META-DEAD
by Chris Knipp

In Diary of the Dead an African American who has "died" and turned into a zombie gets acid thrown on his head and we watch him shamble down the aisle of a storage warehouse as the top of his cranium is rapidly being eaten away. In another frame, many in fact, young film students point professional-size video cameras at one another, accusing each other of recording disaster instead of doing something about it. George A. Romero, who of course is responsible for the seminal 1968 low-budget zombie picture, Night of the Living Dead, still works the old vein in this new movie. There are family members "turned" to monsters who take lethal bites out of their relatives' flesh. And there are folks holed up watching those familiar acres of wandering creeps outside. Typically for Romero, there's a regional Pennsylvania setting, a strong anti-establishment feel, and an equally strong blast of pessimism. But the director has updated the form to make it less a gore-fest and more a think piece. It's hip, it's media- and tech-aware and in touch with the young generation. Or at least it means to be. But it's still a nauseating B-picture full of the old cheap thrills--too full for non-fans--but probably not full enough for true gluttons of gore.

The film relates to 1999's Blair Witch Project in that it follows the pretense that every frame has been shot by a group of Pennsylvania college students who are shown at first in the woods making a mummy movie as part of a college filmmaking class, then get wind of the real horror of a worldwide zombie takeover and go into flight, carrying their filmmaking equipment with them to make the footage we watch, which is blended with offloads from TV and the Internet, whose relative reliability is commented upon. One of the class members narrates, and admits she's done some editing and added in some sound effects to keep the collective video "diary" scary. This makes the movie humorously self-referential. It is also, like Blair Witch, a clever way of justifying cheap visuals. Surely it's a heck of a coincidence that the kids are shooting a Romero-like movie shortly after this movie begins; but the comic aspects aren't milked this time.

Basically this is just a series of action sequences--street scene with TV news crew; film class shoot; class flight on the road in a van; trip to a hospital where all hell has broken loose; encounter with (deaf!) Amish man at a farm (that one is pretty funny); run-ins with black men who've taken over a warehouse; nasty encounter with marauding National Guardsmen. After several safe havens turn out not to be, what's left of the film class by then, along with their alcoholic but resourceful Brit prof (Scott Wentworth), winds up at the fortress house of their rich classmate Ridley (Philip Riccio), who was lead actor in Jason's film and is still in mummy costume. Watch out! He's the lead actor: he may not be what he seems. Each of these scenes sparkles with some cool new ideas, despite the worn premise.

Jason Creed (Josh Close) is the main filmmaker, who's criticized by his whiny girlfriend Debra (Michelle Morgan), who keeps nagging him: "So if you don't film it, it's like it never happened." But this is very different from Blair Witch: the world s out there, and these young people are in touch with it.

It's a commonplace now that not only do millions of people all over the globe have video cameras always at hand, or, in the absence of that, cell phones with cameras embedded in them; they also know how to upload and download, edit and post on YouTube. Thus (as happens in Diary of the Dead) a gory "real life" horror moment, if one happens in your neighborhood, can be uploaded immediately onto YouTube--and get 70,000 hits in a few minutes. And so the young film class witnesses of zombie horror in the movie, at least those most motivated by their drunken professor, wind up more bent on becoming famous on the Internet--and showing what the mainstream media has hidden--than on saving themselves or others from the every-growing army of flesh-gobbling dead. Or at least until the delivery system for the Internet and the electrical power supply run out in a global meltdown.

Diary of the Dead will keep you watching, and it's smarter, or at least more "meta" and richer in good story ideas, than your standard-issue cut-rate horror movie. It's interesting how Romero can change with the times, yet still mine the same narrow genre. My response was a mixture of interest and annoyance. Blatant and secondhand as it is, Romero's post-modern self-reflexiveness is rather fun to meet up with in this cheapo setting. But after good satires like Simon Pegg's Shaun of the Dead, the basic premise, presented with unadorned seriousness, can't help but seem threadbare. That rocking, pigeon-toed zombie walk: how can anybody still take it seriously? Nobody can claim this is a wholly fresh take on its themes, nor is it memorably scary.

Bigger budget flicks are always expanding on the way modern media technology would function in a time of mega-disaster. And zombie and global killer viruses have had more original recent treatments in movies like Children of Men. 28 Days ... and 28 Weeks Later. Still, Romero, for whom this is film five in his "Dead" franchise and follows hard upon his well-received 2005 Land of the Dead, deserves respect and attention from film fans for his inexhaustible enthusiasm for a theme that has spawned so many variations since his unbeatable, ur-terrifying 1968 debut.

©2008 Chris Knipp
CineScene