GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW (posted 2/13/08)

The dead have been very good to director George A. Romero. Ever since his groundbreaking 1968 Night of the Living Dead, this engaged, fiercely intelligent, and technically masterful filmmaker has been intermittently using the metaphor of flesh-eating zombies (and the "normals" who pursue, kill, and more often than not eventually succumb to them) to piquantly examine not just our social norms but the ways contemporary conditions and trends influence, or perhaps mutate, them. And in the bargain he's managed to create some seriously scary and entertaining horror movies.

The new Diary Of The Dead follows Romero's glitzy, broad zombies-versus-real-estate-developer themed Land of the Dead, a giddy kick-out-the-jams entertainment. Diary takes a tack that's not exactly new, but is new to Romero, and as one might expect, the director brings a sharp and uncompromising new perspective to it. Diary sees Romero entering Blair Witch Project — not to mention Cloverfield — territory, although in the final analysis Diary can be seen as an artistically successful version of Brian De Palma's putative pastiche Redacted. Diary purports to be an edited, music-scored version of footage shot by a group of young would-be moviemakers after the outbreak of zombie infestation. The editor/narrator is Debra (Morgan), the initially skeptical girlfriend of film student Jason (Close) who we first see trying to shoot his latest class project, a mummy film. (Romero himself had a long-cherished mummy project on his shelf before the current franchise got off the ground.) As Jason explains to his uncooperative cast members that mummies move slowly, the shoot is disrupted by an actual menace, and the kids, accompanied by their bitter drunkard film professor (Wentworth) head on a road trip to putative safety, a place to make sense of what's going on around them, with Jason compulsively recording everything he can along the way. One particularly grueling set piece takes in a visit to a hospital, and its major point of suspense has Jason trying to work with a new camera as his current one loses battery power, while guts spill and heads fly off around him.