Diary of the Dead
Unlike his last zombie opus, "Land of the Dead", which sent every zombie fan into overdrive, George Romero's latest zombie fiasco quietly shuffled out to greet us. It was very hard to find a theater that was showing it actually, in fact we practically had to cross the us/mexico border (the theater was like within a few miles of it).
There's a reason why, i think - this movie was bad.
Poor acting, stupid characters, lazy scripting, annoyances abound. The only positive thing about this film is that we laughed our asses off the entire time at the intentional and unintentional humor.
The main thrust of the film is this: take a bunch of twentysomethings in the middle of making a film, when *suprise* - a freak zombie apocalypse goes down. Amid the usual fight or flight shenaningans that follow, Romero has the director of the film shooting the events as they transpire, doing the old film-within-a-film thing here. The camera cant be rolling 24/7, so there's breaks between different scenes of the film. The problem is that Romero tends to make these breaks during some very inconvenient times. For example, at one point the main characters are pretty much lost, out on the road in the middle of nowhere. One of their friends gets badly wounded, next scene theyre suddenly, magically I guess teleported to a hospital. Characters are suddenly introduced, camera goes off, then characters are seen driving away when it comes back on. It just comes off as totally lazy.
Did I mention characters? Well they are nothing in this film.
Land of the Dead at least had some memorable central characters. They may have been kinda stupid, but they were something. Dennis Hopper and Asia Argento can more than fill their shoes, and can at least ham it up and be fun in a zombie film. The people in this film cant even act. There's a couple random characters that look promising at first, but anyone who's interesting in the least bit (like the dynamite-tossing Amish guy!) is but a blip in the whole of the film. Horrific events transpire around these wooden main characters, and in my opinion they dont act like anyone remotely would. I'm sorry, if someone was sticking their camera in your face while you were fending off the freakin undead, youd smash it upside their head next chance you got. It's stuff like this that's just retarded, I would have at the very least expelled such a dufus from my ragtag group of survivors.
Again, Romero has let the "social message" thing go to his head. It used to be first and foremost a zombie film, with a social message subtext tacked on so some horror eggheads can feel smart yammering on about later. You know, make some fucking ridiculous zombie film seem like some deep socio-political commentary. Ok, people in the mall are zombie consumers. Got it.
Now, youre absolutely bludgeoned to death with it, and it's totally out of place and pretentious as hell.
I'm yammering on myself now, but I'm just really disappointed. After being all psyched to see this, we found our jaws hitting the floor over and over again at what could only be described as total ineptitude. It's like some great composer releasing a cd of 80's hair metal tunes played on a kazoo or something.