Diary of the Dead

As a fan of the Dead movies, I was pretty excited when I heard this movie was coming out. I must admit, though, that it's actual release slipped passed my radar. I remember hearing about a new Dead movie a while back, but that was all. Like most movies within a franchise, there's two ways of looking at it. We have the movie as part of a larger continuum and self contained. I'm covering both. On to the review.

The winter movie season has seen a return to the documentary style that was made popular by The Blair Witch Project. While I believe that these recent movies are indeed an improvement to Blair Witch, they rarely entertain, or frighten the way they are meant to. While they think the world from a camcorder is revolutionary, I would rather see a panoramic scene any day, personally.

Aside from the cinematography, the story goes something like this: A cinematography grad student is out in the woods shooting his final project. While this is going on, the world is struck by the familiar virus which reanimates corpses, and the college students find out. Everybody abandons the shoot to grab a ride home. Of course, the director of the film decides that it would be a great thing if he made a documentary of the whole thing. So goes the movie. A group of college kids, and an english professor, make their way cross country, and try to cope with the end of the world as they knew it.

As part of the Dead Franchise, Diary did bring a new look at the beginning of the series. We see the addition of things like the internet and HD camcorders to the Dead Universe. We also get to see a lot more media coverage through the world wide web. On the flip side, I don't think many people were expecting the next movie in the Dead series to go back to the beginning. Land of the Dead brought us a picture of a distant future where the virus seems to have evolved. It feels like we were teased with the virus' evolution just to be taken back to the beginning.

As a solo film, I don't believe that Diary had much to offer the casual movie goer. There was some good dialogue in the movie, but it wasn't really that memorable. I guess there is only so many ways you can kill a zombie before it just starts to get stale. The story was pretty predictable, the music was bland, and the visuals were nothing new. Diary suffers from the same complaints that Cloverfield did. It almost feels like a carbon copy with a zombie substitution.

It is a disappointment to say that you should probably wait for video. I don't really feel the big screen experience is worth it here. Home movies are made to be watched at home, after all. If you aren't a fan of the Dead series, then you just may want to skip this one altogether, since it doesn't really have much to offer.