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Diary of the Dead (2007)

Director: George Romero

Time Out rating

Average user rating

9 reviews

Movie review

From Time Out London

After the disappointments of ‘Land of the Dead’ and Zak Snyder’s mediocre re-make of ‘Dawn of the Dead’, George Romero revives the rotting corpse of his own zombie mythology with this nihilistic low-budget horror movie. Like the recent ‘Cloverfield’, Romero uses the kinetic immediacy of digital video shot on-the-run, but in a more sophisticated and disturbing way.

The film-within-a-film that we are watching is ‘found footage’ that has been professionally edited together after the event and is presented as student filmmaker Jason Creed’s final video testament, ‘The Death of Death’.

Shot by a fleeing group of film students and their drunken professor, this ‘home movie’ shows appalling scenes of flesh-eating carnage, as a post-viral society slides towards anarchy and apocalypse. But bleaker still is the inter-cut footage culled from a variety of public media, in particular rolling news coverage and internet blogs.

The ‘shaky-cam’ aesthetic of ‘Cloverfield’ was merely an effective gimmick; by contrast, ‘Diary of the Dead’ uses the shocking visceral impact of these violent images to interrogate and question our ghoulish fascination with images of violence and death; what ‘Cloverfield’ producer JJ Abrams himself has called ‘the YouTube-ification of things’.

As her filmmaker boyfriend continues to record appalling scenes of nightmarish horror and emotional distress, Deb (Michelle Morgan) angrily lambasts him for his voyeuristic detachment: ‘If it didn’t happen on camera, it’s like it didn’t happen, right?’ Some incongruous scenes of knockabout humour aside, this is about as grim as it gets. At one point, Jason (Joshua Close) uploads some grisly images to the net, then congratulates himself as his website receives 72,000 hits in eight minutes.

Author: Nigel Floyd

Time Out London Issue 1959 March 5 – 11 2008

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User reviews of this film

Mike said...

Posted on Jul 02 2008 13:40 this is definitely not a horror film in the modern context, in that its aims rise beyond viscera and shock value. those looking for a mindless gorefest of suspense and legitimate revulsion won't get it here, though elements do come through.
really in the end this is not a spectacular film, but simply a good effort from the originator of this entire genre. i personally have no taste for the standard torture and carnage and over the top tension in most horror, so it sat right up my alley.
waaaayy better than cloverfield, though. no contest in my mind.

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Name said...

Posted on May 23 2008 08:21 I hate this movie. They should banned this movie.

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Five said...

Posted on May 18 2008 10:58 Judging by this review you have bad taste in movies, and you should be ashamed of yourself.

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Ash said...

Posted on May 16 2008 02:58 So bad it angered me. Fails spectacularly on every level.

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Shaun Haynam said...

Posted on May 14 2008 19:11 I haven't seen the movie but Synder's "Dawn of the Dead" was an AWESOME movie.

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martin said...

Posted on Apr 27 2008 22:59 this has got to be the worst film i have seen since, well ever, i cannot say how bad this film was, not even fit to be on dvd, cant belive it made the cinema. dont waste you time with this one, id rather microwave my private parts than watch a film like this again.NOT EVEN WORTH 1 STAR!!!

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Tom said...

Posted on Mar 08 2008 19:20 One of the worst films I have seen in a long time. Totally unbelievable and unoriginal.
One and a half hours of my life that I'm never going to get back.

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jake said...

Posted on Mar 08 2008 10:38 dude this is amazing, although i fell asleep:0

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Marko said...

Posted on Mar 07 2008 09:13 just rubbish

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