George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead (George A. Romero, 2007): USA

Reviewed by Richard Feilden. Viewed at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival.

Diary of the Dead is the latest zombie flick from the undisputed master of the genre, writer/director George A Romero. In the past he has managed to combine all the gore, frights and laughs that his audiences demand with a social or political message. His shambling monsters have given us the director’s insights into racism, consumerism, the class system and the Vietnam-war era distrust of the government. In his latest film he takes on mass media misinformation, the surveillance society, our fascination with the pain and suffering of others and information overload, along with his perennial theme of peoples inability to work together, with success.The film opens with a group of film students and their alcoholic professor working on their class project, a ‘Mummy film’, out in a woodland area. This wonderfully self-referential theme continues as we realize that everything that we, the audience, are seeing is being recorded by the director of the amateur crew, Jason (Joshua Close). As the director argues with his Mummy about the excessive speed of his monster’s perambulation (perhaps referring to Zack Snyder’s remake of an earlier Romero film, or to the works of his one time collaborator, John Russo, whose zombies also move with far greater speed than Romero’s) and his heroine, Tracy, (Amy Ciupak Lalonde) rails against the genre-staples of the impending loss of her dress and her characters inability to run without tripping over a tree root, one of the students overhears a radio report (voiced throughout the movie by Stephen King, Wes Craven and even Simon Pegg amongst others) about the dead coming back to life. As they argue over the merits of the story, more reports come in and as nerves begin to fray, they abandon their film.

With two members of the group heading off in one direction, the rest head back to their University and, having gathered an additional member in the shape of Jason’s girlfriend (Michelle Morgan), they set out in a Winnebago in an attempt to reach their families. When their first encounter with a group of the recently-deceased yet still-walking leads one member of the group to attempt suicide, they seek out a hospital. The hospital though has been deserted, at least by the living…

Romero has chosen to show the entire film through the eyes of cameras within the story. The protagonists quickly gain a second camera, allowing the director more freedom with his editing and CCTV footage is also employed. Romero is careful to make sure that we even see the characters editing the footage together for upload to the internet (its inbuilt resilience keeping it up when the phone and TV begin to fail). This effort pays off, leaving the audience with no information other than that which the protagonists gather. This effect (as employed in the Blair Witch Project and recent Cloverfield) is not simply a way to heighten the tension, but is an integral part in Romero’s attack on our obsession with recording every event (“If it isn’t recorded, it didn’t happen. Right?” mocks one character), as well as the intrusion of surveillance (particularly by the government who, along with the military, never come out well in Romero’s films) into every aspect of our lives. Romero keeps pace with the concerns of society, keeping the ‘Dead’ series relevant.

That isn’t to say that this film lacks some good old fashioned thrills and fun. There are enough moments of surprise to keep the audience on edge and enough new and inventive ways to take down a zombie to keep the laughs coming (death by scythe and acid being two of the stand out take-downs in this film). Romero keeps the film moving at a cracking pace, never giving his characters more than a moment to catch their breath, before plunging them into greater problems with a rapidly increasing zombie count.

With Diary of the Dead Romero has reinvigorated his oeuvre. The laughs, frights and social commentary are all there. What more could you for from the Dead?