DIARY OF THE DEAD

Romero doing Romero

By Dave Wildman

del.ico.us | digg it! | reddit!

print | email | 0 Comments

George A. Romero's survival as a horror icon has always had as much to do with his appeal to eggheads as well as to fans of B-movie explicit gore. For every buff that cites the exploding head scene in the opening of Dawn of the Dead as a life-changing experience, you will find intellectuals fascinated by the philosophical ideas and hilarious socio-political satire he gives audiences to chew on as well.

In his latest, Diary of the Dead, he's back to telling the same tale as in the last four films: the deceased are coming to life and it sucks for the rest of us. Unlike other self-made horror auteurs of low-budget beginnings like, say, David Cronenberg, Romero has not branched out into more sophisticated plots and A-list actors. The closest he's come so far was 2005's Land of the Dead with Dennis Hopper and John Leguizamo, which had little new to offer other than a bigger budget and state-of-the-art bloodletting. He is like an old bluesman that masters three essential chords and never strays from what he knows.

So, while what happens hasn't changed, Romero has at least kept up with the times and adopted the methods of the moment. His latest effort manages to keep the franchise faith while also shining a mirror on society's current obsession with the voyeuristic and the self-referential.

This is done by following the lead of The Blair Witch Project (which used a low-budget documentary style arguably influenced by Romero's first film Night of the Living Dead) as well as so many recent Iraq war films like Redacted, where the fictional subjects of the film are the ones supposedly shooting it. In this case the character behind the camera is Jason (Joshua Close), a student making a horror film on location out in the woods as his final project. His cast is a group of his college friends and their bitter, alcoholic teacher Andrew Maxwell (Scott Wentworth), who is given to drunken, theatrical diatribes. When they hear on the radio that the dead have started to come alive, the shoot breaks up and they climb into their Winnebago, go back to the school to grab Jason's girlfriend Debra (Michelle Morgan) and flee the now deserted college in an effort to get back to their families.

On the way, they tangle with plenty of the requisite flesh-eating undead. Jason takes to his task of documenting the events with an obsessive, almost giddy sense of its historical import. He makes each of his friends recite their names and background for posterity and keeps the camera running for every grisly development, including one where the girl driving the Winnebago runs over a bunch of undead people in the road and tries to commit suicide. They take her to a desolate hospital where Jason obsessively captures on film all the hideous zombie doctors and nurses. Eventually Jason's constant shooting drives his girlfriend Debra to angrily declare: "If it didn't happen on camera, it didn't happen, right?"

While the use of the film-within-a-film technique is nothing new, Romero nevertheless tries to wring every last drop of poignancy out of it. There is a funny and clever scene where Jason is filming the same guy who played the mummy at the beginning, still in costume, but now he's an actual zombie chasing the same girl who was the actress. Romero takes an apparent shot at Alex Garland, who wrote 28 Days Later with its lightning fast living dead, having Jason call out to the girl who is running in terror: "See! Dead people don't move fast!"

The last part of Diary of the Dead takes place at a mansion in the woods loaded with security cameras. The action captured on the surveillance cameras is heavily intercut with Jason's footage. It makes an ironic statement about voyeurism as the last remaining members of the film crew lock themselves in the bunker to helplessly watch the living dead emerge all around them and implicates the audience as they watch in turn.

All the cast members are pretty much anonymous, as Romero stays true to his long stated intention not to use recognizable actors so that the audience won't know who lives or dies. This can result in spotty, overdramatic exchanges at times, but it is what you've come to expect, and the development of character and dialogue is still the most accomplished Romero has produced thus far.

In addition, he does manage to cleverly sandwich a potpourri of horror icons into this thing, including: Stephen King, Wes Craven, Quentin Tarantino, Guillermo del Toro (Pan's Labyrinth) and Simon Pegg (Shaun of the Dead), all as the voices on the radio describing the apocalyptic events going on all over the world. Romero may likely be having less financial success than most of them, but their presence acknowledges his importance as the primal architect of this kind of heady, low-budget flesh-eating thriller, for better or worse.

DIARY OF THE DEAD

RATED | R

OPENS | 2.15.08