How about a slow, stagger-to-your-feet zombie ovation for horror legend George A. Romero?
The man who invented the zombie movie is still mining that vein, and still stuffing metaphor into his lurching, flesh-eating “living dead.” But his timing stinks.
Romero’s “Diary of the Dead” arrives at the end of a glut of assaults of the undead upon the living. And the film’s central conceit — that we’re watching pieced-together “found video” of a disaster as it happens — makes this not just “The Blair Zombie Project,” it’s “Cloverfield: The Halfhearted Zombie Version.”
*1/2 RATING | Zombies
Where “Cloverfield” felt “real,” with its amateur camera work and unedited, un-narrated narrative of a monster attack on New York, “Diary” is a slapdash, dully narrated, badly acted attempt at capturing that same look of “found video.”
Seven University of Pittsburgh film-school students and their teacher are interrupted by a nationwide viral “event,” just as they shoot a mummy movie. As the recently deceased lurch back to life to bite and create other living dead, the obsessed director, Jason (Joshua Close), videos everything as he and his friends make a dash for home in an ancient RV.
A blur of TV news coverage pops up on the RV’s television as they take the back roads to try to connect with friends and family. Listen and you’ll hear various horror filmmakers as TV news commentators.
Watch carefully, and you’ll see Romero’s cameo as a silver-maned police chief.
The kids rediscover what the circle of survivors has discovered in every Romero (and Romero clone) zombie film since 1968’s “Night of the Living Dead”: The zombies can be stopped only by smashing their brains. A bite by the dead slowly transforms the living into zombies, leading to some hard moral choices when boyfriends, best friends or classmates are bitten.
Romero seeks to make a commentary on the video-and-film generation, people who experience too much of the world (Romero suggests) through a lens or a TV tube or YouTube. As a horror- and indie-film legend, he’s spent enough time at film schools to have observed this camera-and-career-obsessed generation up close. His surrogate on screen is Debbie (Michelle Morgan), Jason’s girlfriend/editor, the woman who faces Jason-the-camera and yells at him, “What, it isn’t real if you don’t get it on tape?”
Jason relishes capturing “the night when everything changed,” and crows over his Web hits when he uploads his video. He’ll be the new Spielberg. Pity there won’t be anybody alive to return his calls.
And Debbie, we note, is the one narrating the film.
“God had changed the rules on us,” she intones. “Surprisingly, we were playing along.”
Romero, who just turned 68, has a secure place in film history without this endless recycling of his greatest hit. He probably can claim credit for making the movie that inspired “Blair Witch,” with the original “Living Dead’s” disaster revisited through gritty “news footage” element.
Even a legend’s got to make a living, sure. But “Diary,” for all its core audience appeal, feels like a filmmaker lurching slowly down a path he’s already worn out.
“Diary of the Dead”
R for strong horror violence and gore, and pervasive language. 1 hour, 35 minutes. Directed by George Romero. Starring Michelle Morgan, Joshua Close, Amy Ciupak Lalonde, Scott Wentworth. Opens today at the Starz FilmCenter.
