DIARY OF THE DEAD

The Diary of the Dead did not disappoint me, `twas narcissistic, a movie within a movie, & the media conduits by way of camcorders, act as mirrors to this spicy zombie gobbling fest. The documentary The Death of Death, done by one of the student filmmakers from Penn State, who are the anti-heroes in this drama-feast herein, sort of crash-test-dummies for George Romero`s outragious brainstorms, are downloaded to his blog, then seen instantly by 72,000 people through out the world. I sure wish I could get that many hits! The local nobody-guy is the only one who can provide reliable information about the cataclysmic events unfolding. Network News is mere propaganda that ruthlessly ensnares a witless public. A…this is not unlike what say, Fox News is doing now…is it? This whole project is self-conscious smoking mirrors and carnival poking fun at society, which is what George Romero does best. This one is his Interactive Dead, and stays focused on our watching ourselves watching (if it is possible to stay focused)…with lots of surveillance cameras, a panic room in one scene, and then the paranoia of phony broadcast news, where stuff is faked by opportunistic telly journalists, who get good & gobbled up like jiffyquick. There is a little scene where some African American coterie of survivors take the Penn students in for a bit, and they have high jacked all the surrounding swag into a Wall-Mart of purloined treats; now they are in power for a change. They end up being the human rights perpetrators of the story. I was seeing them as quasi-metaphors for the Black Panthers of old, but I do believe that`s a `lude in my coffee rather. The gunshots to the torsos and heads of the zombies are at point blank. For an unknown reason this is not real violence but rather ultra-violence or performance art violence…everything here is an interactive snuff film, but it is merely comic. The students are just two-dimensional, and when one of them dies you don`t give a hoot really; there are not any actual good people in the plot or anything. They`re not bad either but they`re just there. The camera jitters around a lot so I was reminded of Cloverfield quite a few times, but there is always a put down or another gag to keep your interest. The sequence with the deaf-mute Amish hay boy is something of a hoot. His demise is shocking too. Two good old boys play target practice with some zombies & blow off the head of one poor zombie lady. The Amish farm boy throws homemade grenades that detonate several of the freaks into sawdust. Just about no one gets out alive, so I was reminded of the Friday the Thirteenth franchise. It`s not that scary here though, and when someone gets it it is almost organic. This one wasn`t quite as high camp as The Land of the Dead, which was rich in social satire, but this one is more a study of where the media and the internet are going. My Space, Facebook, YouTube, blogs and the live streaming pseudo-information wars are the fodder for this cinematic clip. You are at a freak show here with trick mirrors sending you deceptive messages, where death is life, fact is fiction, and society is turned upside down! In other words it is just like our current reality. Oh…the National Guard are crooks here and the clan of brothers are heroes, because they control the swag (food & gasoline). Bravo Mister Romero! Mother & father are zombies and must be eliminated…scenes are shown first in real time, then shown again as footage on blogs and other cameras…it occurred to me that this is how we see our lives go by in reality. The same clips again & again! I do encourage you to see it and compare it to the other editions. None will ever beat the first though.