Diary of the Dead

Zombie maestro George A Romero proves us all wrong again: you really can flog a dead horse. Just watch that it doesn't bite you back.

This isn't exactly a sequel to the unfolding Night Of The Living Dead series (so far 68-year-old Romero has given us Dawn Of The Dead, Day Of The Dead and Land of the Dead, and not a dud among them). Rather, it takes us back to square one and the very first night.

The diary idea is similar to the first-person point of view in Cloverfield and The Blair Witch Project. The film presents itself as "The Death of Death", a documentary put together by a film student from his own footage and various downloads from the internet.

Jason Creed (Joshua Close) is shooting a horror movie (a mummy film in fact) out in the woods with several classmates and his teacher, Professor Maxwell (Scott Wentworth), when they hear the first confused radio reports of mass panic spreading across the country. The broadcast is garbled but no less alarming for that. Jason's lead actor, Ridley (Philip Riccio), takes off for home in his sports car. The remainder of the tiny cast and crew - Jason's girlfriend Debra (Michelle Morgan), "actress" Tracy (Amy Lalonde), camera and sound guys Eliot (Joe Dinicol) and Tony (Shawn Roberts) - pile into a Winnebago and drive into the night.

Their college dorm is deserted. It doesn't look good. In fact the further they go, the worse things get. The dead are rising up to attack the living. Jason videotapes his friends' mounting fear and confusion as they try to contact loved ones, worry about depleting stocks of gasoline, food and ammo, (and alcohol, in the British Professor's case) and adjust to the new imperative for violent self-defence.

Romero's zombies may not be light on their feet, but they're relentless and the odds are very much in their favour.

A stopover at a farm brings this new reality into the sharpest focus when a deaf-mute Amish bucks a few stereotypes with his resourceful application of a scythe. Grim Reaper eat your heart out!

Made cheaply in Toronto with a cast of newcomers, Diary Of The Dead is a more coherent movie than Cloverfield, and just as well acted, but it's weighed down with too much heavy-handed dialogue about media ethics and the responsibilities of the guy cowering behind his camera. Granted, these students may have been studying Susan Sontag, but their Professor's recourse to the bottle seems an altogether more reasonable response to their shared predicament.

Romero is a satirist as much as he's a scare-monger, but he's not one to soft-pedal the gore, which can be gruesome and funny at the same time. He finds particularly inventive use of an empty hospital as a killing resource, but remains doggedly wedded to the notion that what passes for humanity these days is more frightening than any CGI creation.

Tense and suspenseful, Diary proves there's still life in the zombies, 40 years after Mr Romero first let them loose on the North American psyche.

Incidentally, according to the imdb, if the newscasters sound familiar, it's because they're voiced by Simon Pegg, Quentin Tarantino, Wes Craven, Stephen King and Guillermo Del Toro. You can imagine; the news ain't good.

Tom Charity
tom.charity@lovefilm.com