George A Romero's Diary of the Dead

Mummies get all the fucking girls.

What's a guy with a video camera doing in the women's dorm, huh?

A college student named Jason Creed, a wannabe documentary filmmaker, decides to shoot the events following a zombie outbreak where the dead are returning to attack the living.

We're in a warzone and I don't know who the war is with.

The main bitch about movies where someone uses a camera to shoot live events in the found-footage genre is that why would someone continue to record everything even as all hell breaks loose? So George picks up the mantle and gives us a reason this time: someone with a passion for documenting something of importance, considering what is happening worthy of constant recording, for future references. Friends and fellow students going to a school in Pennsylvania (this movie, unlike in the past, was shot in Canada) are in a Winnebago on the road to nowhere, and Diary of the Dead is a video diary of what they encounter along the way.

We've got to get her to a doctor.
Yea, a live one.

I must admit that there's some waxing melodramatic where Jason ponders his (and the world's) current situation while mulling over the bodies of dead undead (in a hospital looking for a doctor for the driver of their vehicle who shot herself, the group discovers no one alive, having to put an end to members of the staff, using a gun, and even electroshock paddles which pop out a zombie's eyes!) that can be a bit much (as was his oh-so-serious girlfriend's narration). It's the attempt to look at the zombie outbreak from a more somber perspective, a monotone, depressing tone from Michelle Morgan's voice (she's Jason's girl, always grave, low in spirit, soberly understanding that their predicament is grim).

The world being what it is.

While Day of the Dead is incredibly bleak and conveying a group of people in a bad way emotionally, Diary of the Dead has minor humor, but the overall mood is similar in that dramatically, life is a total catastrophic nightmare, spoken as such, Michelle (as Debra) never wavering in her droning voice and blank face. There's a ton of pondering the meaning of the outbreak, dead coming to life, us eating us, and trying to understand how to deal with it all.

 A sample of Debra's musings:

 It's interesting how quickly we find out what we're capable of becoming. Up until that night, we had lived predictable lives. Now... we would never be able to predict what might happen next. God had changed the rules on us. And surprisingly, we were playing along.

There's a conversation about mornings and mirrors and daylight, how the Professor who traveled along with his students talks about how they're not for terrified old men. A scene where two hunters (similar to those in Dawn of the Dead) using shot guns to separate a body from a face, wondering if we are worth saving: laid on a bit thick and heavy-handed but a message that seems relevant and probably more than a bit accurate. Diary of the Dead just shows that this movie's Romero is different from the Romero of 1978, his view of society, of humanity perhaps even more hopeless and cynical.

What about the gory stuff? The biggest complaint I have read is of the overuse of CGI substituting for old skool make-up effects, depending less on wizards in a workshop and more on tech-kids using computers and technology to depict bullets hitting the skull and causing blood spatter and brain explosions. The eyes popping from a skull, a head splitting into, the top of a zombie's head melting from acid, and the use of a scythe to stab multiple heads at once, all rather obviously invented on a computer instead of brought to life by a Nicotero or Savini. I thought they were reasonably well done f/x but this is a minority opinion as the use of CGI has been the subject of heavy derision, few debating their merits in the movie. This is the typical way now in the zombie genre, the abandonment of make-up grue (which take a lot longer to set up and get right) in favor of what can be done in a lot less time through computer technology.

Look, is this as good as the undead trilogy? I like this film, a lot more than others, but it doesn't hold the same weight as the previous films prior to Land (although, I consider Land a fun movie, wholly different in tone from Diary, but a seemingly unpleasant experience for George due to the corporate suits and Studio bosses he had to deal with) with me personally. The first two are well engrained in my horror DNA, so practically any Undead picture after them will pale, but that doesn't mean I can't enjoy them for what they have to offer. Diary of the Dead is an interesting film within the series as it is George's contribution to the found-footage genre, even though the work of a documentarian is presented to us by his lady love--not found buried in the ground or in a box--who gave him an earful (notice that a constant of the movie has others questioning his moral turpitude for not stopping the recording) about his obsession with shooting, only to realize how important it truly is to provide those who need the truth (and not lies fed to the public by the government) with the correct information.

Some of my favorite touches are the way Texas hottie, Tracy (Amy Lalonde), isn't the blonde stereotypical bubblehead she first seems (even repairing the "Winnie" that leads to her group's escape from near death), the mummy gag (it is used in several ways, as a homage to the classic character, a comment on the comparison between slow and fast zombies, and a spoof of the idea that in essence the mummy is a zombie), and Nicotero's cameo in the hospital. You also have the heroine facing the horrifying fact that her family are of the undead (dispatched by the alcoholic professor who is handy with a bow and arrows). Last but not least, Romero returns to his roots as the Winnie must be hidden temporarily in a deaf mute Mennonite's barn while the undead are trying to get in.

You know, I remember sometime back reading a criticism in this movie about how the camerawork was too good and it just occurred to me that you just can't please people. When the camerawork (using, say, Quarantine, as an example)is shot in a frenzied, shaky-cam method, no one is happy, yet when we finally get someone shooting live action is a smooth, fluid fashion, voices speak up in angst against this! You just can't win...