Movies That Suck/Franchises: Romero's Dead Films. Diary of the Dead (2008)

Barely two years after the release of Land of the Dead, George Romero began making a fifth film in his dead series, which was surprising given how all the other movies were in completely different decades from each other and with the twenty year gap Day of the Dead and Land. And unlike the big budget previous film, this one went back to the low budget roots of the franchise, being independently-produced by a company started by Romero and his friend, Peter Grunwald, and with a meager $2 million to work with, although it was distributed by a major studio, Dimension Films, in selected theaters in February of 2008. Like Land of the Dead, I didn't see it until that winter when I got it on DVD as a Christmas present (which I did ask for, mind you) and, before I went into it, I have to admit was already turned off when I heard that, rather than another sequel, this film was a reboot of the series, viewing the beginning of the zombie outbreak from a completely different perspective, namely from the aesthetic of "found footage." However, once I got over that initial resistance, I felt that viewing it from that angle could work... as long as it was done well, which I really don't think it was. I know there are many diehard Romero fans, as well as mainstream movie critics, out there who feel that he made another masterpiece but for me, as much as I may have thought Land of the Dead was overly preachy, this one turned out to be far worse in terms of pretentiousness and how utterly forgettable it is. 

The framing device is a documentary titled, The Death of Death, which we're being shown by Debra Monaham, the girlfriend of the deceased student filmmaker who began shooting it, who says that this is meant to be a record of how it all began and that it is meant to scare the viewer. The main storyline involves how said filmmaker, Jason Creed, a film student at the University of Pittsburgh, was making a student horror film with his friends and one of his professors when the outbreak of zombies begins. After picking up Debra, Jason and everyone else attempt to flee to safety, initially to the Scranton home of Debra's parents and eventually to the mansion home of another of their friends, all the while running into increasing hordes of the undead and realizing that, as they try to use it to keep themselves updated on the situation, the media begins slowly but surely proving that it can't be trust. At the same time, Jason decides to continue filming in order to show the truth of what went down in retrospect, which makes him very insensitive towards the feelings and even the safety of the others.

As much as I love and respect George Romero, I think this is the film where he once and for all lost his mojo. Bruiser and Land of the Dead were the start of that, especially the former, but here, he forgot how to make an entertaining and interesting movie first and became preoccupied with hammering you over the head with whatever he's trying to teach you. Some may feel that his films have always been that way and maybe they're right but, the difference is, I could appreciate it more in those earlier movies because there was a lot more to them; here, there's nothing but the message and it's not conveyed in the most effective way possible, so I find this movie dire to sit through. Even more disconcerting, it often feels like we're being lectured to by an old man who is so out of his depth and doesn't understand his subject that well, like his wagging his finger at us and saying, "You kids today, with your internet and cameras," and such. I guess that's an inevitability for everyone but, given how he was able to approach his subjects in the past, it's sad to see how far Romero has fallen.

Just to stay on topic, as well as for another reason I'll get into in a minute, I'll start my criticism with the themes of the film. This time, Romero's talking about both the media and the YouTube generation, where everyone has a camera and is always filming everything. The core idea that he's trying to go with is an interesting one: how would all of these cameras and the internet be used if something as cataclysmic as dead people returning to life and attacking the living happened? There's a lot of potential there. Unfortunately, Romero decides to just wallow in it purely in his writing and pander and preach to the choir as if he's teaching a college class. That leads me into the main reason why I decided to start my review with the theme: because the characters themselves hardly talk about anything else. I swear, just about every line of dialogue is pretentious crap about how Jason Creed is obsessed with recording everything, that he won't put down the camera, no matter what happens, and how to him, "If it didn't happen on camera, it's like it didn't happen at all, right?" (Debra says that line twice, in case we didn't get it the first time.) And not only that, the film's framing device intercuts with news clips and radio broadcasts while Debra narrates about what happens when everybody starts filming, how it numbs you to what you're seeing, and... ugh, just stop! I get it! People are obsessed with filming stuff in this day and age, especially when something bad is happening.

Could the title be more redundant?

