Movie Review: George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead (2007)

George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead (2007) written and directed by George Romero

A group of film students are out in the woods shooting a senior project (a horror film featuring a mummy). The student director Jason Creed (Joshua Close) complains about not getting "his vision" from the actors and crew, who all are fellow students.Their professor (Scott Wentworth) is also with them, drinking from a flask in the background and making "funny" comments. One of the tech guys sees the reports of dead people coming back to life and eating other people. The mummy actor has rich parents and a fortified home and offers everyone to come to his place to ride it out. One girl goes with him, the rest get in a Winnebago and start driving towards people's homes to drop them off. The plan does not work as they run into various sets of zombies and survivors, forcing them to fight or to seek help that is hard to come by.

The movie is shot as a "found footage" film with one of the characters narrating as she edits the students' videos together. Jason thinks he is going to hit paydirt with a documentary on the crisis while most everyone else is focused on surviving the situation. So he annoys them but they go along anyway. The movie follows the typical Romero beats--the government and media can't be trusted, other people (aside from government and media people) can't be relied upon, extreme amounts of gore make up for not providing other scares, etc. Many unbelievable moments happen in the visual editing. A lot of other cameras are in buildings and somehow the characters have access to the extra footage which is at times very implausible.

The movie also leans into a Scream-like vibe. At the beginning the characters complain about the mummy movie having a lot of the standard horror tropes--the blonde female who loses her clothes in fighting the monster; the monster moving faster than it should; etc. Viewers immediately recognize that these tropes will be used later in the film which Romero can't resist doing, despite the fact that characters acknowledge it is tacky. The winking self-awareness does not come off as clever or entertaining.  It's just uninteresting recycling of other, better work.

Not recommended.