"Diary [of the Dead] may initially struggle to get up to speed as it reprises business from the earlier films, but Romero has lost none of his wild inventiveness. This film has more left-field weirdness and edgy suspense than Land, with unexpected characters (a deaf, dynamite-throwing Amish farmer), grim jokes (the zombie birthday clown who bleeds when his red nose is pulled off) and horror scenes you have never seen before (in a crowded, gloomy warehouse, amid reserves of gasoline, a single, hard-to-find zombie mingles with jittery, well-armed folk). It turns out that despite decades of experiment, there arestill spectacular new ways of killing zombies on screen (a slow acid-dissolve of the skull), while presenting state-of-the-art make-up effects vérité-style recalls the impact of the gruesome intestine-gobbling scene in 1968.
"It's hard to tell when Romero is kidding. The hard-drinking British film professor Maxwell emerges as a comic creation more suited to Shaun of the Dead, with his pseudo-profundity or quoting from Dickens provoking perhaps unintended giggles. This taking Maxwell lightly mutes powerful moments, as when Debra thanks him for disposing of her zombified loved ones. The mostly young and attractive student crowd are in line with typical horror-film disposables, though even among this fairly privileged group Romero still finds an interesting range of social classes and attitudes. The more naive characters believably act as if they haven't seen such movies before and have to come to terms with the necessity of shooting their former friends or recognising that the support services are unlikely to help - snippets of news footage make this a post-Katrina rather than a post-9/11 movie.
"In the coda - a YouTube home video of rednecks amusing themselves by shooting zombies - Romero revives the Vietnam-era violence of Night but also evokes new horrors such as Abu Ghraib or Guantánamo. The Dead films are the director's own take on the rolling apocalypse of modern American history - and the real chill of Diary is that his vision is as biting now as in 1968."
Bite of the living dead
Film of the Month: Diary of the Dead
Kim Newman
Sight & Sound
"Repeatedly, Diary finds ways to locate its old plot in a new time. As in 1968’s Night of the Living Dead, the panic over the zombies triggers a realignment of communities according to visible differences. The black militia men, black men with lots of guns, are not about to be isolated and killed by cracker vigilantes like Ben (Duane Jones). They mean to survive, and though Diary leaves them before you see their fate, that very move—to leave them—speaks to the film’s point about difference and fear and the ways that image-makers decide on who’s in the images. When one of the militia men admires Debra, noting their similar toughness and determination, it’s a brief bit of bonding and mutual admiration that goes a long way in a film that is so suffused with brutality and betrayal."
Cynthia Fuchs
Popmatters
"As a group of University of Pittsburgh student filmmakers headed by the compulsive Jason (Josh Close) and his recalcitrant sweetheart Debra (Michelle Morgan) witness the technological civilization around them abruptly crumbling under the assault of the brain-munching undead, they keep doggedly editing and uploading their videos to the Web. Everything we see in "Diary of the Dead," in fact, is supposedly shot by Jason and his friends and later edited by Debra, who explains her methods in an arch opening voiceover: "In some places I've added scary music to the video. Because I do want to scare you. Maybe it will wake you up."
"Meanwhile, all the background video Romero uses to indicate the encroaching chaos around them is real, and a lot of it's recognizable: Desperate crowds outside the Superdome in New Orleans; street riots in Latin America and Asia; genocidal civil violence in Rwanda and elsewhere. As usual with Romero, the social and political subtext is barely veiled, if at all. "Diary of the Dead" is thematically ambitious and at least mildly ingenious in form (although it's too bad for Romero that the similarly structured "Cloverfield" came out first). His zombies, if you'll forgive me saying something so tedious, are always metaphorical, and represent the yawning darkness that lies beneath the sleek but fragile surface of our techno-consumer culture.
"OK, that's the end of the good news. As long as I live I'll have a soft spot for Romero, a genuine filmmaking maverick of the pre-indie age who scared the living crap out of us while making us believe that resisting the Hollywood machine was both possible and necessary. Each of the films in his original trilogy has spawned its own genre, and I continue to believe that the unjustly neglected "Day of the Dead" (last of the three), claustrophobic and apocalyptic nightmare that it is, marks the creative end point of zombie cinema.
"None of that excuses me from telling you that "Diary of the Dead" is a limp and dreary experience, at least after you get past its intriguing premise. It's poorly written and woodenly acted, completely formulaic and hopelessly imprisoned by both its genre and finally its form. I mean, it's great that George Romero knows about MySpace, I guess, but spicing up a middling, muddling zombie flick with a few electronic-lifestyle fillips is beneath him, frankly. Romero didn't actually go back to Pittsburgh to make this movie; he shot it in Canada just like a middlebrow Hollywood director would, and something about that fundamental betrayal seems to infect the whole enterprise like a single zombie bite."
"Zombies eat YouTube!"
