DIARY OF THE DEAD (R) ***

 

Directed by George A. Romero. 95 minutes.

Starring Michelle Morgan, Joshua Close, Amy Ciupak Lalonde, Joe Dinicol and Shawn Roberts. Released by The Weinstein Company.

 

There’s a lot to chew on, both literally and figuratively, in Diary of the Dead, George A. Romero’s fifth installment to his living dead series. As the films move forward, Romero’s zombies continue to become less and less of a menace, a presence even, than in the previous films as sociopolitical ideas and critiques take center stage in the series. This is mostly a good thing. I did not find Diary of the Dead to be as eerie as Night of the Living Dead, as shocking and visceral as Dawn of the Dead or as repulsive as Day of the Dead (my least favorite of the series), but Romero continues to pick away at our culture and at our species in general through these films. In Diary, which is supposed to take place at the same time as Night in some sort of parallel universe or whatever, we have become zombified by the 24 hour news cycle, the You Tubification of our culture and by cinema itself, or something to that tune.

 

As the picture opens, a student film crew from Pitt University is shooting a low budget mummy epic in the Pennsylvania woods as their alcoholic professor looks on bemused. There’s the tough talking Queens native who does not like the way the film is being shot, the lead actress who does not understand why she has to bear her bosom onscreen, the loutish male lead, the no-nonsense girlfriend, the religious van driver and, of course, the director, whose persona is basically vive la cinema! throughout the film’s proceedings as the dead find there is no more room in hell. News reports – voiced by Wes Craven, Quentin Tarantino and Stephen King – tell our crew that the recently dead have come back to life and have a knack for gnawing on flesh. The crew hits the road and Jason, the director, decides he must film it all ala Cloverfield because, as his girlfriend puts it, “if it isn’t on film, it’s as if it never happened.”

 

The film, much like Stephen King’s Cell by way of Redacted, is a road trip, which leads the film’s characters to rural Pennsylvania, where they discover black militants, asshole military men, a zombified family and a Molotov cocktail-throwing Amish farmer. Jason’s footage is interspersed with real, or should I say reel, footage of lootings, riots and mass hysteria. You know, cats and dogs living together. The crew, both somewhat detached from reality and creating reality themselves, splices together their film on the road and being surprised when their work in progress gets thousands of hits on You Tube.

 

The film strikes a nice balance of satire and horror and, although it’s never particularly frightening, Diary successfully creates a sense of unease. Romero’s targets are pretty wide here, but he pretty much nails it, from the distortion of truth through media manipulation and the fact that our every waking minute and tragedy is caught live on film to much deeper truths about the nature of mankind. Watch the film’s final scene, an aside thrown into Jason’s own The Death of Death film that sort of re-imagines some moments from both Night and Dawn, and tell me if you are not smiling at Romero’s cynicism. It’s nice to see that the director, at age 67, still has bite – pun intended.

 

At times, the acting is not exactly phenomenal- not distracting, but not phenomenal. I’ll leave it at that. Granted, the performances in Dawn and Land of the Dead were not the focal point either, but I cared more about the people in those previous films. In fact, the death of a character with whom we are supposed to sort of identify and, I guess, care about was greeted with cheers from the audience with whom I saw the film. No matter. Romero has succeeded once again by creating a film filled with dead people that is bursting with cinematic life. He is one of the few directors that can rub our contemporary societal ills in our faces without seeming self righteous. It’s fitting that one of America’s wittiest critics during a time of unspeakable horrors is, in fact, a horror filmmaker. Here’s a film in which the mass media really does sort of eat itself.