Diary of the Dead

Plot synopsis:
The movie begins with news reporters filming a story about the death of an immigrant couple and their child. As they are wheeled out of their apartment building on a gurney, the mother and the child suddenly wake up and attack the emergency services crew on site. Both are shot in the head, but not before biting quite a few of the people.After an introduction to the zombie documentary ('The Death of Death') mostly filmed by Jason Creed (Joshua Close), a film student at the University of Pittsburgh, the film cuts to the group of students filming a mummy horror movie in the woods in the middle of the night, with Jason directing. The actor playing the mummy, Ridley Wilmot (Phillip Riccio), is lectured on the way a corpse moves and the make-up artist, Tony Ravelo (Shawn Roberts), on not doing a good enough job on the make-up of the zombie. While the group argues, another student, named Elliot Stone (Joe Dinicol), declares that something strange is on the news. All the students, and their supervising professor hear the reports of the dead waking, and Tony scoffs at the news. After hearing the report, Ridley decides to head to his home in Philadelphia, along with his girlfriend Francine Shane (Megan Park), another student.The group gets into their Winnebago and heads over towards the university dorms to pick up Debra Monahan (Michelle Morgan), Jason's girlfriend. Entering the abandoned dormitory, he finds Debra in her room, attempting to get through to her parents, but to no avail. On the laptop computer next to her is the news report that was shown at the beginning of the movie. They get on the road once more, and Jason requests that each of the people introduce themselves to the camera, because he believes what is going on will be a part of history, and wants to document everything. Each of the group members introduce themselves hesitantly, starting with Mary Dexter (Tatiana Maslany), the driver, and moving to Debra, and Tony, then to Elliot, Gordo Thorson (Chris Violetti), his girlfriend Tracy Thurman (Amy Lalonde), and finally their professor, Andrew Maxwell (Scott Wentworth). While they drive, they encounter a car accident on the side of the road, where a State Trooper slowly stumbles towards the caravan. The students are frightened as he looks as though he has been fried from the fire of the accident. He begins to pound on the door, and the group quickly drive off, running over three other zombies as they escape.Mary falls quickly into depression as she realizes that she has murdered three people. Stopping for a break outside, Mary shoots herself with a pistol she was carrying, prompting the group to panic. Discovering that she still has a pulse, they rush to an abandoned hospital, looking for help. The group splits up, and Gordo hears a chaotic radio transmission. The group eventually find a doctor hidden behind a curtain. They call for his help, only to discover that he is a zombie. After firing shots into his torso, they realize the only way to put an end to him is to shoot him in the head. After killing him, an undead nurse starts to stumble towards them. After losing its eyes due to Debra zapping her head with a defibrillator, Gordo puts an end to her by shooting her in the head too.Running out of battery power for the camera, Jason opts to stay with a comatose Mary while it charges. He hears Debra screaming, but remains where he is, not wanting to leave his camera. Debra comes back, with another video camera in hand, and lectures Jason about his documentation being more important than their lives. Mary suddenly groans as she begins to turn into a zombie. The professor confiscates the pistol from Gordo's hands and kills Mary. On their way out of the hospital, a zombie patient bites Gordo in the arm before Elliot stabs the patient in the head with an IV pole.A few hours later it is dawn. The group bury Mary, and Gordo is dead. Tony prepares to shoot him, but Tracy stops him, pleading for him to wait and see whether he will turn. Gordo then does wake up as a zombie, and Tracy kills her boyfriend herself. They get on the road again, only to have the caravan break down due to a broken fuel line. They find a barn and its deaf owner, Samuel, an Amish man. After repairing the fuel line, the group prepares to leave. But several zombies appear from out of nowhere and attack. Samuel is bitten and stabs himself in the head with a scythe, thus killing the zombie behind him in the process.Another few hours later, the group encounters a band of rugged African-American survivors who have stocked a fortified warehouse with supplies. Jason uploads the footage he has shot so far on the Internet, and gets 72,000 message replies within eight minutes from around the world. Debra receives a text message on her cell phone from her little brother, claiming they are safe and heading home. Just before leaving, Ridley calls Jason via webcam and invites him over to his mansion in Philadelphia