Romero finds new twist on zombies
Published 12:45 pm Thursday, February 14, 2008
If the excellent and satiric “Land of the Dead” seemed like the last word in zombies from director George Romero, think again. “Diary of the Dead” finds yet another angle on a subject that refuses to die.
Romero began his career with “Night of the Living Dead” in 1968, and each time he comes back to zombies he always finds a different way to do it (none of the films is a sequel). As though to remind us of his low-budget indie past, Romero’s new one is shot on video with a cast of unknowns.
“Diary” purports to be the work of a young film student whose camera is rolling when the dead begin re-animating and chomping on the living. A little like “Cloverfield,” but with us as the monster.
In the opening sequence, supposedly a feed from a live TV report, Romero shows he hasn’t lost his ability to unnerve: We might not even notice at first that the people in the background of the shot, who are supposed to be corpses being loaded into an ambulance, are abruptly coming to life.
After that, we pick up with the group of young people, who are filming their own panic and escape from the zombie onslaught. Romero doesn’t cheapen or joke up their experiences.
Every now and then, he throws in other video or TV news reports they might have found — which accounts for the immortal moment when a family birthday party is interrupted by a party clown who turns out to be undead. Ouch.
The film students argue about the wisdom of continuing to film, a subject that is probably talked about too much. Michelle Morgan is a standout in the young cast, with Scott Wentworth adding some disenchantment as their older professor.
Romero has always engineered these zombie movies to work on two levels: to scare us, and to comment on how he sees the world around us working. (If you doubt that, try to think of a more entertaining attack on consumerism than “Dawn of the Dead.”)
On that score, “Diary of the Dead” is scathing. The ending is bleak, and it’s enough to make zombies lose hope. But only until the next movie.
