June 20th, 2009

Original Release Date: February 15th, 2008

MPAA Rating: R

Genre(s): Horror, Zombie

Director: George A. Romero

Runtime: 95 minutes

Website: Click Here

Do I have some kind of weird, stinky fetish for zombie movies or something?

At this point, you could say I get my cinematic "rocks off" to them quite easily, because if you look at my movie collection, it's flooded with flicks featuring the lil' gray matter munchers.

It seems like I've seen almost all of them by now. I guess I'm a complete sucker for seeing "Random Town, USA" being the victims to an unexplained plague of the dead coming back to life and eating human flesh with McDonald's branded Sweet and Sour sauce.

We can all agree the basic premise of the stereotypical zombie flick hasn't wandered too far from the established path of the genre-defining classics from the 70s and 80s, but there are the few notable exceptions of films like 28 Days/Weeks Later and Flight of the Living Dead. 28 Days worked, but Flight was.. well, pretty horrid (you can read my hilarious review right here).

The zombie sub-genre kind of made a comeback near the middle of this decade, but their ability to draw crowds at the box office is definitely, pardon the pun, flat lining as of late. It's almost as if big Hollywood is running out of ideas of how to put a fresh spin on the genre while still making a good movie. The last really good one I saw was Shaun of the Dead, but that shouldn't count because it was a comedy at heart. When it comes to serious takes on the subject, I see a lot of silly and over the top ideas being thrown out (Dance of the Dead? Really?) and I've seen more cinematic diarrhea in my day than I care to recollect.

Most of these films involving the undead either end up flopping in the theaters or going directly to DVD. Or, they can do a little of both and stink up the cinemas so bad, you don't even know they were out and they're rushed to home video. Case in point, George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead.

Not to say Diary is bad -- nor am I even knocking the more profitable aspect of going straight to DVD and Blu-ray, I'm just saying most people are just kind of used to the overdone zombie formula by now and don't really care to see those films when they're out in theaters -- even if they might be well executed (yet, we all go in droves to see Saw on a yearly basis when it's been the same song and dance for the past three or so editions. But hey, I'm guilty of this myself).

When I first heard about this project some time in 2007, I, of course wasn't too thrilled at the idea. Yet, being predictable me, I was first in line...... to download the torrent (LOL!) and set aside time in my day to watch it like a giddy little kid with Ninja Turtles on VHS. I mean, really, after me seeing Flight of the Living Dead and sitting through House of the Dead -- twice (I should win a t-shirt for that, Sega...), I don't think it's even possible to short circuit my brain cells further. Plus, horror legend George A. Romero was behind the scenes, so how horrendous could it really be?

"It's interesting to find out what we're capable of becoming. Up until that night, we had lived predictable lives. Now, we would never be able to predict what might happen next. God had changed the rules on us, and surprisingly, we were playing along."

2008's Diary of the Dead is interesting mainly because it's a modernized twist on things. The central theme asks how would we react if a zombie outbreak happened, right now, in today's communication driven world? The generation today, whether we do it willingly or not, are rouge journalists. TV and printed publications like newspapers and magazines are slowly going the way of the dinosaur and many younger folks get their information through blogs -- both written and visual. There's a trust factor involved when it comes to sensitive issues in the headlines, as media online is rarely ever censored while "official" news, if you subscribe to the concept of conspiracy, could have been tampered with in an attempt to cover up something.

Diary of the Dead gets it's title from the impromptu documentary of the outbreak that is chronicled by a group of film students from the University of Pittsburgh. Jason Creed finds himself going from being the director of a sloppily produced mummy movie for a class project to being behind the lens capturing the apparent end of known civilization as the dead reanimate. The movie we're seeing is the "final cut" of the documentary, which was titled "The Death of Death," and was "edited" on a laptop by Jason's girlfriend, Debra. The opening narration explains this, and even says music has been added for "dramatic effect" in hopes to scare you.

This was a nice touch to point out and really saved this opening montage from being incredibly cheesy and totally unbelievable. Kind of like how I hate musicals because nobody points out where the music is coming from, ya know?