saying that he and Francine are safe. The group gathers some supplies from the warehouse after Tony kills a zombie and proving his worth to the rugged survivors.The group then sets out again to Debra's home. When they arrive, they find Debra's parent's car in the garage with the passenger window smashed and bloody. As they search the house, Debra is ambushed by her undead brother, who is quickly killed by Professor Maxwell with a bow and arrow. Debra also finds her zombie mother who had been chewing on her dead father. She is also killed by the professor, who claims that they need to leave.As night falls once again, the group decides to head over to Ridley's home hoping to find santuary. Before they get there, the group encounters two jeeps with four soldiers from the National Guard, who stop them. While the other three soldiers stand guard around the trailer, the colonel (Alan Van Sprang) enters the camper asking where they are going. After ordering Jason to turn the camera off, the four rouge soldiers quickly steal all their supplies, save for their weapons, and drive away, leaving the students with no food or water.A few more hours later, the group finally arrives at Ridley's home, only to find the front door open. Searching the home, Ridley surprises them as he comes out of a panic room in the library that has a two-foot thick steel door and is filled with video camera monitors eyeing the whole grounds. Tracy and Jason go and unload the caravan while Tony films Ridley going through the kitchen, looking for some food. His strange behavior alarms both Tony and Debra, who ask where Francine and his family are. He claims that they are all dead, and that he has buried them. He shows the two their bodies, who have been carelessly dumped into the swimming pool, but not before Tony noticing a bite wound on Ridley's hand. Ridley quickly turns, and goes outside where Jason is filming Tracy unloading the caravan. The zombie Ridley suddenly attacks her, but she manages to run. Jason follows them with his camera, and distracts Ridley as Tracy smacks a stick into Ridley's back, knocking him out.Angered that Jason simply filmed her as her life was in jeopardy, Tracy takes the caravan and drives off on her own. In the bathroom, Elliot dries his hair with a blow dryer as he is ambushed by the undead Ridley, causing him to fall into the tub and killing him from electrocution.Professor Maxwell suggests they head into the panic room after seeing Elliot's death on the TV monitors, but Jason refuses, claiming he doesn't want to be shut off from the rest of the world. He lies that he'll go into the panic room, and while the rest of the group are busy stocking up, he sneaks away, only to run into Zombie Ridley. The group hears the commotion and find Jason being bitten by Zombie Ridley on the ground. Zombie Ridley's head is sliced in half by the professor, leaving Jason lying on the floor. He begs Debra to shoot him, which she does.The next morning, vowing to continue his movie, Debra uses the camera and takes Jason's place and begins to record their actions. Debra, Tony, and Professor Maxwell spot hundreds of zombies breaking into the mansion from all directions and a dead Elliot walking around the house. The professor quickly closes and locks the panic room door as the zombies move inside the house sealing the three survivors inside the panic room... with no hope of escape or rescue. The movie ends with Debra explaining how inhumane some humans are, and questions whether the human race is really worth saving.

Tags: horror, revenge, humor, violence, stupid

Review:
There are also some shots at censorship, social media, and the propaganda potential for the mainstream media.Unfortunately, Diary of the Dead feels like a watered-down reboot of his classic franchise, modernized and targeted at teenagers, with the requisite group of stereotypical dumb ass characters found in every direct-to-video slasher movie.
It's no hyperbole to say that Romero essentially invented the zombie movie, gave it the structures and tones that have relentlessly followed the genre through 40 years of movie history.Diary Of The Dead, Romero's new movie and latest entry into the 5-part series, is a return to the form and feel of his original classic Night Of The Living Dead.
Diary takes us back to the beginning, taking place during the first few days of the attacks, documenting how a group of college students (and one drunken professor) cope with the crisis growing around them.The hook of the movie is that what we're seeing is not presented in a typical film fashion, but instead as a series of homemade video clips made by the characters themselves.
Diary is a movie with thousands of bombs waiting under thousands of tables, waiting to explode every time the camera turns a new corner.After Land Of The Dead, a great movie that felt buried beneath a huge budget and massive studio interference, it's great to see Romero returning to his indie roots.
