Diary of the Dead Details

[Highly rated reviewer]

SO SO SO SO BAD!!!!!

PLEASE DO NOT WASTE YOUR TIME AND MONEY ON THIS GARBAGE! ! !

WORST FILM I HAVE EVER SEEN IN MY LIFE........

ITS CRAZY HOW FILMS THIS BAD CAN BE MADE!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Breathtakingly bad

This is quite simply one of the WORST films ever made.

From creating one of the finest and most significant horror films of all time (Dawn of the Dead), Romero went to being merely interesting (Day of the Dead, Land of the Dead) to now being just a bit rubbish. A few visual flourishes aside (ever more inventive slayings to please the Fangoria crowd), this falls down at ever hurdle. The script is incredibly poor and the performances even more so. For the first 20 minutes or so you half expect the film to pull back self reflexively, and for the ineptitude to be shown as deliberate. But it doesn't. Where there are attempts at humour, the laughs are uneasy because you can't be sure if its intentional or not... it's that bad! It's cliche riddled - Romero's characters run headfirst into jeapordy time and time again as if Scream had never been made.

There's a potentially interesting idea here (the living dead phenomena unveiled through the lens of a student film maker) but Romero doesn't even grab the opportunity to make a virtue of his zero budget, instead he eschews an edgy Blair Witch/Cloverfield candid texture and just throws in a few clumsy out of focus and 'battery low' moments. And if you thought the polemic of Land of the Dead was heavy handed (American Imperialism and 9/11), you'll groan at his GCSE Media Studies discourse here.

Unbelievably bad, and difficult to believe that George Romero was responsible. He should have Alan Smithee'd it...