“We have all been mediatized. This is a generation that has been robbed of its innocence.”
I remember an English teacher I had in junior college saying this, and it always stayed with me because nothing could be truer. And this was back in 1994 or 1995, just after I graduated from high school. We had yet to fully discover the internet (I hadn’t yet anyway), and we were not even near to getting addicted to MySpace or You Tube. My English teacher had brought this up because she had seen this preview for a movie called “Far From Home: The Adventures Of Yellow Dog” with Bruce Davison and Mimi Rogers. It looked like a very innocent movie to her, and yet there were some teenagers in front of her who said:
“This looks so lame!”
I guess she felt that they were robbed of any chance they had of enjoying a film like this, and that they were more interested in watching something that was the polar opposite of what it had to offer. This may be true, and when you combine the loss of innocence with the ever growing world of technology, it seems more apparent than ever that there is no going back to the way things once were (assuming they were better than what we have now). We are now more “mediatized” than ever, and it may be hard to imagine what it would be like to live without all of that.
That seems to be the main sticking point of George Romero’s latest zombie opus, “Diary Of The Dead.” George takes aim at a generation that has been so sucked into You Tube and of watching things not just from a distance, but an emotional distance as well. We have become so enamored of our watching disasters and car crashes from afar that we seem robbed of our ability to actually help and do something about it. As a result, Romero’s vision of this generation is especially bleak as he is not sure if we as a whole are even worth saving.
The movie starts off as a film within a film, as we watch a horror film turned documentary called “The Death Of Death.” The horror film itself is not going so well as everything is behind schedule and the crew and actors are restless. All of a sudden, they hear on the news of the dead coming back to life, and everything changes forever. Some head home, and others head to the college for their girlfriends. From then on, it’s a race to home as the world is soon overrun by zombies…or so the internet and TV tells them. What are they gonna believe?
“Diary Of The Dead” can be seen as coming in too late as we just had “Cloverfield” released. Both films are filmed in a handheld camera style, but whereas “Cloverfield” used the technique as a gimmick, “Diary Of The Dead” uses it as a commentary on our fascination with watching the worst that life has to offer. Many people went crazy and beyond nauseous with the camerawork in “Cloverfield,” but those same people will be relieved to see that Romero and his Director of Photography (Adam Swica) have reined it in to where it shouldn’t alienate too many people.
Whereas the previous Dead movies dealt with a world being constantly consumed by an ever growing population of zombies that get increasingly intelligent, this one goes back to beginning to when the zombie onslaught began as if the previous movies never happened. At first, I was a little disappointed by this as it would have been interesting to see where the world would be at when this movie took place. But in the end, it makes more sense that George Romero would do this as the world would probably not reach such an advanced technological level had the zombies start rising from the dead back in the 1960’s.
The film crew is made up of different characters: The director Jason (Joshua Close) who acts though he believes that if it didn’t happen on camera, then it never happened at all. There’s his girlfriend Debra (Michelle Morgan) who gets increasingly annoyed with his filming everybody, Tony (Shawn Roberts) who looks like he is prepared to beat Jason to death, and there’s even the drunken film professor Maxwell (Scott Wentworth) who looks upon everything with a bemused attachment. What George Romero succeeds in doing as a writer is give us characters who aren’t simply types. If they come across as clichéd, they break those clichés to become increasingly unpredictable in their actions.
One of Romero’s other strong attributes is that he gives us strong characters with females and minorities. He started doing this a long time ago with “Night Of The Living Dead,” and it continues on with this one. The female character that comes across as the strongest here is Debra, played by Michelle Morgan. She is driven to get back to her family who are back at home, and she is not about to get sucked into watching things through a camera lens. Michelle gives the strongest performance in the movie, and she also narrates the movie within the movie, so you have a pretty good idea of what happens to her character.
