| this week's Tribune review : GEORGE A ROMERO'S DIARY OF THE DEAD [6/10] |
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| Monday, 03 March 2008 | |
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------------------------------------------------------------------------------ USA 2007 Starring : Michele Morgan, Joshua Close Director : George A Romero ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ AFTER Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968), the screen horror movie - some would say cinema itself - would never be quite the same. With Dawn of the Dead (1978), Day... (1985) and Land... (2005), Romero continued the saga of a world very much like our own - apart from the crucial detail that corpses rise from the grave to consume the living. Along the way, Romero has shown how genre material can (and should) explore a wide range of social, political and psychological ideas. Not to mention topical ones: Land of the Dead remains one of the sharpest critiques of American domestic and foreign policy to emerge in the current decade. Evidently too sharp for mainstream audiences: the picture failed to meet box-office expectations, forcing Romero back to his (relatively) low-budget, no-frills roots. Reportedly shot in three weeks for less than $10m, Diary of the Dead follows a bunch of twentyish media-students - plus their boozy lecturer (droll scenestealer Scott Wentworth) - who venture into remote woodland to filming a cheapo chiller. They pick up reports of dire, apocalyptic events unfolding in the world's cities - and piecing together (conflicting) information from various modern media-sources, they realise that they face a grim struggle for survival - and also for the truth... Anticipating multiplex hit Cloverfield by several months (Diary premiered at Toronto last September), Romero adopts a Blair Witch-ish, "found" footage approach - mixing in some Scream-style post-modernism/self-referentiality that's now somewhat old hat. The results are frustratingly uneven, especially as Romero is clearly still capable of hitting the bullseye when he really puts his mind to it: the opening scene (a zombie-attack caught by TV news-cameras) is a flat-out terrific combination of the hilarious and the nightmarish; the astonishing last shot is an unexpectedly resonant and moving 'kicker.' What comes between, however, displays distinctly variable levels of inspiration and pacing. Romero shows distinct signs of treading water, making points about society's ills in a more overt and heavy-handed manner than ever before. He does deliver several stomach-churning set-pieces which impressively transcend budgetary limitations - but audiences seeking gore, shocks and satire may be better served by an upcoming Spanish variant REC, which pays dutiful homage to maestro Romero and is due out here in April. Neil Young 26th February 2008 written for the next issue of Tribune magazine GEORGE A ROMERO'S DIARY OF THE DEAD : [6/10] : aka Diary of the Dead : George A. ROMERO : US 2007 : 95m : seen 29th Oct 2007, Stadtkino, Vienna (Viennale - Vienna International Film Festival) : complimentary ticket adapted from original review |
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