In fact, the core idea of the story is very flawed and makes it feel like Romero does not quite understand what he's trying to talk about. First off, what we're supposed to be seeing is Jason's film that Debra has finished for him. Question: in the context of the movie, who is supposed to be watching it? Who's going to be around after a zombie apocalypse to watch this thing? And for what purpose? Debra says that she hopes the film will help the viewers to "wake up" and not make the same mistakes she and her friends made but, by that point, isn't it a little too late for that? Here's an even bigger mystery; when the group stops at a small National Guard base and Jason uploads his footage to the internet, he says that within minutes, he's got thousands of hits. Again, who are all these people who aren't worried about what's going on and are just sitting at their computer, watching this stuff? Don't they have more important stuff to do, like trying to find shelter or making their homes zombie-proof? What's hilarious about this is that the movie itself sometimes points out the flaws of this main idea, like when Jason tells one of the National Guardsmen that he's shooting "home movies" and he asks, "Who's gonna be left to watch?"

And by the way, does this movie feel like it could be taking place around the same time as Night of the Living Dead, as Romero says it does? It doesn't feel that way to me. That film had such an air of the 60's about it, with the way everybody looked, talked, and even dressed to some extent, not to mention the vehicles, the radios, and the television sets, that it's very hard for me to believe that this story about filming the beginning of a zombie outbreak with digital cameras and uploading it to the internet is happening just miles away from Ben and company dealing with the siege on the farmhouse. Of course, you could say that it's also hard to fathom that Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead take place weeks or even a year or so after Night because of how much they feel like movies from their respective decades, especially Dawn, but it's easier for me to suspend my disbelief there. Once I see a bunch of digital cameras and modern computer screens, as well as college students who look and talk the way they do here, it feels so definitively like a movie from the 2000's that the idea of it taking place at the same time as a movie from the 60's is nearly impossible for me to swallow. It especially doesn't mesh when you hear audio from Night's news reports on the radio because of how it stands out from all of the others in terms of both audio quality and performance.

Just as bad as, or maybe even worse than, that idea is the message about the media. While the truth about the internet and all of the video cameras in the world seems to have flown over Romero's head, here he really tries to pound into you what he's trying to say and it's nothing you haven't heard before: the media lies, it makes up stuff, it doesn't give you all the details, etc. Again, you're bombarded with all of these clips of the media and they're often accompanied by Debra's pretentious narration, with lines like, "The media were lying to us, or the government was lying to them. They were trying to make it seem like everything was gonna be all right," or, "The more voices there are, the more spin there is. The truth becomes that much harder to find. In the end it's all just noise." It's eye-rolling, and if she's not preaching to you about it, the characters themselves mention it, like when they note that they changed footage of a zombie attack from how it seemed earlier. All you would have needed was the dialogue from the police chief (Romero himself), where he tells the press, "These attacks were carried out by a bunch of illegal immigrants who were mistakenly pronounced dead before the attacks took place. The only time they were dead was when my guys shot 'em," followed by the footage to get across that they're full of shit. You didn't need someone to spell it out for us.

Also, Romero's dialogue is some of the most ham-fisted, overly dramatic, preachy crap I've ever heard. That seems to be a growing trend in movies in general nowadays but it's especially bad in this film. It seems like Romero forgot he was writing a screenplay and wrote it as if it was a damn novel. The college professor played by Scott Wentworth is the worst offender in that regard. (By the way, does that guy's voice remind anyone else of Geoffrey Rush? At first, I thought it was him for a moment.) He always gives these long, melodramatic speeches, talking about how it was during the war when killing became justified and how he has no home to go to because he's a wandering spirit. Nothing he says is ever casual dialogue from him; it's always a big speech like he's living in Shakespeare's time. The one that slays me is a line at the end of the film where he says he doesn't like mornings or mirrors, mornings because,"I prefer the darkness. It's easier to hide in the dark," and mirrors because, as well as mornings, they "only serve to terrify old men." Give me a freaking break. The only times I liked him were when he shut the hell up and took out some zombies with a bow and arrow and later an antique sword. In those moments, he was a badass; otherwise, he's annoying. And you know what, looking back at Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead, I realize that there were indeed instances of this overdone, pretentious dialogue there as well, like in Day when John says, "It takes more energy to keep quiet than it does to speak the mind," but because everything else, including the characters, was so well done and engaging, I was able to overlook it. In a movie like this, it's impossible for me to do so.

At the beginning of the film, the professor says a throwaway line about the basic gist of the horror film they're shooting, saying it has, "an undercurrent of social satire." That's the key word: undercurrent, as well as subtext. This is not subtext; this is just text. If Romero wanted to talk about this stuff, he might as well have just a made documentary about it rather than shoving it into something that's supposed to be a horror movie at the end of the day. I hate to keep repeating myself but, once again, while I can appreciate a little subtext and depth, ultimately all I care about is being entertained. This is not entertaining. It's just preachy. And, going back to the dialogue, a lot of it sounds like stuff film critics writing about the movie would say. Listening to some of it, like that comment about the altered footage I mentioned earlier, it's as if Romero said to himself, "People are too stupid to understand what anything really means anymore, so I'll just outright tell them." The part where Debra is filming a zombie attack along with Jason and she stops filming because she realizes she's becoming like him is a prime example. If it had just ended there, it wouldn't have been too hard to figure out why she stopped, but no, instead, she has to come out and say, "I don't want to become you."

