Wednesday, November 24, 2010

1468 - Diary of the Dead


I've categorized this film below as being Canadian, money-wise I'm not sure if it's true, but I think that there are enough elements in it to deam it true.

As you can see looking over my last months worth of entries that I've been on a bit of a zombie-kick. It has a lot more to do with reading The Walking Dead more than anything, but I saw this was on netflix, and I've always enjoyed the old Romero flicks so I thought I'd give it a whirl.

Use the format of fictional documentary is a fresh and realistic approach to making a zombie flick, and it's nice that it came from Romero himself, probably in a desire to get back to his low-budget roots. As always Romero uses his zombies to creates metaphors for aspects of our society. Here it's about truth and the media. It's about how the media and the gov't withholds information, filters it. That's the strengths of the film. It doesn't really have any scares, or jump out of your seat moments. You don't dislike the characters, but they are more caricatures than anything and so it's hard to really get attached to it. The self-referential nature is often amusing, but it gets pretentious in the moments where they go on and on about how important what they're doing is. As if it'll make a difference - the problem is that there's no way for the audience to know if it will or does. I believe that the filmmaker believes that the film he's making is important, but I don't believe for a second that it is important at all.

The film is okay, if you're a Romero zombie fan you'll probably dig it a lot - there are some fun jabs to the fast-moving-zombies idea. Over-all it's not a great film, but it's interesting. I'd recommend it to fans of the genre, but it's not going to convert anyone.

No comments: