El diario de los muertos

I watch a lot of movies. Not that I'm an expert or anything but I have a pre-paid pass that means I can see as many movies I want at the cinema for a year.

And with that pass I watch everything. To the end.

I've seen a lot of terrible movies and a lot of good movies but Diary of the Dead was one of a very few that I have actually walked out on my own decision.

Being a George AR fan naturally I expected good things. Land of the Dead was enjoyable enough, I liked it. Bought it. I own all the others and I consider the original three to be horror masterpieces, but masterpiece this movie is not.

Plagued with dire acting, over-preachy inconsistent plot riddled with cringeworthy clichés, I could honestly find no good qualities watching this. Hated the characters(whiny, emotionless, clichéd, students) who just did not convince me that this was real at all. In fact the camera style, also similarly used in REC and Cloverfield is supposed to install a sense of realism but everything felt incredibly staged, from actors to scenarios and really detached me from the whole experience.

And with little action altogether(Judging from the 60mins I saw) it felt more like a film about a group of students pretty standard psychophysical debate set during a zombie invasion. In reality it should have been students trying to survive during a zombie invasion but with such a lack of emotion from every character it seemed like this was just a pretty average day.

All in all this is definitely one of the worst movies I've seen in recent years and has truly made me believe that George AR isn't just having a bad streak, but may be going completely senile.

However I may watch it if it ever comes my way, some people are giving it good ratings and now I want to see if it changes into a completely different movie after the 60th minute because the pile of pants I watched doesn't even deserve a vote or even a damn entry into IMDb for being such a half-assed, poor excuse for a film.

This was quite a creepy film for the most part - the scene at the hospital was really creepy: the location, the build up and the pay off were all great.

Romero does a good job of showing the savagery of man. I think his vision is that we are not much different than the zombies as our humanity declines. He is also showing that the media and the government cannot be trusted to tell the truth.

It is a movie about zombies, and it has the usual excitement. Not a lot of gore, and the girl doesn't get her clothes ripped off, but exciting nevertheless.

George A. Romero is one of those filmmakers who shouldn't need an introduction. If you're a horror fan at all, you should be intimately familiar with his Dead series by now, and if you're a movie fan at all, you should at least know Night Of The Living Dead and Dawn Of The Dead, the first and still the strongest entries in the genre. It's no hyperbole to say that Romero essentially invented the zombie movie, gave it the structures and tones that have relentlessly followed the genre through 40 years of movie history.

Diary Of The Dead, Romero's new movie and latest entry into the 5-part series, is a return to the form and feel of his original classic Night Of The Living Dead. The three movies in between (the classic Dawn, hit-or-miss Day and severely underrated Land) showed a world consumed by destruction and fear, already well past the point of no return in an unthinkable apocalypse. Diary takes us back to the beginning, taking place during the first few days of the attacks, documenting how a group of college students (and one drunken professor) cope with the crisis growing around them.

The hook of the movie is that what we're seeing is not presented in a typical film fashion, but instead as a series of homemade video clips made by the characters themselves. While shooting their own low-budget horror movie, the students are interrupted by the sudden, jarring realization that freshly dead bodies are coming back to life and attacking people. What follows is a documentation of their quick departure from their suddenly deserted campus and their long trip to home, safety and any sort of an answer.

If the plot description has you thinking of The Blair Witch Project or Cloverfield, the comparison ends with the initial conceit of horror via home movies. There's no shaky-cam addled suspense here, and you won't ever feel motion sick. The camera's presence in the movie serves to give a heightened feeling of suspense and immediacy. Unlike most other zombie movies, there's no outside camera telling the story, letting us know where the zombies are and when they're coming. We follow the characters through the movie, and the threat of danger is always palpable, even when nothing on screen is particularly frightening. Hitchcock once said that surprise was a bomb going off under a table unexpectedly, while suspense was letting the audience know there is a bomb under the table while the characters remain unaware. Diary is a movie with thousands of bombs waiting under thousands of tables, waiting to explode every time the camera turns a new corner.