Andrew O'Heir
Salon.com
"There's a lot of huff and puff here about the media and its messages as Diary tracks the camera-wielding coeds on the road to nowhere in a zombie-splattered Winnebago. The dialogue can be overly self-reflexive ("If it's not on camera, it doesn't exist!"); the sharpest words tend to sneak in at the margins of the sound design ("The problem used to be people crossing the border," a radio pundit comments). Visually, Romero's ersatz-DIY experiment isn't as suave as Brian De Palma's similar effort in the recent and risible Redacted, nor as exactingly engineered as the video convulsions of Cloverfield, but its scrappy, ultra-low-budget edges are part of its charm. Romero initially conceived the project for Web-only broadcast, and if Poppa Zombie isn't quite the second coming of McLuhan when it comes to media critique, his return to small-scale indie filmmaking delivers big genre kicks.
"The devil's in the details, and Diary is diabolically resourceful within its circumscribed framework. Conceptually abstract as it is, the movie is vividly grounded in place: the institutional banality of university housing and deserted hospitals (priceless defibrillator- to-the-head bit here); the cluttered, shadow-strewn warehouse hideout where the kids meet up with a radicalized band of black survivors; the frightfully porous farmhouse of Samuel, a dynamite-chucking, deaf-mute Amish zombie slayer; the suburban McMansion, replete with six bathrooms, indoor pool, and steel-reinforced panic room ("We can sit and play Nintendo until this whole thing blows over"), where Diary climaxes as a kind of Zombie Year at Marienbad.
"Shades of 28 Days Later's finale there, though Romero claims never to have seen it. He has been watching the news, however, and Diary makes chilling appropriation of Katrina footage to double for the zombie disaster. To what end? "I don't try to answer any questions or preach," Romero explained following Diary's ecstatic midnight premiere at the Toronto Film Festival. "My personality and my opinions come through in the satire of the films, but I think of them as a snapshot of the time. I have this device, or conceit, where something happens in the world and I can say, 'Ooo, I'll talk about that—and I can throw zombies in it! And get it made!' You know, it's kind of my ticket to ride."
"Vlogged to Death"
Nathan Lee
The Village Voice
"Diary of the Dead (Weinstein Co.), George Romero's fifth contribution to the zombie-movie-as-political-satire genre that he almost singlehandedly invented with 1968's Night of the Living Dead, is hardly top-drawer Romero. In fact, it may be his worst zombie film yet. But even bad Romero is a far sight more interesting than the coolly sadistic guts-porn that currently passes for mainstream horror. Diary should have been called MySpace Page of the Dead. It uploads the director's usual obsessions (governmental paranoia, race war, and vigorous neck-chomping) into the global stream of images pouring out of our cell phones, laptops, and messaging devices. It's no surprise that one of the movie's sacrificial heroes is a deaf Amish farmer. Diary of the Dead is almost Luddite in its skepticism about the now-ubiquitous technology of information."
"Diary of the Dead: George Romero's bleakest zombie movie yet"
Dana Stevens
Slate
"Most seem to agree that Land is the weakest of the first four films (Hopper and the black zombie apart, its characters are not very interesting, and too much of the first half merely repeats the now-familiar slaughter). Diary, though it lacks the controlled and compressed intensity of Night and the bright colors and energy of Dawn, may prove to be the series’ supreme achievement, Romero’s most inclusive statement. Its premise is brilliant. In a gambit of characteristic aplomb, Romero establishes that he has no responsibility for the film we are watching: the opening segment has been downloaded from the Internet, and what follows is the work of a group of film students from the University of Pittsburgh, and in particular of an aspiring young filmmaker called Jason Creed (Josh Close), introduced directing his own student horror movie in which a mummy pursues a young woman through the woods at night. When the first news of the zombie attacks comes in, Jason is quite ready to leap at the opportunity to make the abrupt transition to a “reality” movie. We are not permitted to see Jason clearly until well into the film, as he is wielding the handheld camera, blocking his face; his film’s title is not Diary of the Dead but The Death of Death.
"Romero’s decision to attribute his film to a group of students is a masterstroke. The handheld camera continuously underlines the sense of the instability of a world in which nothing is reliable, anyone may turn out to be a zombie. Detached (at least partly) from the nuclear family, looking ahead to a still undefined future, with a certain freedom of choice, the young people are the ideal protagonists for a Romero movie. Even in the midst of the pervasive horrors, the constant reminders of the handheld camera, the youthful spontaneity and emotional openness of the group, also combine to give the film a surprising freshness and exhilaration that’s lacking in the previous films (and especially in Land), while the group’s relative innocence gives the film an unexpected and touching poignancy.
"Whatever Romero had in mind when he began, his ambitions, the seriousness of his commitment, have developed and revealed themselves well beyond the expectations we bring to a genre movie. For the record, Diary is the first of his films that has made me cry, no doubt partly because the characters, with their youthful energy and thirst for life, remind me of the students in my graduate film studies courses: they may not be facing zombies but they will also be struggling to survive within a relentlessly disintegrating culture. Romero never idealizes his young people. Jason’s motivation, for example, is repeatedly called into question, notably by Debra (Michelle Morgan): is his determination to continue filming through all the horrors callously self-serving, or justified by an authentic desire to establish truth? Both seem present, but Debra’s final acceptance of him, and her desire to continue his work after his death, acknowledge a degree of integrity."
"FRESH MEAT: Diary of the Dead may be the summation of George A. Romero’s zombie cycle (at least until the next installment)"
Robin Wood
Film Comment
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