Scan and Pan
Saturday, February 16, 2008
Diary of the Dead
A group of film students are shooting a low budget horror film in the backwoods of Pennsylvania when corpses begin reanimating to feast on the flesh of the living. As the students try to escape, one of them keeps filming with his video camera, obsessed with documenting everything that occurs so that someone may eventually know the truth of what happened.
Writer/director Romero returns to his roots as a low budget guerrilla filmmaker, and the result is easily the best Dead film since Dawn of the Dead in 1978. Romero has always used the horror genre as a way to examine and satirize contemporary society. The satire is on the mark here, taking aim at the news media, internet culture, and reality television among other things, while raising chilling questions about the manufacturing of "truth" by the media and our own enjoyment of violence.
The production pushes the boundaries of its R rating with some particularly gory scenes, but it's also wonderfully funny at the most unexpected of times and it's not above mocking other modern zombie films where the walking dead are more like the sprinting dead. Romero finds and successfully maintains the delicate balance between horror, satire, and dark humor throughout. The final shot is like a kick to the throat, putting a brutal exclamation point on the film's themes.
As the title suggests, the story is told as if it's a video diary, taking a cue from The Blair Witch Project (and putting it on common ground with Cloverfield) with a first person narrative where the camera is used to appear as if it's being carried and operated by one of the characters. The technique once again works very well for providing a terrifying sense of immediacy, but cinematographer Adam Swica (Bruiser) achieves the effect without the nausea-inducing ShakyCam of its stylistic predecessors. It's quite different from Romero's usual style of filmmaking, but he shows himself more than capable of adapting himself to a different way of telling a story, and this allows him to succeed in a way that he hasn't for quite a long time.
The cast of unknowns is well suited to the guerrilla style of the film, providing believable performances within the framework of the story, including Joshua Close as the obsessed filmmaker who we hear more than we see because he's the one with the camera; Michelle Morgan as his frustrated girlfriend; Shawn Roberts, Amy Lalonde, Joe Dinicol, Philip Riccio, Chris Violette, Tatiana Maslany, and Megan Park as the other students; Scott Wentworth as their alcohol soaked film professor; and Alan Van Sprang as a National Guard officer they encounter. Romero himself has a cameo as a police chief providing information at a televised press conference.
News broadcasts are used as backgrounds to several scenes, and the voices of the unseen newsreaders are provided by Wes Craven, Stephen King, Simon Pegg, Quentin Tarantino, and Guillermo del Toro.
The fifth entry in the Dead franchise is one of its best, providing a fresh take on the material four decades after the franchise's birth and finding its creator back in top form as a social satirist. Diary of the Dead is grisly, funny, thought provoking, and one hell of a ride.
[4.5 out of 5 stars]
In 1968, George A. Romero shocked the world with a new kind of horror film, Night of the Living Dead. Forty years later, he returns to the scene of the crime with what can be viewed as either a companion piece to the original or a reboot of the franchise. Whichever it is, it's bloody good.
A group of film students are shooting a low budget horror film in the backwoods of Pennsylvania when corpses begin reanimating to feast on the flesh of the living. As the students try to escape, one of them keeps filming with his video camera, obsessed with documenting everything that occurs so that someone may eventually know the truth of what happened.
Writer/director Romero returns to his roots as a low budget guerrilla filmmaker, and the result is easily the best Dead film since Dawn of the Dead in 1978. Romero has always used the horror genre as a way to examine and satirize contemporary society. The satire is on the mark here, taking aim at the news media, internet culture, and reality television among other things, while raising chilling questions about the manufacturing of "truth" by the media and our own enjoyment of violence.
The production pushes the boundaries of its R rating with some particularly gory scenes, but it's also wonderfully funny at the most unexpected of times and it's not above mocking other modern zombie films where the walking dead are more like the sprinting dead. Romero finds and successfully maintains the delicate balance between horror, satire, and dark humor throughout. The final shot is like a kick to the throat, putting a brutal exclamation point on the film's themes.
As the title suggests, the story is told as if it's a video diary, taking a cue from The Blair Witch Project (and putting it on common ground with Cloverfield) with a first person narrative where the camera is used to appear as if it's being carried and operated by one of the characters. The technique once again works very well for providing a terrifying sense of immediacy, but cinematographer Adam Swica (Bruiser) achieves the effect without the nausea-inducing ShakyCam of its stylistic predecessors. It's quite different from Romero's usual style of filmmaking, but he shows himself more than capable of adapting himself to a different way of telling a story, and this allows him to succeed in a way that he hasn't for quite a long time.
The cast of unknowns is well suited to the guerrilla style of the film, providing believable performances within the framework of the story, including Joshua Close as the obsessed filmmaker who we hear more than we see because he's the one with the camera; Michelle Morgan as his frustrated girlfriend; Shawn Roberts, Amy Lalonde, Joe Dinicol, Philip Riccio, Chris Violette, Tatiana Maslany, and Megan Park as the other students; Scott Wentworth as their alcohol soaked film professor; and Alan Van Sprang as a National Guard officer they encounter. Romero himself has a cameo as a police chief providing information at a televised press conference.
News broadcasts are used as backgrounds to several scenes, and the voices of the unseen newsreaders are provided by Wes Craven, Stephen King, Simon Pegg, Quentin Tarantino, and Guillermo del Toro.
The fifth entry in the Dead franchise is one of its best, providing a fresh take on the material four decades after the franchise's birth and finding its creator back in top form as a social satirist. Diary of the Dead is grisly, funny, thought provoking, and one hell of a ride.
[4.5 out of 5 stars]
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