After Land Of The Dead, a great movie that felt buried beneath a huge budget and massive studio interference, it's great to see Romero returning to his indie roots. Diary is entirely his own movie, and he gets the tone perfect. The campy scares and the gross-out gore explosions are all present, and will delight fan boys to no end. (They sure got some big laughs out of me.) But what Romero does best is suddenly switch from fun to disturbing when you least expect it. The best moments of Diary come when the gory thrill ride comes screeching to a halt and everything suddenly becomes all too relatable, entirely too real. These are the moments that will stick with you after the gory brain-splatter effects have lost their novelty.

Diary isn't quite a perfect movie though. Occasionally the hand-held camera device becomes too distracting and begins to get in the way of the story. The movie takes too much time rationalizing why the characters decide to film the events, rather than trusting the audience to go along with the idea. At times it feels like the movie is apologizing for its own concept, which it definitely does not need to do. We don't need to know the details of why the movie is edited, or why music has been added. The explanations slow down the movie, and only highlight problems instead of fixing them. Also, the pace slows down quite a bit in the third act, which is when Romero movies usually jolt up to a fevered pitch. Stick it out though, because the movie's last sequence, and especially its last line of dialog, are worth the price of admission alone. This is most likely not the end of the Dead saga, but if it were, it could not have come to a more perfect conclusion than the jarring, horrific last shot Romero gives us.

I really dislike the whole "found footage" genre, and I wish it would finally die. Luckily, this movie doesn't quite fit 100% into that genre, but it's close enough that I got fairly annoyed. Diary of the Dead is basically about some film school kids documenting the beginning of the zombie apocalypse, and thus it's more of a fake documentary than anything else. Unlike some movies shot in this style, one of the main themes involves criticism of the obsessive need to document everything rather than actually participating. There are also some shots at censorship, social media, and the propaganda potential for the mainstream media.

Unfortunately, Diary of the Dead feels like a watered-down reboot of his classic franchise, modernized and targeted at teenagers, with the requisite group of stereotypical dumb ass characters found in every direct-to-video slasher movie. The social criticism is blatant and lacks subtlety, and Romero resorts to outright lecturing the audience. I generally agree with Romero, but I prefer his older movies. He's never been particularly subtle, but this is just too overt and generic for my taste. He comes off as having been inspired by soulless ripoffs of his own work.

It's one of Romero's worst movies, but that still makes it better than much of the crap that litters the horror landscape. Hopefully, if we get any more movies from Romero, they'll be as uncompromising and powerful as his earlier work, but it seems as though Romero has had some real problems getting funding. Watered-down, mainstream Romero is better than no Romero, but it's difficult to recommend. This may be a good introduction to his material for younger audiences, though.

While filming a horror movie of mummy in a forest, the students of the University of Pittsburgh Jason Creed (Joshua Close), Ridley Wilmot (Phillip Riccio), Francine Shane (Megan Park), Tony Ravelo (Shawn Roberts), Elliot Stone (Joe Dinicol), Mary Dexter (Tatiana Maslany), Elliot "Gordo" Thorson (Chris Violetti) and Tracy Thurman (Amy Lalonde) and their professor Andrew Maxwell (Scott Wentworth) hear on the TV news that the dead are awaking and walking. Ridley and Francine decide to leave the group, while Jason heads to the dormitory of his girlfriend Debra Monahan (Michelle Morgan). She does not succeed in contacting her family and they travel in Mary's van to the house of Debra's parents in Scranton, Pennsylvania. While driving her van, Mary sees a car accident and runs over a highway patrolman and three other zombies trying to escape from them. Later the religious Mary is depressed, questioning whether the victims where really dead, and tries to commit suicide, shooting herself with a pistol. Her friends bring her to a hospital where they realize that the dead are indeed awaking and walking and they need to fight to survive while traveling to house of Debra's parents.

I do not say that "Diary of the Dead" is disappointing, but indeed there is nothing new in this movie "à la The Blair Witch Project (or Cloverfield)". The story is a kind of "documentary" of George A. Romero's trilogy, with the cinema student Jason Creed shooting the movie with his handy camera. Unfortunately there is a total lack of credibility in this unreasonable character that keeps shooting his movie even in the most weird or dangerous situation for himself or for his group of friends. My vote is six.

Title (Brazil): Not Available