In DIARY the camera acts as a character in the film, a lot of time I forgot I was watching a documentary esquire movie, and thought I was just watching a film.
The film is not a zombie gore fest by any means, not by comparison to Land anyways (But don't worry, DIARY still holds a great deal of signature Romero moments that had the audience up and cheering).
The fact that the film was shot all in subjective camera doesn't result in a gimmicky, incoherent mess, like, say, the Blair Witch, but is used intelligently and effectively.The scares and effects were great, and the movie actually takes a rather complicated approach to the topic of today's media-saturated environment, rather than being a crude polemic.My only complaint would be that the voice-over and dialogue were a little clunky at times, overexplaining things that could have been inferred without too much trouble.
The budget is tiny and the actors unknown (as is the case with his best films), but the special effects are top-notch and there is plenty of gore that's made even more unsettling as seen through the lens of a camcorder.The 'Point Of View' technique is bound to generate concern over similarities to other films using the same style (Cloverfield for instance) but Diary is a very different kind of film and certainly not a 'rip-off', but rather a smaller scale movie doing it's own thing.There's humour (some real laugh-out-loud moments), social commentary (perhaps a little heavy handed, but relevant and intelligent), suspense, gore and everything else we've come to expect from a Romero film but bundled-up into a new and fresher style by the old guy.
Follow this recipeIngredients: Throw in bits of social satire of a world gone or going wrong right now, a brilliant cast and crew, top notch attention to detail and mix with equal part zombies and what you have is a complete George A Romero feast.Best thing about the above recipe is that it will never spoil as I will not spoil with any details of the storyline....just go see it if you get a chance to..
I have to give credit where it's due, because the lighting and scene construction were done pretty well.Generally speaking, a film can please a large audience by combining excessive foul language with gratuitous drug use, sex, or violence, but this film doesn't have anything other than cursing.Over the years, George Romero has been pivotal in the specific sub-sect of horror that focuses on the idea of a zombie apocalypse.
This film is a daring re-imagining of Romero's own Night of the Living Dead and the initial zombie outbreak that results in the undead apocalypse of Romero's "Dead" series.Unlike Cloverfield, this movie is not presented as "found footage", instead it is a finished student film that was uploaded to the Internet.
Even though some might criticize the film for taking itself too seriously, Romero firmly acknowledges the stuffiness of the subject matter and reminds us that this is just a movie after all and so let's have fun with it.Streebo rates George A.
I cannot believe this came from the same man that brought us Night, Dawn & Day of the Dead...What a boring, emotionless waste of time...I LOVE Romero and was really unhappy with Land of the Dead, but compared to Diary, that was a classic!
Have you ever rented a horror film that was really low-budget and made for like 50K and you accept the terrible acting and bad effects...well this was the same exact thing, only this one wasn't any fun....I cannot express what a letdown this movie was...I really never leave comments but I was really looking forward to this...what a waste..
Let me just tell you about 1 scene from the movie that I must have watched 7 times and still laughing about it.***SPOILER*** OK, they are a group of like 5 - 6 people going through this hospital and the guy holding the camera is walking in the back.
With what I have seen when movies are made with the point of view I would think the movie would try to make things so the characters are more relate able and a person can get better insight into the characters thoughts and mind.This chance does not seem to be taken .The story seems like it could have been covered better from the third person point of view and not under the narrative of the film which by the way was dull and painfully obvious at the symbolism it was trying to slap the viewer in the face with.My final problem with the movie is there was not as many zombie eating people moments as there could have been.That's one of the reasons I watch these movies for is straight out zombies eating people and zombies getting killed by people.There was just not enough of this which was a major disappointment.There was still good amounts of gore for the scenes with the killing in them though.
A group of young film-makers, off making a horror movie as part of their course, hear on the radio stories about something happening with the dead coming to life.
Romero does make some good points on how media manipulation from governments and agencies to distort the truth from the public can mean the truth can get lost.Although shot in a similar way to such movies as The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield, the movie that comes to mind is actually a little known movie, The Last Broadcast, in that the footage that was shot has been edited with a voice-over and music added to turn it into a proper movie (the voice-over admits this at the start of the movie).The cast of unknowns are all very impressive.
