I’ve always been a skeptic when it comes to things I like, George Romero’s Dead series being one of them. I had high expectations for his last film, Land of the Dead and came away fairly disappointed in it. I had pretty low expectations for Diary when I heard it was going to be shot in a mockumentary style similar to The Blair Witch Project, but it turned out to be an interesting film in its own right. Perhaps better than Land turned out to be.

Sure, a film centered around a bunch of film students using camcorders to record the early days of the zombie outbreak is going to be amateurish, dull, and hard to believe or follow – which Diary is – but at the same time it really does kind of fit perfectly for this style of shooting. Film students know what it’s like when you just pick up a camera and shoot things/people; it’s hard to follow what doesn’t get picked up by the camera, and therefore the viewer has to use his/her imagination to pick up the missing pieces. That’s how I saw Diary.

Essentially Diary is meant to be a reboot of the franchise, much like Batman Begins or Casino Royale for their respective franchises. It wouldn’t make much sense otherwise, given that the first three films took place in the 1960s-1980s, back when there was no Internet, when cell phones weren’t prevalent, when camcorders weren’t so accessible to the general public. As a stand-alone film Diary’s narrative does provide an interesting new idea: that of a zombie outbreak that can and does occur in our present time, a time where most people think they’re relatively safe from any sort of disaster. It’s a good commentary on our overdependence on technology and the media, just like how Day of the Dead was a commentary on the military.

Does that make Diary of the Dead stand up there alongside the better Dead films like Day or Dawn? Not really. While it’s an interesting new direction to take, one gets the feeling that George Romero may just be messing around a bit, trying to find the right ingredients to take the often stagnant zombie genre to the next level. Mockumentary isn’t the right direction, so here’s hoping Island of the Dead turns out to be a much more rewarding experience.

I’m a huge, huge fan of zombie films, and I like to watch even a bit crappier ones, because this ‘genre’ is just so fascinating. But I don’t know what was supposed to be the idea of this film, because it certainly wasn’t zombies. Maybe I didn’t get the point, but I thought it was more about criticism of media, its power and how it has become such a huge part of our daily life, than anything else. The zombies seemed like extras, something you need on the background to fill the empty spots. I didn’t expect much but was still greatly disappointed, there was just nothing, no suspense, no interesting acting, not even a good plot, just… nothing. The film was considerably gory, but instead of making me scared or even a bit uneasy all the blood made me just bored – using too much blood usually indicates that the makers don’t have anything else to show us, so they rely on gory details. Well, doesn’t work for me, nope. It’s probably hard to make decent zombie films these days, recycling the same old idea of a virus that turns humans into zombies is just getting so… old. We’d need something new and fresh, and I’m still waiting for that.

Is Romero going senile?