meant to be, I think, a satire on the desire of the YouTube generation(TM) to make themselves heard on all subjects, no matter if they know what they are on about or not.

What he has made is a movie with no teeth. Ironic really. Even "Land" had some amusingly satirical bits; I recall particularly Dennis Hopper's George W. Bush allegory screaming "You Have No Right!" at the horde of invading undead, as if somehow trying to appeal to their sense of inferiority.

In "Diary" Romero simply chooses to make every single character as hateful as humanly possible - Jay, the director, is a personality-free jerk with one character beat (I MUST make this film) his girlfriend, who doubles as our narrator, is a frosty aloof Polaroid of a proper character. Everyone else is an archetype to the point of parody - you have the angry New Yorker, The nerd, The Christian Girl, The pretty and big boobed Texan girl, her shallow as a residue boyfriend and, in a spectacular misjudgement, a weird Englishman - their lecturer, who is obviously a drunk and refers to guns as "too easy to use". He is a character from broad farce, shoehorned in for no apparent reason - plus he's great with a bow and arrow because of his history at Eton.

Odd.

What gore there is, is reasonably well done, but if you're that sort of horror movie watcher who enjoys the odd memorable death (I'm only human) you're in for slim pickings here - though one standout moment involves a character's spectacular method of dispatching himself and a zombie at the same time using a farm implement. That's almost the only thing that remains lucid in your mind after the hour forty or so of this film.

By the time the young survivors have reached the mansion where their friend lives, all interest had vanished as far as I was concerned, and the cheap joke at the expense of the monster movie they'd originally been making registered barely as much as my need to clean the Cat's bowls.

You'll notice I've spent rather a lot of time talking about other films in this review - it's because I truly feel that any (yes, any) of the other films I have mentioned in this post are vastly superior to this latest effort from Romero - the acting is lame, the plot is dull, the set pieces are, barring the strangely postmodern humour of the deaf Amish farmer sequence, unmemorable.

Avoid this unless, like me, you are a Romero completist.

A major disappointment - exactly the opposite of [REC]

See that instead. It really is rather good.

A

P.S. The deaf Amish Farmer is the only thing saving this from a mind numbing 2/10.