While they venture to home in their old and stuffy Winnebago, they run into all sorts of people who are quickly learning to survive in a world that is forever changed by the onslaught of the zombies. They run into a squad of African Americans who have taken over a small town and all its supplies, and who refuse to leave the town. This is because for once, they have power over something that they have never had before, and you could see it as a sort of revenge against the white man for all they have put their people through. There is also a deaf Amish man who provides some of the funniest moments as he blows up some zombies with dynamite before introducing himself to the frenzied group of film students.
The movie does have its share of good scares, and has that same morbid humor that has been present in all of Romero’s “Dead” movies. That’s what makes these movies so relevant even after four decades after the very first one. They are really social commentary movies designed as zombie movies where Romero looks at how society is enslaved by its own wants, needs, beliefs and prejudices. The first “Dead” dealt with civil rights and gave us a black man as the chief protagonist, something that I don’t think had ever happened at that point. His ultimate destiny at the film’s climax said much about the times in which the movie was released. “Dawn Of The Dead” dealt with our quest for materialism, wealth, and of having everything we need. It also looked at how all of that ends up leaving us feeling empty and as dead as the zombies who look to tear their way into the mall for fresh human flesh. “Day Of The Dead” dealt with the paranoia and crazed determination of the military, and the inherent sexism in it and in the rest of the world. Then you had “Land Of The Dead” where Romero went after the well to do and how selfishly involved they are in their own interests, and of Reganomics which offered us the great lie of how this great wealth and riches could easily be yours when that was never the case at all.
Now with “Diary Of The Dead,” Romero’s take on our addiction to watching the unthinkable instead of doing anything to stop it, you have to look at all of Romero’s “Dead” movies in context to see that they are really a long chronicle of the decline of human civilization. It all started with civil rights and the reaction to it (positive and negative), and it’s been downhill ever since. To call this latest film bleak is a severe understatement. Romero doesn’t seem to hold out much hope (if any) for the human race at this point. The last scene in the movie questions the audience directly as to if we as a race are really worth saving or not. That scene will stay with you long after the movie has ended because the characters have only started to learn how to exist in a post-zombie world (shades of 9/11 do abound here and there).
If you’re wondering about the blood and gore, there is a good dose of it here, even if it is not quite on the same level as “Dawn” or “Day.” Still, there are some good kills throughout, and the characters make good use of a scythe and a bow and arrow. Romero, after all these years, doesn’t skimp on the good stuff. However, it still takes these characters way too long to figure out that the best way to defeat a zombie is to shoot it in the head.
The other interesting thing about the film is the way the characters and their reality are drawn out. Whereas in “Cloverfield,” there was a chance for safety for victory for what has dominating the citizens of New York, there is no real hope for the characters in “Diary Of The Dead.” Whether or not they make it home, they quickly realize that this is a conflict that will never cease. It will just get worse and worse until there is nothing left. The movie forces you to think about what you would do if you were in this situation, and that makes it all the more terrifying.
One of the big and most effective differences in this specific “Dead” film from Romero is that, unlike the others, there is no military presence. None of the characters have a clear idea of there is even a military left in their country. They are left to fend for themselves in a world that has gone dead on them, and their only link to the world is technology and the internet. But with everyone voicing their opinions through videos and blogs, who is to be believed when they’re so many different opinions circling around? All you have left is chaos and anarchy, and every man and woman for themselves. The characters in this movie are smart enough to recognize this almost immediately, and this makes the events for them all the more suffocating.
I remember an English teacher I had in junior college saying this, and it always stayed with me because nothing could be truer. And this was back in 1994 or 1995, just after I graduated from high school. We had yet to fully discover the internet (I hadn’t yet anyway), and we were not even near to getting addicted to MySpace or You Tube. My English teacher had brought this up because she had seen this preview for a movie called “Far From Home: The Adventures Of Yellow Dog” with Bruce Davison and Mimi Rogers. It looked like a very innocent movie to her, and yet there were some teenagers in front of her who said:
“This looks so lame!”
