Perhaps YouTube and MySpace and the proliferation of cheap, digital video cameras have turned us into a nation of navel-gazers.
We sit in front of computer screens for hours, posting and clicking on the most mundane and intimate details of our lives that are out there for all the world to see — or no one. But it’s cathartic, so who cares?
Leaving us sluggish and mumbling with glazed eyes and pasty skin, technology has practically turned us into ... zombies. Or so the logic seems to go in “George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead.”
The horror veteran appears to be slamming the mainstream media for failing to tell us the truth (about Hurricane Katrina, about the Iraq war) yet he also indicts a generation of twentysomethings for creating their own misleading din with an onslaught of online reportage.
The message is muddled, but the zombie master still knows how to make a gripping, graphic, grossly funny horror flick. Here, Romero returns authentically to the low-budget roots he used to established himself 40 years ago with the classic “Night of the Living Dead.”
As writer and director, he follows a group of film students crossing Pennsylvania in a Winnebago to escape a growing attack of the undead — the source of which is, a virus maybe? Doesn’t matter, really. They include aspiring filmmaker Jason (Josh Close), who refuses to put down the camera, regardless of the threat; his disgruntled girlfriend Debra (Michelle Morgan), who narrates the finished product; and their melodramatic, alcoholic professor (Scott Wentworth).
All of them, along with tough-guy New Yorker Tony (Shawn Roberts), Texas belle Tracy (Amy Lalonde) and rich-boy actor Ridley (Philip Riccio), were shooting Jason’s student film in the woods (at night, natch) when the first rumblings of trouble began. Ridley, dressed as a mummy, was pursuing the corseted Tracy too quickly, prompting Jason to scold, “Dead things don’t move fast. ... The script says, ‘The mummy shambles.”’ (It’s Romero’s amusing little dig at the frantic zombies that populate modern movies like “28 Days Later.”)
News reports start flooding in about the dead coming back to life; one generically blond reporter gets her face eaten off on air, which is at once hilarious and horrifying. Jason and Co. try to reach their loved ones by phone but with no luck, so they pile into the RV looking for shelter and hoping to drop everyone back home along the way.
Of course, this being a horror movie, they get picked off one by one during their journey. (And the zombies themselves take it to the head with a variety of creative weapons, including a bow-and-arrow, a scythe, a defibrillator and — best of all — a smashed bottle of hydrochloric acid that fabulously fries a dude’s brain from the outside.)
But they also run into a wildly eclectic cross-section of people, including a deaf Amish man who’s surprisingly resourceful; National Guardsmen who aren’t exactly there to help; and a group of heavily armed black men who are thrilled to be in power now that all the white folks have left town. Civilization falls apart — again — or as Debra puts it in one of many voiceovers that state the obvious: “God had changed the rules on us and, surprisingly, we played along.”
Through it all, Jason keeps rolling; even when things get hairy at a hospital, he’s too busy recharging his low battery to help his screaming friends. “I can’t leave without the camera!” he reasons. “The camera’s the whole thing.”
Debra repeatedly chastises him for shooting everything, all the time, as if nothing matters if it’s not being recorded. (Didn’t Warren Beatty have the same criticism of Madonna in “Truth or Dare”?) The point grows a bit heavy-handed.
But Jason figures he’s doing the right thing — his duty, even — by taping these terrible events so that others may know what happened. And he feels emboldened when the video he’s already started posting on MySpace, “The Death of Death,” receives “72,000 hits in eight minutes!”
Romero — who’s used previous zombie movies to satirize the Vietnam War and rampant consumerism — clearly thinks he’s spineless and exploitative, though, especially as Jason asks his friends to repeat a line or walk through a doorway a second time for coverage.
So who’s right? As in “The Blair Witch Project” and “Cloverfield,” which employed a similarly visceral first-person point of view and jittery, hand-held camerawork, it’s all a matter of perspective.