Some artists work in oils, some artists work in marble, George A. Romero works in zombies. With DIARY OF THE DEAD, he continues his work in that most unusual of mediums, making this incarnation as fresh, as timely, and as grotesquely funny as all that he has purveyed before. Maintaining the conceit of using zombies to comment on the real world, this time the target isn’t just the public obsession with reality programming, but also the uncomfortable question of whether or not the human species is actually worth saving, so quickly does the social order cave when the least little thing goes awry. Okay, it’s zombies, which is more than one little thing, but it takes the hyperbole of a different kind of terror alert to make the point about what happens when people are jarred out of their comfort zones.
Once again, the plague of re-animated corpses have a bad case of the munchies for human flesh. Once again, no one knows what’s causing it, or why it’s happening, that being entirely beside the point for the film’s purposes. Once again things happen very fast, including the breakdown of civilization and the protagonists fighting to stay alive. These protagonists are a typical collection of attractive kids, film students in this case, and their boozy but erudite faculty advisor. After determining that six separate stories on the cable news about corpses suddenly waking up hungry must have something to it, they decide to scrap their film shoot, pile into the Winnebago, and head home. That would be Scranton. Sensing that this isn’t so much an apocalypse as a golden opportunity to make his name in the film biz, one of those students, Jason (Joshua Close), picks up his camera again after and goes for cinematic glory. He keeps the camera going, recording everything he sees, ticking off his companions by trying to interview them during the worst couple of days of their collective lives, and stopping only to recharge the camera’s batteries. And even then, he doesn’t so much stop and stay put as his companions go looking for help.
With a master’s grace, Romero moves his erstwhile students from one cliché location to another while making it all flow naturally. There’s the empty dorm hastily abandoned to looters. The hospital where the staff has turned to the dark side. The Winnebago that hurtles through the dark and scary night in the middle of nowhere. The barn that is even further in the middle of nowhere. The swanky mansion that is a little less further in the middle of nowhere, but still adequately remote to be beyond the help of any authorities that might still be in charge. And, my favorite, the swipe at clowns, who, for some of us, will always have something deeply, darkly disconcerting about them.
Romero isn’t subverting the genre, far from it. He is exalting all its glorious excess, bending the idioms to a higher purpose while maintaining a respect for them that borders on idolatry. It’s all in the service of commenting on the zeitgeist where 200 million video cameras are in consumer hands, and in that he succeeds with a devilish élan. He deals a rabbit punch to the media, while extolling the wonder of the internet for getting to the truth of things, or at least a less corporately homogenized version of same. “Shoot” becomes the key word, an imperative both for survival, and for documenating it all as it happens. As Debra (Michelle Morgan), Jason’s long-suffering girlfriend keeps snidely reminding the proto-auteur, Jason seems to believe nothing is real unless it’s on camera, a turn of phrase that has its own meta-irony as mayhem ensues off camera, but is heard as clearly as the aftermath is shown.
There is also the trademark Romero humor, which is rarely forced and is frequently gruesome. Romero begins with that student shoot, a mummy chasing the requisite corseted heroine who will, as she must, lose her footing, as the actress complains about why that always has to happen in horror films. He is setting us up for later and rather than a clumsy foreshadowing, it is as welcome as a familiar song. The variation he spins from it, effectively witty and creepy. Romero, with an unerring sense of the puckish in the macabre, teases out the absurdity of people dealing with an twist to their lives for which there is no paradigm, and mines it for all it’s worth. As for the trademark gore, it’s surprisingly restrained. Sure, there is the bubbling brain, the spilling guts, but the camera doesn’t dwell on such as that in close-up until the final shot, where the purpose is about more than the mere shock of mangled flesh.
DIARY OF THE DEAD is played with all the rules of a shock-fest. The actors jump and scream, the audience does, too, even while both acknowledge that entering a new building will result in another attack and another death. The anticipation is delicious, the payoff even better.
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