Fans will be pleased others confused
George A. Romero’s films are troublesome. They aren’t good films. At least they aren’t good films in the way that Paul Thomas Anderson makes good films. They’re extremely self-conscious celebrations of gory fantasy violence that have achieved cult status through a combination of their lovably ham-fisted satire political commentary and — let’s not forget — an outrageous hilarious glorious amount of entrails. But isn’t rewarding a self-consciously bad film because y’know we get it kind of smug?
The first three Dead films ( Night of the Living Dead plus Dawn and Day ) strike exactly the right balance between oblivious callowness and what was at the time a genuinely interesting message for a horror film: humanity may not be worth saving. Since Romero returned to the Dead verse with Land of the Dead however he hasn’t made any effort to update those nasty “serious” bits which makes the irony a lot harder to buy into.
The story follows a group of film students and their professor in the first days following the initial rise of the flesh-eating dead. The film opens on growling self-serious monologue delivered by Debra (Michelle Morgan) the girlfriend of the film’s tacit protagonist Jason (Joshua Close): “This film was collected from several sources” she says. “I’ve edited it together and added music to scare you. Because make no mistake — I am trying to scare you. Sometimes the truth isn’t enough.” After the beginning-to-end disappointment that was Land of the Dead it’s an excellent start.
Besides providing the perfect excuse for the film’s verite style Debra’s weighty narration at first seems to mark a return to form for Romero’s writing. It’s not brilliant by any means but it is smart enough to justify his constant good-natured jabs at Zack Snyder and the torture-porn subgenre. Sadly it’s all downhill from those provocative opening lines. Throughout the rest of Diary the dialogue oscillates between dull banter and self-important dreck consistently awful well beyond what would be excused by Romero’s sporadic genre-critique cheekiness.
Now here’s the troublesome part: Once the atrocious dialogue has been trimmed away the story is actually very good. Jason is an original protagonist; infuriating all of his friends (and the audience) with his devotion to his viewfinder he’s something like the zombie film equivalent of Atom Egoyan in Calendar . Romero is able to find a number of exceedingly clever ways to switch angles and keep the film visually interesting that are all embedded directly within the narrative itself and it never feels stilted or contrived ( Cloverfield eat your hat). Basically when Romero is making a horror movie about making horror movies Diary verges on excellent. When he takes off his clever-old-man hat in favour of his aging-filmmaker hat though no amount of experience or community gratitude could justify his characters’ supercilious preaching.
Diary of the Dead is a troublesome success then. It’s worth watching within the context of Romero’s previous films and the zombie genre at large but not worth seeing in and of itself. Romero fans will be interested either way but for those whose first experience with the walking dead involved Ving Rhames it will seem like a relic — a formally excellent film with dialogue and simplistic messages trapped in 1968.
