Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. When I first heard the concept of George A. Romero’s DIARY OF THE DEAD I wasn’t exactly taken with it. The pitch line was BLAIR WITCH meets NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and that didn’t sound at all interesting to me.

However it was George Romero and he’s earned a lot of trust when it comes to Zombie movies. I wasn’t sold, but I kept my faith in Romero’s vision.

The film opens with some raw news footage, what is widely regarded as the first footage capturing the zombie outbreak. It’s one camera with a newscaster preparing her report. You hear the cameraman as they go over what the report is going to look like. They’re covering an apparent murder in a rather poor apartment complex.

How we’re introduced to the plague set my mind at ease. This was not only creepy, but really smartly executed. The opening made me sigh with relief. It captured exactly what they were going for with this updated introduction into a somewhat parallel Romero world. The way we see the outbreak in the film is just the way we’d see it now, either on TV or through the web.

Thank God, I thought. But then the rest of the movie started.

We’re introduced to our main characters shooting a mummy movie on video in the woods near their campus. It was about the first couple of times they winked at the camera going, “Man… we’re sure in a Romero zombie movie, aren’t we?” that the fear came creeping back.

Yes, it’s cute to hear them joke about how the mummy is moving too fast and that dead things move slow. I get it. I can even forgive it because it sets up a good situation later, however they even bungle that.

What I was most disappointed with was the lack of any sort of subtlty or layering. Romero’s movies have always had a great subtext, be it satirizing consumerism in DAWN or racism in NIGHT. Here there is no subtext. Just text.

It’s not a cryptic line, “They’re us.” It’s multiple people staring into the camera blatantly talking about our need for pure information, untainted by the commercial network news spin.

I saw a movie a couple years ago at the American Film Market that I was really excited to see. It was the new Dario Argento movie and it was called THE CARD DEALER. I walked out of that movie extremely worked up. It was horrible and even worse, it didn’t feel like an Argento movie. It maybe felt a little bit like someone trying to ape an Argento movie or mimic an Argento movie, but that only made it more upsetting.

I feel very much the same feeling about DIARY OF THE DEAD. It feels like someone trying to make a George Romero movie. “Hey, I got a message! Let’s slap it on there! Hey, let’s homage Romero’s early work and talk about how slow the dead would be!”

I think one of Romero’s strongest traits as a filmmaker is who he picks to be the focus of his films. I love every one of the characters in the house in NIGHT. Such great, layered work there. Same with DAWN. The group is perfectly fitted with each other. Flyboy is plain as hell, but he has a nice arc and he’s off-set by Roger. Even in DAY OF THE DEAD you have a bug-fuck crazy bad guy and tons of interesting and colorful characters, not the least of which is Bub, the zombie.

The college kids that are the focus of this movie are completely uninteresting. They’re as clichéd as can be, the choices they make defy all logic and, worse of all, they’re just dull. It’s a bunch of Flyboys without a Roger.

What’s even sadder is we are introduced to a few characters that are actually really interesting as our RV full of retarded, self-important college douchebags drives the backroads.

My favorite character in the film was Samuel, a deaf Amish man who is particularly old school in taking out zombies. But he’s only in the movie for 4 minutes. If I was King of All Movies, I’d grant Romero a budget to just make a movie about Samuel surviving the zombie plague. How great is that? A mute dude who refuses to use any of the benefits of technology to survive a zombie uprising? How badass is that?

But, no… we have to get a few more tearful “I have to record this instead of helping because it becomes real when I put the camera down and I can’t let that happen!” to the camera.

Then we meet the leader of a Black militia that goes against any sort of stereotype you’d expect. Again, a nice Romero twist on things and the other interesting character in the movie. And again, he doesn’t get much screentime.

The whole idea of seeing this only through footage is an interesting one, but at the same time it still just boils down to a gimmick, which is fine, but a gimmick needs strong character work and good actors to make it more than that.

The acting is bad throughout, particularly in the leads. There's even one girl who is playing a Texan... yee-haws and all... Her accent drops throughout the movie and that wouldn't have really been a big deal if her character was at all interesting.

Listen, I’m happy Romero sold the movie to the Weinsteins and I’m also happy that my disappointment in the movie doesn’t seem to be the common opinion if the reviews out of Toronto are any indication. I don’t like feeling this disappointed by a Romero film and I wish I could give myself over to this one like many others have, but it just didn’t work for me.

Maybe with the success of this film Romero will keep getting to make movies the way he wants to make them and he’ll pop out some great indie work in the coming years. I certainly don’t think he’s lost his touch, I just think he made a misstep with this one.

-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com