The other major flaw of the movie is the characters, none of which are memorable, at least not in a good way, or well-acted. Except for the professor, it seems like all them are Canadians trying to sound American and it doesn't feel convincing. The most painful example is Amy Lalonde's performance as Tracy, the woman who was acting in the student film. The character is from Texas and so, Lalonde puts on a very stereotypical, cringe-inducing accent that sounds nothing less than like someone who's never been to the south trying very hard to sound like they're from there. As Debra, Michelle Morgan does nothing to make her particularly likable, coming across as very bland, and in the end she decides to finish Jason's film and, despite all of her criticisms, becomes like him for no apparent reason, with her after the fact narration proving that. How and why did that happen? Other than them and the professor, none of the other characters do anything particularly memorable. In fact, they're so forgettable that the only reason I'm remembering their names and who played them is because I'm reading it off Wikipedia; otherwise, I'd only be able to remember them either visually or by their actions. Case in point, I remember Eliot (Joe Dinicol) because he was the kind of nerdy guy with his big glasses, Ridley (Philip Riccio) because he spends the entire movie dressed up as a mummy for the student film they were shooting (fitting, since he becomes a zombie), Mary (Tatiana Maslany) because she attempts suicide due to guilt for running over some people (refusing to believe that they were zombies) and eventually becomes undead, and Gordo (Chris Violette) for getting bitten in a hospital and Tracy, who's his girlfriend, having to eventually kill him after he becomes reanimated. They're also idiots because, when they get to Ridley's big mansion at the end of the film, they keep leaving the damn doors open! They deserve what they get for that blatant stupidity.

Jason Creed (Joshua Close), the leader of the film project, however, is the worst character of all, which really sucks since he's basically the lead. I wasn't kidding earlier when I said that he's so committed to filming what's going on that he doesn't give a flying shit what's happening to his friends and doesn't do anything to help them when they're in danger. The worst example of this is near the end of the film, when Tracy is getting chased by a zombie and Jason does nothing to help, saying, "I'm shooting!" What kind of an uncaring asshole is this guy? Some people have tried to defend him by saying he's just so obsessed with it but somebody on an IMDB message board responded to that in the best way possible: rather than making me relate to him, it just alienates me from him more. I don't care how obsessive somebody is, I doubt they would just do nothing unless they're psychotic or a sociopath.

Another big problem is that the tone of the film sometimes feels out of whack, as the characters are often saying funny stuff and making jokey remarks when they shouldn't. Yes, there was a lot of funny stuff in Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead but they kept with the overall tones of those particular movies. This is meant to be grim, serious, and, I assume given the motif of the film, realistic, but it's absolutely botched by these dumb moments. Even worse, remember the scene I talked about earlier where Tracy is being chased by a zombie? After she subdues said zombie, she says, "Don't mess with Texas," which was bad enough but then, just to add even more cheese, you hear a few chords of Dueling Banjos. That just floored me, especially when Debra said at the beginning that she added some music to the footage in order to enhance it. What was that meant to enhance? The stupidity of what's going on? And speaking of music, which is by Norman Orenstein, it's not only generic and forgettable but it also never fails to ruin any suspense or eeriness the film would've had if it was just dead quiet, as most of these types of movies are for good reason.