Romero hits the "reset" button on his hugely influential Dead series with this scaled-back look at the zombie apocalypse as told from the perspective of a student filmmaker who sets out to shoot a low-budget fright film, but instead captures the breakdown of modern society at the decaying hands of flesh-eating ghouls.Jason Creed (Joshua Close) and his crew are shooting a mummy movie in the Pennsylvania woods when media reports begin pouring in about the dead rising from their graves to feast on the flesh of the living.
While self-centred star Ridley (Phillip Riccio) beats a hasty retreat to his family's fortified mansion halfway across the state, the remaining cast and crew are forced to fight for their lives despite having no weapons to speak of, and only a wobbly recreational vehicle in which to seek shelter.Immediately recognizing the gravity of the situation and outspokenly sceptical of the media, determined director Creed decides to use his own camera to capture the real story in a documentary entitled "The Death of Death." Now, as the group attempts to fight their way to safety, the sceptics will all watch as their greatest fears become reality, and the realists will attempt to process a nightmare that modern science would pass off as impossible.the movie suffers from the same malaise Romero diagnoses in society.
Even as his friends die he keeps filming.The story is decent as are the special effects, I mean this ain't' no 'Walking Dead' and it is very much a B movie but the zombie kills are fun and unique; the melting head covered in acid comes to mind and the opening scene at the hospital is also really good.Horror king George A Romero definitely has a style and as writer-director here, if you're a fan of the genre this is worth checking out.
A group of film students is in the woods shooting a low-budget zombie horror flick when the zombies start to rise with a hunger for human flesh.Next we see civilization fall apart as the zombie apocalypse is coming.Two of the group peel off and head back to a house they describe as a fortress and the rest sally forth in search of family aboard an RV.The students are also filming themselves trying to survive the end of the world."Diary of the Dead" is shot cinema-vérité style by our fledgling film crew caught up in the web of horror.There is a decent amount of gore and the acting by unknown cast is adequate,but the tone of the film is sometimes too preachy.If you are paying attention, assorted radio broadcasts are voiced by Romero fans such as Quentin Tarantino,Simon Pegg and Guillermo del Toro with a religious rant by Stephen King.7 out of 10..
Diary of the Dead dares to change many motifs of Romero's previous Dead films but by way of this films "commentary of the time", which is the importance of the information age.Without explaining the plot like other reviewers have, might i say that Romero's use of making the camera diagetic (that is exist within the film) is a balsy move that could have turned for the worst (Blair Witch Comparison).
I'm a big zombie movie fan, not obsessive, but enjoy a well thought out and acted story.The acting in this film immediately raised my doubts followed by extremely poor plot pieces, characters and general incoherent goings on.
As a lifelong Romero and zombie horror fan, I was counting the days until the release of "Diary" with much anticipation.The concept of the movie was very enticing, and hearing that Romero was to have complete control and influence over the direction, I could hardly wait.So, tonight on it's UK release, I dragged a friend along to view what was hopefully going to be THE horror film of the decade.
The idea was good and potentially we may have had an utterly terrifying 1st person perspective zombie rampage, complete with all the suspense and horror associated with past Romero films.Diary is a big insult to both "Dawn" and "Day".
Diary of the Dead was totally uncomfortable to watch.I'm a huge fan of zombie movies and George Romero -- which is why I was so surprised by Diary of the Dead!
After all, George Romero practically single-handedly created the American zombie movie genre by himself, with such classics as "Night of the Living Dead," with its brilliant commentary on racism, and "Dawn of the Dead," with its insightful satire of consumer culture.
For the attempt he deserves something, even though he's only in the film for about 6-7 minutes.In my Cloverfield review, I said this: "That this film works makes me look foreword to Diary Of The Dead, which will be an incredible experience if George A Romero utilises the camera half as well as Cloverfield has." Thats the problem.
George Romero's Diary of the Dead should be looked at as much as your typical 'kill-the-brain-to-kill-the-dead' zombie movie as it is a multi-faceted comment on media itself.
The cast of characters are filming a horror movie of their own, with an undead mummy about to attack a hot young college girl, and then "CUT!" and, of course, there are actual zombies.
