Latest Romero zombie film bites
The revelatory moments of utter shock and disgust thatˆ½ characterized George Romero's early horror films -- such as a zombified girl eating her mother's organs -- are nowhere to be found in his new movie "Diary of the Dead."
Romero's fifth zombie movie isn't a sequel to his groundbreaking 1968 masterpiece "Night of the Living Dead." Here, Romero reboots the zombie myth by ignoring his four earlier films. Yet, "Diary" still feels tired and recycled.
"Diary" follows "The Blair Witch Project" and the recent "Cloverfield" by passing itself off as footage of a supernatural event shot by people attempting to document horror as it happens.
Unlike those two films (and Ruggero Deodato's 1980 exploitation classic "Cannibal Holocaust"), Romero dresses up "Diary" like a regular studio film. He adds narration, a score, sound effects and two-camera shots for cutaways. The extent to which Romero bends over backward to justify using these traditional narrative elements in a student's digital "diary" is laughably absurd.
In Pennsylvania (really Canada), college filmmakers shooting a mummy movie hear reports about dead people (illegal immigrants at the beginning) rising up to chow down on the living.
The mummy actor, Ridley (Philip Riccio), jumps in his sports car and heads to his rich parents' home, leaving behind his cast and crew toˆ½ survive in a lumbering old RV.
The seldom-seen director Jason Creed (Josh Close) decides to make a documentary called "The Death of Death" and chronicle what happens to his fellow filmmakers, among them his narrator girlfriend Debra (Michelle Morgan) and their wisecracking, alcoholic film professor (Scott Wentworth).
The students first run into the undead by running them over in the RV. Mary (Tatiana Maslany), convinced they've killed innocent people, shoots herself, prompting her friends to dash her to a hospital filled with dead people.
Later, the students encounter paramilitary bandits, a makeshift resistance group, a deaf Amish farmer (an inspired, blackly comic segment) and eventually wind up at Ridley's house, a survivalist compound that becomes as much a trap as it does a haven.
Creed continues to tape, and conveniently finds a second camera so his pal Tony (Shawn Roberts) can chronicle the carnage. When attacked by chomping zombies, Creed doesn't run away, he actually moves in for close-ups.
"If it's not on camera, it's like it never happened, right?" Debra says, suggesting today's technologically obsessed students prefer to deal with reality as a media product rather than as first-hand experience.
The original "Night of the Living Dead" hit hard on racism and humanity's inability to work together to save itself. Romero's sequel "Dawn of the Dead" (1979) criticized the cannibalistic effects of a consumer-obsessed world.
"Diary of the Dead" almost parodies Romero's work, especially when the winking professor comments on the "thread of social criticism" in their mummy movie, filled with amateurish talent that doesn't improve even after the performers stop "acting" for Creed.
It took Zack Snyder's 2004 remake of "Dawn of the Dead" to revitalize the zombie genre with a jaw-dropping opening sequence that whisks us from an ordinary suburban morning into explosive Armageddon within a matter of minutes.
How sad that Romero, the father of modern zombie movies, fails to pump new life into the undead genre.
"Diary of the Dead"
Two stars
Starring: Michelle Morgan, Josh Close, Shawn Roberts, Amy Lalonde and Joe DiNicol
Directed by: George Romero
Other: A Weinstein Company release. Rated R (extreme gore and violence, language, nudity). Running time: 95 minutes.