The zombies and the gore effects are another aspect of this movie that is a major letdown. Since this is the beginning of the apocalypse, the zombies' makeup designs are very basic and unimpressive, with no particularly well-designed wounds or scars to them and few of them stand out, except maybe the one in the hospital played by Greg Nicotero, the undead patrolman they come across, and Debra's zombified mother and little brother. The deaths of the zombies and their victims are also very basic: typical throat-ripping and munching on body parts, an electrocution in the bathtub for Eliot, gunshots to the head, a group of zombies getting blown up by dynamite, an IV pole through the head, an arrow to the head for Debra's little brother, and Ridley's head getting sliced in half by an antique sword. I guess by this point, we'd been spoiled with the fantastic makeup effects in the previous movies, making this one disappointing because it's so restrained. The most creative death for both a character and a zombie at the same time is when Samuel, the deaf Amish guy they come across, gets grabbed from behind and bitten, prompting to stab himself right through his head with a scythe, doing the same to the zombie. There are other more creative zombie deaths in the film, like one getting a defibrillator to the sides of its head, causing its eyeballs to explode, another that gets acid thrown on its head, which slowly eats away the skin, and the last shot being of a zombie hanging from a tree that gets shot through the middle of its face, leaving only the top of its head hanging, and they all could have become classics... had they not been achieved by horrible CGI. In order to breeze through shooting more quickly, Romero used CGI even more so than in the previous film and because of the film's very low budget (which also resulted in an overall look that's far worse than Land of the Dead), it's so terribly rushed and bottom of the barrel in terms of its quality that it absolutely ruins those scenes and takes you out of the movie. Hands down, the worst effect in the film, aside from that final shot (even before it gets blown apart, the hanging zombie is clearly computer-generated), is a moment where Ridley shows Jason and Debra that there are a number of zombies wandering around the bottom of his estate's swimming pool. I don't even have to describe it. Just look at it. Does that not look like something of a PlayStation 2 game?

While we're on the subject of the zombies, another thing that gets tiring aside from the constant beating over the head of the theme and the pretentious dialogue is Romero's need to remind us that, "Dead things don't run." He's always hated the whole "running zombie" concept that first started with 28 Days Later (again, not really a zombie movie to me, but whatever) and really caught a lot of attention in the remake of Dawn of the Dead, and I don't understand why. Aside from the simple fact that zombies aren't real and, therefore, it's unnecessary to preoccupy yourself with how they would or wouldn't move in reality, it's like he doesn't get how scary the concept of running zombies is. Those guys will be able to catch you no problem, especially since they can't get tired due to they're being, you know, dead. Romero has always seemed to be unable to enjoy other zombie movies that weren't made by him (aside from Shaun of the Dead) and doesn't respond well to people tampering with the "rules" that he established in Night of the Living Dead. Therefore, there are several times in this film where the character of Jason Creed makes it clear that the undead wouldn't be able to run. He directs Ridley in this way while filming the student movie at the beginning, telling him, "Dead things don't move fast. You're a corpse, for Christ's sakes. If you run that fast, your ankles are gonna snap off," and at another point, he yells, "See? I told you dead things move slow!" It's like, "George, we get it! You don't like running zombies. Fine. That's your prerogative. But get over it and stop trying to shove it down everyone's throats, for God's sake."

By this point, you're probably thinking, "Man, Cody, you're pretty harsh towards this movie. Is there anything in it you did like?" Well actually, like Land of the Dead, there were some aspects of it that I did indeed like. My favorite part of the whole film was the deaf Amish guy, Samuel (R.D. Reid) they come across. He was just awesome with how he was no nonsense and took care of business by throwing dynamite at the zombies and slicing into others with his scythe... and then they kill him. He gets the best practical death in the film, yes, but still, I'm like, "Way to go, Romero." The other things I liked were two video clips that they see on the net. One was a video of a little girl's birthday party, where the clown turns out to be a zombie and attacks the partygoers, which struck me because I always find that kind of twisting of something that's supposed to be happy, memorable, and exciting for a little child to be very disturbing. And then, there was a clip from Tokyo where a young woman says that everything is going to hell there, telling anybody who's watching, "Don't bury dead. Shoot in head!" I found that unsettling because it proved that the zombies are was appearing all over the world, not just in America. In the other films, we always assumed that it was a world-wide thing but here, we get confirmation and it makes the situation all the more frightening.

Diary of the Dead not only had the misfortune of being given a limited release but it also came out a couple of months after Cloverfield (which used the point-of-view gimmick much better, I might add) and, by that point, people were already tired of the POV horror style, even though it was actually just getting warmed up. But, as I've said, that was the least of the film's problems. I hate ragging on Romero this much but there's no denying that the guy does not make films the way he used to and, as I've said, his biggest problem is that he now cares more about the messages he's trying to convey than anything else, which the movies suffer for. In my opinion, he needs to be a filmmaker first and a social studies teacher second, and if he can't, then he should either just make documentaries about his views or retire. In case you're wondering, I still haven't seen Survival of the Dead, his follow-up to this. I'm afraid to see it because I hear it's even worse than this, which is quite an accomplishment. He's apparently making movies so bad that they're only worth watching to satisfy your curiosity as to how bad they can get. If I ever do see Survival of the Dead, you guys will, as always, be the first to know my thoughts. For now, I'm moving on.