Something's happening here, but you don't know what it is... George A. Romero is asking the questions in DIARY OF THE DEAD, and you might not be able to answer them.
Jason Creed learns the meaning of Jean Luc Godard's comment that cinema is life at 24frames per second.
"It used to be us against us; now it's us against them ... except, they are us."
I am pleased to report that I spent the first 95 minutes of my 56th birthday at a Midnight showing of GEORGE A. ROMERO'S DIARY OF THE DEAD (onscreen title). After you reach the big 5-0 you don't so much celebrate birthdays as survive them. So I was really taken by the fact that Romero's fifth zombie film is about the nature of Survival, the quality of life as it's experienced in the early 21st Century and the meaning of Death in the Information Age. In other words, it's a zombie film for thinking people which delivers the gory goods for those demanding ever new ways of destroying the living and disabling the brains of the undead.
A Romero zombie film has to be experienced at a Midnight showing or not at all. That's the way I first saw his first, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968), and have never quite shaken off the experience. Some 40 years and three zombie titles later the maverick director has more on his mind than ever and doesn't hesitate having his characters speak his cynical, gloomy, very un-mainstream of consciousness. And, first and foremost, it's a genre satire, a pitch black one...
GEORGE A. ROMERO'S DIARY OF THE DEAD is really about American Mainstream Culture, how it has evolved since the 1960s, invaded the rest of the world through television and the Internet and been reflected by Mainstream movies. At the ripped out heart of it all is a fearless auto-critique of Romero's career, from the maker of possibly the first Post-modern horror film to his attempts at entering the Mainstream after the success of his own DAWN OF THE DEAD, to the compromises of DAY OF THE DEAD and LAND OF THE DEAD, to his return as the man who continues to pose the most unnerving questions to his audience and himself.
DIARY is more in the lineage of the first Post-post-modern horror films, exemplified by Lucio Fulci's NIGHTMARE CONCERT (1990) and Ruggero Deodato's CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST (1979), where the filmmaker places himself and his craft on the firing line and comes up guilty. I'm not even going to mention the two US horror films this is being endlessly compared with, let's just say that DIARY is far more thoughtful and outrageous. And his final image is the most disturbing one he's created since the apocalyptic pyre which concluded NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD.
Unless you live in a big city, this is not an easy film to see and I thought I would have to wait for the DVD. Interesting that David Lynch's INLAND EMPIRE, which was equally subversive both stylistically and thematically, also had spotty theatrical distribution. So it goes. This is most compelling US film I have seen since INLAND EMPIRE and my favorite Romero zombie film since 1978's DAWN OF THE DEAD. It's totally unlike any of Romero's previous films except that it's obviously made by George A. Romero. The Panic Room in which the survivors entomb themselves is as symptomatic of our age as the farmhouse was in NIGHT and the mall was in DAWN. And the final question posed over that hideous and haunting final image is one most will not wish to linger upon.
You know the set-up, the characters, the plot and that it's presented as a cam corded, lap-top edited film-within-a-film, THE DEATH OF DEATH. The special effects/video game designer I went to see it turned to me at the end and said, "Romero's a genius." I would say he's a visionary, or maybe someone who can see and hear through the wall of video and sound coming out of innumerable available portals out there. Romero is able to transcend each and every zombie movie/comic cliche and come up with a nonstop stream of new visual frissons, my own favorite in DIARY are the zombies floating in the swimming pool who are digitally activated for the final attack. It's something that Jean Rollin might have come up with.
After spending more time than I would like to admit on message boards and blogs during the last decade I had to laugh out loud when a Japanese poster on a You Tube message board advises the world, "Shoot in head!".
Keep going downmarket, George, keep on asking those chilling questions and thanks for the great birthday present.
(C) Robert Monell, 2008
