George Romero is a hack.
Or: The Dead Walk. I snore.
"Diary of the Dead" is absolutely about the Dead getting up and walking around: it's true, it's amazing George Romero can even lift a camera, let alone have the audacity to slap something this slipshod, this mediocre, this stupefyingly dull together. Here's a hint George: time to hang up the cam and spend those royalties on a nice tropical timeshare and mebbe a pair of decent glasses. Not those giganto loopy things you've been wearing since "Night". It's affected your vision, in every sense of the word.
If you really wanna see a zombie flick where about 95% of the run-time is spent with obnoxious community college types going on and on (and my God! on and on) about the meaning of blogging---I'm not making this up!---and cinema, and the reality of media, and the reality of reality---this is your flick. If you wanna see an engaging, visceral, shiggola kicking zombie film, stay away.
"Diahrea of the Dead" is Romero doing his zombie thing by way of the "Blair Witch Project": student filmmakers scoring a mummy flick when Earth passes through a meteor shower, or the Arrowhead Project gets all outta whack, or the Illuminati raise Nixon from the dead and he starts really taking a bite outta crime. Whatever.
The premise is that one talky student (the pretentious Joshua Close, who 'plays' Jason, who...forget it, who can't act, even describing this thing is making me groggy) and his crew of derelicts, misfits, social morons, and college student apes, are shooting their crappy little film when the recently dead start hankering for human canapes. Chaos ensues. Or does it?
1)"Diary" cuts its own throat: you can have instant, on the spot realism, or you can have a typical studio film. You can't have it both ways. "Diary" doesn't trust its audience, and why should it? So even though we've got a handicam film, it's got background music. The chick narrator (see below) says she edited that stuff in to 'scare us'. Yeah. We're viewing a flick about the zombie holocaust, and we need bad synethesizer tunes to get creeped out.
2) Irritating Chick Monologue: Jason's squeeze is "Debra", played by Michelle Morgan, who, with her big puppy-dog eyes and nice cheekbones and raven waves of cascading black hair and taut little nubile muscles and toned up thighs and arms and....where was I? Oh yeah, she's easy on the eyes. But I've seen autistics who were better actors. She does voiceovers. Constantly. Voiceovers that make you want to cringe, as in: "we were all in this dark corridor of meaningless violence together, the camera showing us what was real, only because it was a camera, it wasn't real, and so we weren't really real."
Yeah, babe. Make me a pie. And then vamoose: Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner" was a visionary masterwork in spite of Harrison's lame narration. "Diary" sucks, but it sucked worse because you opened your mouth. And not in a useful way, dig?
3)ATTACK OF THE 80 FOOT CAMERAMEN! having a guy hoist a camera and film throughout a zombie apocalypse is hugely silly. Rotting folks are trying to make you their power lunch: you gonna keep filming? The only way to get us to suspend our disbelief is not to dwell on it overmuch---the way "Blairw itch" did it, or the way "Cloverfield" did it. The camera, then, becomes our own eyes, as opposed to an intrusive screen or barrier to the story unfolding before us.
Romero's cam is artless, distracting, and constantly takes me out of what might have been scary or worked. Worse still, when you have a mini zombie rampage in a hospital, and the Zombies are really working it, you know, working it to make chicken McNuggets out of the actors, and you've got about 3 people shooting videotape while everyone else is wigging out----well, it's funny. Funny not ha-ha. Funny Liberace. Dig?
4)Zero Scares. Every time romero starts playing around with an idea that might be cool & nasty (the dead guy in the warehouse hide n seek, or the rampage in the fortified mansion, all covered room to room by this creepy dead-eye surveillance camera) he immediately deep sixes it to return to monologue babe (Morgan). Yeah, she's a hot chick, but she can't act her way out of a paper sack. Every time we get a quease inducing idea (Mummy boy!) we gotta talk about blogging. Or the Internet. Or the Media. Or Global Warming. You're getting sleeeeeeep-ier, or I am.
5) the mummy scene actually worked. Phil Riccio, who played the wicked, doomed socialite Ridley Wilmott, did what he could to make this flatline flick amusing. Thanks Phil!
Oh, and the pool zombies (what we saw of them) were fun. Seriously. Maybe sticking to the mansion the whole film through might have been more fun and given things a nasty "Resident Evil" vibe. Same with the Warehouse thing: you got a buncha brothas together, and they're all hardcore, you know, all Harrisburg PA and all, and they get to do NOTHING. Zero. Bummer.
6) not enough of the talky annoying people die. Big bummer.
7) not enough guts by far.
"Diary of the Dead" is pretty much a diary by way of King Louis XVI, last King of France (who did his own undead shuffle by way of the Guillotine), who wrote in his diary on Bastille Day (when Paris's infamous political prison was obliterated by Jacobins) "Nothing Happened Today".
Serve that up as an epitaph for "Diary" and bury this corpse.
JSG |