I guess she felt that they were robbed of any chance they had of enjoying a film like this, and that they were more interested in watching something that was the polar opposite of what it had to offer. This may be true, and when you combine the loss of innocence with the ever growing world of technology, it seems more apparent than ever that there is no going back to the way things once were (assuming they were better than what we have now). We are now more “mediatized” than ever, and it may be hard to imagine what it would be like to live without all of that.
That seems to be the main sticking point of George Romero’s latest zombie opus, “Diary Of The Dead.” George takes aim at a generation that has been so sucked into You Tube and of watching things not just from a distance, but an emotional distance as well. We have become so enamored of our watching disasters and car crashes from afar that we seem robbed of our ability to actually help and do something about it. As a result, Romero’s vision of this generation is especially bleak as he is not sure if we as a whole are even worth saving.
The movie starts off as a film within a film, as we watch a horror film turned documentary called “The Death Of Death.” The horror film itself is not going so well as everything is behind schedule and the crew and actors are restless. All of a sudden, they hear on the news of the dead coming back to life, and everything changes forever. Some head home, and others head to the college for their girlfriends. From then on, it’s a race to home as the world is soon overrun by zombies…or so the internet and TV tells them. What are they gonna believe?
“Diary Of The Dead” can be seen as coming in too late as we just had “Cloverfield” released. Both films are filmed in a handheld camera style, but whereas “Cloverfield” used the technique as a gimmick, “Diary Of The Dead” uses it as a commentary on our fascination with watching the worst that life has to offer. Many people went crazy and beyond nauseous with the camerawork in “Cloverfield,” but those same people will be relieved to see that Romero and his Director of Photography (Adam Swica) have reined it in to where it shouldn’t alienate too many people.
Whereas the previous Dead movies dealt with a world being constantly consumed by an ever growing population of zombies that get increasingly intelligent, this one goes back to beginning to when the zombie onslaught began as if the previous movies never happened. At first, I was a little disappointed by this as it would have been interesting to see where the world would be at when this movie took place. But in the end, it makes more sense that George Romero would do this as the world would probably not reach such an advanced technological level had the zombies start rising from the dead back in the 1960’s.
The film crew is made up of different characters: The director Jason (Joshua Close) who acts though he believes that if it didn’t happen on camera, then it never happened at all. There’s his girlfriend Debra (Michelle Morgan) who gets increasingly annoyed with his filming everybody, Tony (Shawn Roberts) who looks like he is prepared to beat Jason to death, and there’s even the drunken film professor Maxwell (Scott Wentworth) who looks upon everything with a bemused attachment. What George Romero succeeds in doing as a writer is give us characters who aren’t simply types. If they come across as clichéd, they break those clichés to become increasingly unpredictable in their actions.
One of Romero’s other strong attributes is that he gives us strong characters with females and minorities. He started doing this a long time ago with “Night Of The Living Dead,” and it continues on with this one. The female character that comes across as the strongest here is Debra, played by Michelle Morgan. She is driven to get back to her family who are back at home, and she is not about to get sucked into watching things through a camera lens. Michelle gives the strongest performance in the movie, and she also narrates the movie within the movie, so you have a pretty good idea of what happens to her character.
While they venture to home in their old and stuffy Winnebago, they run into all sorts of people who are quickly learning to survive in a world that is forever changed by the onslaught of the zombies. They run into a squad of African Americans who have taken over a small town and all its supplies, and who refuse to leave the town. This is because for once, they have power over something that they have never had before, and you could see it as a sort of revenge against the white man for all they have put their people through. There is also a deaf Amish man who provides some of the funniest moments as he blows up some zombies with dynamite before introducing himself to the frenzied group of film students.
