Romero has taken his fifth installment in the classic DEAD series back to basics. Instead of a gritty black and white indie feel (like in the original) he uses a Panasonic HDCAM and tells the story from the point of view of a modern film student. The results are mixed. This is not quite the total disappointment Land of the Dead turned out to be. GEORGE ROMERO'S DIARY OF THE DEAD is a semi-effective morality tale with some joltingly good bits of C.G.gore and little else to recommend it except that it does feel truer to the indie spirit of vintage Romero than it's predecessor.
The movie tilts toward annoying in its first hour, mostly due to its stock characters and a series of head scratching events in the story. Romero does build some tension so you go with it. But DIARY OF THE DEAD never does really find its own footing as a movie. About halfway through there is a series of scenes with an Amish farmer that are both funny and bizarre which serve to illustrate the problem. You're not sure whether to laugh at this character or laugh with him. Suddenly, you wonder what might have happened if the movie had more of the tone of Dawn of the Dead, blending humor and gore into a knit that supports the necessary feeling of creeping dread. Laughter sometimes helps to provide a tension and release that can support other emotions (in this case, fear). What if...you think to yourself. What if...?
In the final analysis creativity is lightning in a bottle for some people. Romero caught it in the sixties and seventies but he just can't seem to get it back. I would see any DEAD film that he made because he has built up a lot of credit with me over the years. However, I view his current films with some trepidation because they just don't have the same pop as the old ones. In Dawn of the Dead Romero critiqued American society. He told us that we were a bunch of mindless consumers bumping into one another in the night, creatures with no souls, creatures that produce nothing except more of themselves. In the intervening years our society has devolved toward that reality. It is further proof of our decline, that we don't even have the money to purchase the goods we want anymore. We instead use credit. Romero created his original terrifying morality tales decades ago and to this day people still don't recognize that they were full of double meaning. Back then he even knew how to make his morality tales scary. For this country and for Romero the only hope for greatness lies somewhere in figuring out how to re-invent ourselves. Figuring out how to re-boot. Romero doesn't quite do it here, but it's a decent try.