Diary of the Dead

George A. Romero has undoubtedly broken ground with his legendary Dead series: his use of Duane Jones, the black protagonist of 1968’s Night of the Living Dead, and his shopping centre setting in 1978’s Dawn of the Dead are now the stuff of university curricula—proof that cheap ’n’ gory genre filmmaking can function astutely as social commentary.

Yet his latest Dead offering, Diary of the Dead (which follows 2005’s very good Land of the Dead), seems the work of a master who has become much too conscious of his own canonization. Diary is, fittingly, strained meta-horror: a group of film school students making a mummy movie find themselves in the midst of a real-life flesh-eating epidemic. Some, such as narrator Debra (Michelle Morgan), just want to go home and see if their families are OK; others, such as Jason (Joshua Close), want to exploit the crisis and record every last bloody moment. Viewers, of course, get the entire story through what he and others record.

Diary of the Dead has a lot to say about post-9/11 America’s relationship with digital technology, but always tends toward the obvious (a jaded Debra repeatedly tells us, “If it’s not on camera, it’s like it never happened”). As with other such recent Media Studies 101 films as Cloverfield and Redacted, Diary’s deconstruction of storytelling and voyeurism can be seen as a smokescreen for its questionable plot devices, hackneyed dialogue and wooden performances. Romero certainly gets his point across—he well-nigh bludgeons us with it—but in the process has turned out his least surprising and least fun film to date. WAIT FOR THE DVD

Diary of the Dead is now playing at the Scotiabank Theatre Toronto (259 Richmond St. W.).