The movie does have its share of good scares, and has that same morbid humor that has been present in all of Romero’s “Dead” movies. That’s what makes these movies so relevant even after four decades after the very first one. They are really social commentary movies designed as zombie movies where Romero looks at how society is enslaved by its own wants, needs, beliefs and prejudices. The first “Dead” dealt with civil rights and gave us a black man as the chief protagonist, something that I don’t think had ever happened at that point. His ultimate destiny at the film’s climax said much about the times in which the movie was released. “Dawn Of The Dead” dealt with our quest for materialism, wealth, and of having everything we need. It also looked at how all of that ends up leaving us feeling empty and as dead as the zombies who look to tear their way into the mall for fresh human flesh. “Day Of The Dead” dealt with the paranoia and crazed determination of the military, and the inherent sexism in it and in the rest of the world. Then you had “Land Of The Dead” where Romero went after the well to do and how selfishly involved they are in their own interests, and of Reganomics which offered us the great lie of how this great wealth and riches could easily be yours when that was never the case at all.
Now with “Diary Of The Dead,” Romero’s take on our addiction to watching the unthinkable instead of doing anything to stop it, you have to look at all of Romero’s “Dead” movies in context to see that they are really a long chronicle of the decline of human civilization. It all started with civil rights and the reaction to it (positive and negative), and it’s been downhill ever since. To call this latest film bleak is a severe understatement. Romero doesn’t seem to hold out much hope (if any) for the human race at this point. The last scene in the movie questions the audience directly as to if we as a race are really worth saving or not. That scene will stay with you long after the movie has ended because the characters have only started to learn how to exist in a post-zombie world (shades of 9/11 do abound here and there).
If you’re wondering about the blood and gore, there is a good dose of it here, even if it is not quite on the same level as “Dawn” or “Day.” Still, there are some good kills throughout, and the characters make good use of a scythe and a bow and arrow. Romero, after all these years, doesn’t skimp on the good stuff. However, it still takes these characters way too long to figure out that the best way to defeat a zombie is to shoot it in the head.
The other interesting thing about the film is the way the characters and their reality are drawn out. Whereas in “Cloverfield,” there was a chance for safety for victory for what has dominating the citizens of New York, there is no real hope for the characters in “Diary Of The Dead.” Whether or not they make it home, they quickly realize that this is a conflict that will never cease. It will just get worse and worse until there is nothing left. The movie forces you to think about what you would do if you were in this situation, and that makes it all the more terrifying.
One of the big and most effective differences in this specific “Dead” film from Romero is that, unlike the others, there is no military presence. None of the characters have a clear idea of there is even a military left in their country. They are left to fend for themselves in a world that has gone dead on them, and their only link to the world is technology and the internet. But with everyone voicing their opinions through videos and blogs, who is to be believed when they’re so many different opinions circling around? All you have left is chaos and anarchy, and every man and woman for themselves. The characters in this movie are smart enough to recognize this almost immediately, and this makes the events for them all the more suffocating.
I liked “Diary Of The Dead” a lot, and it shows that Romero is still a strong son of a bitch in the world of independent filmmaking. While the first three “Dead” movies are pretty much untouchable at this point, I would put this one ahead of “Land Of The Dead” which I thought was good but necessarily great. That film may have been encumbered by too much studio interference from Universal which gave Romero the money and budget he had been begging for years to get. This time around, he’s back to his independent roots and seems a lot more comfortable this time around. The movie’s pace does slow down a but too much in its last half which had me a bit restless, and some moments last longer than they should, but this was definitely worth a visit to the Nuart Theater in West Los Angeles where the movie is currently playing in an exclusive engagement. Whether or not the movie gets a wide release remains to be seen.
Regardless of how bleak Romero’s view of the world continues to get in each of these movies, there is something to be said for his efforts to spend decades raising money to make them. There was a big lull between “Day Of The Dead” and “Land Of The Dead,” and that shows his endless determination to see his vision reach the screen one way or another. And here he is almost 40 years later, making a new zombie movie for a new generation. There may be room for another one Romero zombie yet, and there is hope to be had in that even if the world is still falling apart. I wouldn’t mind seeing him do one more, but I hope it comes out before the apocalypse hits us.
***1/2 out of ****
Excellent review.
I really liked this film too.
great review! I really wished I could have seen this, but it hasn't been anywhere near me. Well I guess I will check it out on DVD if all else fails.