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I had originally planned to see this at the local international film festival earlier this year but missed out due to other plans. Now, George Romero's latest return to his most notable subject matter - the living dead - has finally arrived on DVD and I jumped at the chance to review it.
Unlike Romero's prior entries in his Dead series (which showed the zombie crisis getting larger and larger with each new film), Diary of the Dead takes place at the beginning of a zombie epidemic. The protagonists of the film are a group of film students and a professor, who first find out about the problem in the midst of shooting their own horror film in the woods near Pittsburgh. They immediately pack into a Winnebago and set off on a trip with little other goal than trying to get back to their homes. The group's director/cameraman, Jason, insists on capturing the events on camera in order to make a "record", for a number of reasons explored in the film. His obsession with making the film irritates many characters throughout the film, most of all fellow student Debra, who finds his behaviour to be counterproductive to the much more important goal of survival.
It seems like one of the more popular gimmicks to use in horror films nowadays is the usage of video cameras wielded by the film's characters to capture the action as opposed to conventional camerawork. In the case of Diary of the Dead, I was actually rather impressed by this (the ability to capture most of the film in long takes without spotting any real crew members still leaves me wondering, "How do they do that?"). Romero utilised the convention rather well, even extending it to several different cameras (including footage taken from mobile phones and security cameras).
While I did think the usage of security cameras in the film's climax was a rather decent touch, as a whole I did find the film's presentation to be somewhat annoying. Seeing as it's supposed to be a student film, it's even edited to look and feel like a fake student film. This includes moments where the raw footage shot by the characters is interspersed with bits of downloaded stock footage of other zombie attacks around the world and even the beloved film student cliché of effects-heavy montages of existing footage. This footage is also accompanied by narration that feels very, very unnecessary (except perhaps for the very last scene of the film), and tries to extol a commentary on Romero's latest target, which is...what again? The media? The Internet? The people who run either one? I can't quite remember. The message was lost on me, to be honest. Funny, because at the same time it felt like I was getting beaten over the head with it. On one last note, the music that Debra opts to include "to fit the mood" is also a rather ridiculous touch. You've got to wonder why anyone would want to add scary music to what was probably the most horrifying experience of their life.
Despite having a decent grasp on the technical side of the film (the gore effects are rather decent and all the more impressive in the context of a handheld camera technique), the film has plenty of plenty of problems. The characters are largely forgettable caricatures, and several of them are rather annoying in both manner and behaviour - none more so than the lead couple of Jason and Debra. It's hard to know what I found more ridiculous, Jason's fixation on his film or Debra's idealist wish to survive. Debra's stubborn nature also leads to what is easily one of the most ridiculous scenes in the whole film in a confrontation with a well-stocked survivalist over taking supplies.
I'm still in two minds over how I really rank this film overall - on one hand I think it's actually rather well-made. Even though the student film angle has plenty of failures, I can't help but admire the complexity of a handheld camera approach (then again, maybe I've still got to get sick of it first). However, plenty of other stuff fails. The students' plight marks one I don't really care for most of the time, and I found myself much more interested in the groups they came in contact with (black gangsters who were finally on top of their town, National Guardsmen turned psychopathic looters, etc) or the stock footage of separate incidents that was also weaved into the film as a whole (including a team of soldiers storming an elderly couple's home searching for zombies). Maybe it's just because I reckon the zombie film needs to expand beyond the clichéd set-up of a group of stereotypes that gets picked off ever so slowly throughout the film. Diary tried to do something different, but in the end it fell flat more often than not. I guess all I can do now is wait for somebody to successfully adapt the stories from Max Brooks' World War Z into a zombie epic that stretches beyond the constraints of the average zombie film.
DIARY OF THE DEAD
(George A. Romero, 2007)
(George A. Romero, 2007)
I had originally planned to see this at the local international film festival earlier this year but missed out due to other plans. Now, George Romero's latest return to his most notable subject matter - the living dead - has finally arrived on DVD and I jumped at the chance to review it.
Unlike Romero's prior entries in his Dead series (which showed the zombie crisis getting larger and larger with each new film), Diary of the Dead takes place at the beginning of a zombie epidemic. The protagonists of the film are a group of film students and a professor, who first find out about the problem in the midst of shooting their own horror film in the woods near Pittsburgh. They immediately pack into a Winnebago and set off on a trip with little other goal than trying to get back to their homes. The group's director/cameraman, Jason, insists on capturing the events on camera in order to make a "record", for a number of reasons explored in the film. His obsession with making the film irritates many characters throughout the film, most of all fellow student Debra, who finds his behaviour to be counterproductive to the much more important goal of survival.
It seems like one of the more popular gimmicks to use in horror films nowadays is the usage of video cameras wielded by the film's characters to capture the action as opposed to conventional camerawork. In the case of Diary of the Dead, I was actually rather impressed by this (the ability to capture most of the film in long takes without spotting any real crew members still leaves me wondering, "How do they do that?"). Romero utilised the convention rather well, even extending it to several different cameras (including footage taken from mobile phones and security cameras).
While I did think the usage of security cameras in the film's climax was a rather decent touch, as a whole I did find the film's presentation to be somewhat annoying. Seeing as it's supposed to be a student film, it's even edited to look and feel like a fake student film. This includes moments where the raw footage shot by the characters is interspersed with bits of downloaded stock footage of other zombie attacks around the world and even the beloved film student cliché of effects-heavy montages of existing footage. This footage is also accompanied by narration that feels very, very unnecessary (except perhaps for the very last scene of the film), and tries to extol a commentary on Romero's latest target, which is...what again? The media? The Internet? The people who run either one? I can't quite remember. The message was lost on me, to be honest. Funny, because at the same time it felt like I was getting beaten over the head with it. On one last note, the music that Debra opts to include "to fit the mood" is also a rather ridiculous touch. You've got to wonder why anyone would want to add scary music to what was probably the most horrifying experience of their life.
Despite having a decent grasp on the technical side of the film (the gore effects are rather decent and all the more impressive in the context of a handheld camera technique), the film has plenty of plenty of problems. The characters are largely forgettable caricatures, and several of them are rather annoying in both manner and behaviour - none more so than the lead couple of Jason and Debra. It's hard to know what I found more ridiculous, Jason's fixation on his film or Debra's idealist wish to survive. Debra's stubborn nature also leads to what is easily one of the most ridiculous scenes in the whole film in a confrontation with a well-stocked survivalist over taking supplies.
I'm still in two minds over how I really rank this film overall - on one hand I think it's actually rather well-made. Even though the student film angle has plenty of failures, I can't help but admire the complexity of a handheld camera approach (then again, maybe I've still got to get sick of it first). However, plenty of other stuff fails. The students' plight marks one I don't really care for most of the time, and I found myself much more interested in the groups they came in contact with (black gangsters who were finally on top of their town, National Guardsmen turned psychopathic looters, etc) or the stock footage of separate incidents that was also weaved into the film as a whole (including a team of soldiers storming an elderly couple's home searching for zombies). Maybe it's just because I reckon the zombie film needs to expand beyond the clichéd set-up of a group of stereotypes that gets picked off ever so slowly throughout the film. Diary tried to do something different, but in the end it fell flat more often than not. I guess all I can do now is wait for somebody to successfully adapt the stories from Max Brooks' World War Z into a zombie epic that stretches beyond the constraints of the average zombie film.