Dead Last

Diary of the Dead. Directed by George Romero. Starring Joshua Close, Scott Wentworth, and Michelle Morgan.

Most of the actors are hip, annoying twenty-somethings, and Diary of the Dead tries to emulate The Blair Witch Project shaky cam school of horror films, but Romero shows his true colors early on in Diary of the Dead:

How many times have I told you? 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.

Lenny Bruce was right. There is nothing sadder than an aging hipster. Romero lets you know he doesn't approve of the innovations made to the zombie genre since Return of the Living Dead and culminating in Zack Snyder's remake of Dawn of the Dead.

Any suspense generated by Diary of the Dead is purely accidental. Digital cameras can really get up in the viewers face (for example, 28 Weeks Later) and while there are a couple of nice scares they feel almost perfunctory. Romero loves his static shots, and most of the footage consists of medium or long shots. What's the point of shooting on digital though, if the director doesn't want to get up close and personal to his subject?

While ostensibly an "amateur" project shot on digital camera, most of the scenes looked like they were shot on a tripod rather than by a real person carrying the camera. Clubbing the audience over the head with a political message is Romero's top priority. One really over long scene dwelt at some length on the real, white liberal nightmare: armed black men stockpiling valuables.

In a Romero film, social commentary is always more important than the action seen onscreen. The characters spend too much time to pontificating and debating man's fundamental existential dilemma before they get mauled to death. Entertainment? As far as Romero is concerned, that's for people out in the suburbs who probably vote Republican.

Not unlike the Winnebago the kids are driving around in, I suspect Romero's political views are frozen in time, lost in the haze of the seventies. Romero isn't really pissed off at Dubya. I think he's still angry about Nixon, and was probably too baked at that time to put out a more coherent polemic on film. Not that he's really doing any better now, but I'm sure it's cathartic for the old guy.

If you want to make a social statement, George, join Michael Moore's crew when he starts shooting his next documentary. If you aren't prepared to make something as entertaining as Creepshow, why not leave the field open for younger, more talented directors like Zack Snyder?