George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead

Perhaps YouTube and MySpace and the proliferation of cheap, digital video cameras have turned us into a nation of navel-gazers.

We sit in front of computer screens for hours, posting and clicking on the most mundane and intimate details of our lives that are out there for all the world to see — or no one. But it's cathartic, so who cares?

Leaving us sluggish and mumbling with glazed eyes and pasty skin, technology has practically turned us into ... zombies. Or so the logic seems to go in "George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead."

The horror veteran appears to be slamming the mainstream media for failing to tell us the truth (about Hurricane Katrina, about the Iraq war) yet he also indicts a generation of twentysomethings for creating their own misleading din with an onslaught of online reportage.

The message is muddled, but the zombie master still knows how to make a gripping, graphic, grossly funny horror flick. Here, Romero returns authentically to the low-budget roots he used to established himself 40 years ago with the classic "Night of the Living Dead."

As writer and director, he follows a group of film students crossing Pennsylvania in a Winnebago to escape a growing attack of the undead — the source of which is, a virus maybe? Doesn't matter, really. They include aspiring filmmaker Jason (Josh Close), who refuses to put down the camera, regardless of the threat; his disgruntled girlfriend Debra (Michelle Morgan), who narrates the finished product; and their melodramatic, alcoholic professor (Scott Wentworth).

All of them, along with tough-guy New Yorker Tony (Shawn Roberts), Texas belle Tracy (Amy Lalonde) and rich-boy actor Ridley (Philip Riccio), were shooting Jason's student film in the woods (at night, natch) when the first rumblings of trouble began. Ridley, dressed as a mummy, was pursuing the corseted Tracy too quickly, prompting Jason to scold, "Dead things don't move fast. ... The script says, 'The mummy shambles.'" (It's Romero's amusing little dig at the frantic zombies that populate modern movies like "28 Days Later.")

News reports start flooding in about the dead coming back to life; one generically blond reporter gets her face eaten off on air, which is at once hilarious and horrifying. Jason and Co. try to reach their loved ones by phone but with no luck, so they pile into the RV looking for shelter and hoping to drop everyone back home along the way.

Of course, this being a horror movie, they get picked off one by one during their journey. (And the zombies themselves take it to the head with a variety of creative weapons, including a bow-and-arrow, a scythe, a defibrillator and — best of all — a smashed bottle of hydrochloric acid that fabulously fries a dude's brain from the outside.)

But they also run into a wildly eclectic cross-section of people, including a deaf Amish man who's surprisingly resourceful; National Guardsmen who aren't exactly there to help; and a group of heavily armed black men who are thrilled to be in power now that all the white folks have left town. Civilization falls apart — again — or as Debra puts it in one of many voiceovers that state the obvious: "God had changed the rules on us and, surprisingly, we played along."

Through it all, Jason keeps rolling; even when things get hairy at a hospital, he's too busy recharging his low battery to help his screaming friends. "I can't leave without the camera!" he reasons. "The camera's the whole thing."

Debra repeatedly chastises him for shooting everything, all the time, as if nothing matters if it's not being recorded. (Didn't Warren Beatty have the same criticism of Madonna in "Truth or Dare"?) The point grows a bit heavy-handed.

But Jason figures he's doing the right thing — his duty, even — by taping these terrible events so that others may know what happened. And he feels emboldened when the video he's already started posting on MySpace, "The Death of Death," receives "72,000 hits in eight minutes!"

Romero — who's used previous zombie movies to satirize the Vietnam War and rampant consumerism — clearly thinks he's spineless and exploitative, though, especially as Jason asks his friends to repeat a line or walk through a doorway a second time for coverage.

So who's right? As in "The Blair Witch Project" and "Cloverfield," which employed a similarly visceral first-person point of view and jittery, hand-held camerawork, it's all a matter of perspective.

Lest there somehow remain any shred of doubt as to how little faith George A. Romero has in humanity, the grim coda to his curious foray into subjective filmmaking should dispatch that uncertainty with the stopping power of a carefully aimed bullet fired into a shambling zombie's forehead. Not since Night of the Living Dead has a Romero coda felt so deliciously grim, and while fans will certainly argue the merits of his fifth "Dead" film -- as well, perhaps, as the aging filmmaker's continued relevance or lack thereof -- there's still plenty to like about Diary of the Dead. While some may be quick to compare Diary of the Dead to such subjective-style hits as Cloverfield and The Blair Witch Project, it should be noted that this is a very different beast. Whereas both of those films were purported to be raw found or recovered footage, Diary of the Dead wastes no time explaining that the film-within-a-film that we are about to see -- a student film entitled "The Death of Death" -- is in fact a "professionally" produced document of events as experienced by a group of young filmmakers who happened to be shooting a low-budget horror film when the dead decided to get up and go searching for some guts to munch. As such, the "filmmaker" has seen fit to drop in the occasional musical cue, get a bit creative with editing, and occasionally draw on footage shot by others in order to drive home their point. It's a curious experiment that largely works thanks to Romero's signature gallows humor, social commentary, and creative zombie kills, though some longtime fans may decry the perceived lack of character definition that distinguishes the director's most effective works. Still, seeing as how the main character -- the one through whom the audience experiences the majority of the story -- goes largely unseen for most of the running time, it could be argued that Romero was simply going for concept rather than character this time around. Romero has always been concerned with how we receive and respond to media, and in this film that preoccupation is arguably more pronounced than ever before. From a mention of the original "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast early on, we're clearly tuned in to Romero's feelings about the power of the media, and in an era when everyone with Internet access is essentially "the media," he seems to be arguing that we shouldn't take that distinction in stride. Two films past the "Dead Trilogy" and counting (Romero has openly stated in interviews that he is interested in making his first-ever direct sequel to Diary), perhaps it's time to lay the concept of this being a trilogy to rest in order to reassess and reevaluate the "Dead" films as a series. At this point, we all know that Romero is a filmmaker who likes to inject his horror with a little social commentary -- it's what distinguishes his movies from the glut of brainless, generic zombie flicks that line the shelves of your local video store. Yet, to constantly compare his latest endeavors to the films we now consider "classics" (Night, Dawn, and Day), we do both the movies and the man behind them a grave injustice -- even Day was maligned by fans and critics when it first hit screens back in 1985, only to be deemed a grim classic by legions of fans upon reappraisal. Romero isn't the same filmmaker he was when he created that original trilogy -- nor, for that matter, when he made Land of the Dead -- and while it may be hard to accept the fact that we might never get another film with the power and iconography of Dawn of the Dead, we should be careful not to dismiss his more recent endeavors simply due to some perceived lack of bite. Perhaps his commentary works better when applied to some concepts (and eras) than others, but given the choice between watching a lesser work by a filmmaker with something truly interesting to say, or a polished slice of entertainment from a former music-video director who built their career on pushing a product, why continually opt to switch off our brains? Are we still capable of thinking and being entertained at the same time, or has the short-attention-span theater of modern media made us completely incapable of completing such advanced processes? If you answered in the positive, chances are you'll be able to look past the surface flaws and find something to like about Diary of the Dead. If you answered in the negative, perhaps Romero's bleak commentary concerning humankind's true value isn't too far off. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide