Diary Of The Dead

Mar 7 2008 Evening Chronicle

You just can’t keep a good zombie franchise down.

Forty years after George A Romero reinvigorated the horror genre with his low-budget classic Night Of The Living Dead, the godfather of gore returns with the fifth instalment of the blood-soaked franchise.

For Diary Of The Dead, Romero returns to his guerrilla filmmaking roots, shooting this latest brush with the slavering undead from the perspective of a group of students who use their camera to document bloody encounters with the flesh-eating denizens.

Romero uses a film within a film stylistic device (a la Cloverfield) to introduce us to aspiring filmmaker Jason Creed (Close) and his masterpiece, The Death Of Death.

Jason and his ramshackle crew, including his girlfriend Debra (Morgan), are shooting a horror film in the Pennsylvania woods under the supervision of their alcoholic college professor, Maxwell (Wentworth).

Tensions flare when the team hears bewildering news reports about reanimated corpses.

Cramming into an old Winnebago, the friends drive through the night to reach their loved ones, invariably coming into contact with the undead and other survivors of the deadly plague.

Diary Of The Dead is starved of decent scares, whittling down the cast to the core survivors.

Some of the set pieces are contrived – when the students reach a hospital and scout for survivors Jason refuses to leave behind his camera as it recharges.

“Plug it in and come with us,” pleads Debra.

“I can’t. I have to wait here with the camera,” he whines, leaving the director alone in the spooky, deserted ward a few feet away from infected corpses.

Close’s hero becomes increasingly irritating, risking everyone’s safety for the sake of his documentary.

He shows no compassion to his crew as he captures their panic.

Special effects are suitably yucky but without sympathetic characters or a meaty storyline, the zombies have scant substance to sink their teeth into.

(18, 94 mins) Horror/Thriller. Josh Close, Michelle Morgan, Philip Riccio, Amy Lalonde, Joe Dinicol, Shawn Roberts, Scott Wentworth, Chris Violette, Tatiana Maslany. Director: George A Romero.

SWEARING; NO SEX; VIOLENCE