Life > April 17, 2008

By Rachel Kowal | Staff writer

Exactly 40 years after the release of Night of the Living Dead and a host of zombie flicks over the years, George Romero is back with his latest, Diary of the Dead, which explores the implications of living in an increasingly technology-driven and influenced society.

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The film is shot mostly with hand cams since it is told from the perspective of Jason (Joshua Close), a budding film student who was in the process of shooting his own horror film in the woods with his friends when they hear news of a strange and unsettling event on the news.

He decides to abandon his current efforts and begin filming an account of the chaos in an attempt to spread the truth.

What we see for the majority of the film is therefore the unraveling of events through the lens of Jason’s camera, which many complain is a rip-off of the recent film Cloverfield.

Like several other zombie movies, Diary of the Dead poses an ethical quandary and presents an appraisal of society.

The basis of this critique is our dependence on technology and the effects of a culture faced with millions of takes on the truth through the proliferation of things like blogs, MySpace and YouTube.

While the media, the official source for news, attempts to cover up and downplay the cases of the dead coming back to life (a critique on the coverage of the Iraq War, perhaps?), the internet is a hotbed for information from people all over the world.

As one character states, “I think that’s what started the panic — not knowing the truth.”

No doubt, Diary of the Dead is rarely ground-breaking.

Its ideas have been more effectively tackled by other films, the special effects are lacking and the script is horrendous and predictable.

Lower your expectations, however, and your viewing will certainly prove to be entertaining.

Just don’t expect brilliant — or even remotely intelligent — dialogue or clever indictments of pop culture. Don’t even expect realistically gruesome scenes.

Even I was able to stomach most of the gore in the film, and I am usually quite squeamish.

Though the film was certainly full of blood and guts as any zombie movie should be, it is obviously over-the-top and hardly natural-looking.

Over all, my experience seeing Diary of the Dead with my friends was highly entertaining, but only because we knew not to take the movie seriously and were able to laugh throughout the painful attempts to deliver a moral and the obvious clichés in both the plot and dialogue.

Listen in particular for the voiceovers by Jason’s distraught girlfriend, Deborah (Michelle Morgan) ,who never fails to state the obvious.

All complaints aside, some of my favorite scenes included an encounter with a deaf, old Amish man with a mean scythe and the scene with the zombie dressed as a mummy.

The scene with the zombified hospital staff and the ironic death-by-defibrillator is also quite entertaining.

Unfortunately, though the zombie flick is at its finest on the big screen, you may have to wait to catch this one on film since it left Winston after only a brief run. In the mean time, brush up on your zombie knowledge with earlier Romero flicks or check out 28 Days Later or its recent sequel, which provide a searing critique of our culture and put an interesting spin on the conventional zombie movie with the introduction of the Rage virus.

Compared to ghosts and vampires, zombies may not be the first horror movie villain that spring to mind, but they have become a more formidable foe in recent years

This is as a result of with the outburst of zombie films and the increased underground support among college students especially.

On March 29, Greensboro held its first ZombieCon festival, which included a zombie walk through the streets and an after party and many other similar events have worked their way into popular culture.

Plans are already in the works for a Zombie 2 Festival, which will take place on October 25 in Chapel Hill.

This festival is promised to be even bigger and better than Greensboro’s ZombieCon.