After getting my hands on Diary of the Dead, I was quite curious and of course watched it straight away. The last two hand camera works Cloverfield and [Rec] met my demands for unpolished and instant confrontation with the nasty evilness in a brilliant way. Of course I had my expectations. George A. Romero is probably THE father of zombie movies and in spite of the mediocrity of Land of the Dead, I had my hope for a decent flick, since Diary of the Dead was supposed to be a production without the control of a big Hollywood mainstream studio. Unfortunately, it failed almost all along the line.
So what’s going on? A group of amateur movie makers shoot a horror movie in a forest and suddenly receive information about dead people reviving and attacking other people. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it. From now on, they drive around from place to place in order to generally stay alive. One of them keeps track of his filming obsession and shoots everything they experience to show the world what’s really going on, since the media is embellishing the zombie attacks. Of course they get killed one by another. So what’s the problem? First of all, the script is horrible. The character drawing seems as it was made by a bad amateur writer who has no susceptibility to reasonable behavior at all. I can’t believe that Romero wrote the script. The movie ends up in having a few super-unvaried stereotypes, which indeed cause brain damage in the audience. It hurts to see them talking bullshit and act stupid. Furthermore, the acting itself sucks. It’s not even B-movie level anymore. It’s so horrible… I cannot believe I’m writing this now, but yeah, the bad script and the bad actors destroy the whole movie.
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Moreover, what about the gore? Well, that’s the only proper and creative thing in Diary of the Dead - head splits, acid kills, lots of head shots, slashes by grenades and archery kills. However, does the gore make the movie a better movie? No. The criticism on mass media doesn’t help as well. Hmmm… I’m very disappointed. Dear Mr. Romero, please don’t rely on a concept without any proper structure. Please watch Cloverfield and [Rec] and learn how to make a proper hand camera movie, because your movie just failed. I hope your sequel will not slip up as this one.