But through Romero's technique of making this a trade-off of horror and documentary, he's still able to make a Romero movie as opposed to something like a Redacted (even if that has more in common with 'Diary' than the much compared-to Cloverfield).As if in a giddy act of a man in his golden years, Romero lets loose on new ways to kill people and reveal guts, and at the same time revisit some of his most potent themes from previous films.
There are the typical tough black characters (this time a kind of small militia of National Guard who've turned quasi-black panther), the rough rednecks going torturous with their "target practice", the token drunk guy in the group of student filmmakers as an echo to 'Day', and the juicy bizarre beats that we all love in Romero's work (i.e. the deaf Amish guy with a chalkboard, a nice lot of dynamite and a scythe).To be fair, I was probably more pleased with the end result, as I am one of those "fan-boys" for Romero's work; and to be also fair, Romero has always been experimenting in his career, from the artsy vampire flick Martin to the spin-off apocalypse flick The Crazies, even an obscure documentary he's done before Diary about OJ Simpson!
But Romero does something even more daring: he points his finger harsh, and at times hilariously, at the form of zombie movies themselves, from the 'mummy' horror movie made within the movie ("If your dead you walk slow", a character says after the "CUT" as the mummy actor gets mad).
In fact the camera style, also similarly used in REC and Cloverfield is supposed to install a sense of realism but everything felt incredibly staged, from actors to scenarios and really detached me from the whole experience.And with little action altogether(Judging from the 60mins I saw) it felt more like a film about a group of students pretty standard psychophysical debate set during a zombie invasion.
In reality it should have been students trying to survive during a zombie invasion but with such a lack of emotion from every character it seemed like this was just a pretty average day.All in all this is definitely one of the worst movies I've seen in recent years and has truly made me believe that George AR isn't just having a bad streak, but may be going completely senile.However I may watch it if it ever comes my way, some people are giving it good ratings and now I want to see if it changes into a completely different movie after the 60th minute because the pile of pants I watched doesn't even deserve a vote or even a damn entry into IMDb for being such a half-assed, poor excuse for a film..
What Romero is targeting with his criticism is DIY news reporting, and the notion that people would—through instinct—rather stop and watch people in distress than help them.This film is far more in vain of Night of the Living Dead than the rest of the series in that the relationship between the characters is just as important as the zombie threat.
Every avenue has been exhausted since then, with hundreds of walking dead movies in the forty plus years hence.Diary of the Dead uses a different angle by having a film crew of college students from the University of Pennsylvania i the process of making a horror flick, when real zombies start to chomp on the good people of Pa. The kids with the cameras decide to keep rolling, to make what should be an award winning documentary.
I bought this thinking that it would be like many of Romero's other zombie movies, you know, good.
If you want to see a good zombie movie like cloverfield you should watch Dawn of the Dead on one TV and Cloverfield on one next to it.
This was George Romero's first independent zombie movie for years.Whether that's a good or bad thing, you be the judge.Though this is the fifth in his zombie movie series, this actually takes place around the time of the zombie outbreak but set in modern times.George makes his point known about technology in this film and it is shows through the use of hand held cameras and the like.
Diary will definitely help fiction fans in that they will have plenty to write about in their own Diary world.Diary is a lot different that the previous dead films, Romero actually goes for less flesh eating and focuses on the story instead of the gore being the films only attraction like Land.
This has shown me the man has still got what it takes to make a great horror film.If I was to rank the films, Diary would come in right behind the original Dawn of the Dead, making it Romeros second best zombie movie ever.
Diary of the Dead (2008) ** 1/2 (out of 4) The fifth film in Romero's living dead series borrows The Blair Witch Project's idea of hand held cameras.
The film spends most of the time looking at the students and not the zombies, which could have worked but I thought Romero's screenplay was rather disappointing here.
But you can trust the man responsible for creating the modern zombie film to come back and make a great zombie movie; and in 2004, Romero did just that with Land of the Dead.
Overall, Diary of the Dead is one of the best of the modern zombie movies and proof that Romero still knows how to make a good horror film.
I'd recommend it only because it's Romero and no one else makes zombie movies like him..