Full Movie Reviews
Rating of
1.5/4
Diary of the Dead - Movie Review
Matthew Brady - wrote on 01/01/2014
I don't know if George A. Romero knows how cameras work, because the camera literally has clear audio even when the characters are having small conversations too far away for a camera to pick up anything. It's like everyone got a mic on them.
The one thing I notice in this movie that I never thought about before, is that every time there was a zombie attack, it's always caught on camera and just by the way it was perfectly shot in time for someone to come behind it to shoot or stab it. It would be a lot better if someone died or gets attacked off camera, because it would add a lot to this movie and keeps you guessing on when the next attack happens.
The acting was a bit off at times, the effect's are really dated, and the characters are a bunch of idiots.
Rating of
2.5/4
"Diary Of The Dead" by Yojimbo
Yojimbo - wrote on 04/05/2012
A group of film students attempt to document the descent of society into chaos as the dead begin to rise again and feast on the living. I had a creeping dread of this film because I had the horrible feeling it would just be The Blair Zombie Project, particularly after witnessing the shapeless waste of an hour and a half that was Cloverfield, but the latest in George Romero's "dead" series actually works reasonably well. The use of multiple cameras intercut with faux internet footage and closed circuit TV gives rather more scope for dramatic momentum than the usual sole first person perspective and the mockumentary approach gives the film the kind of structure woefully lacking in Cloverfield. Unfortunately it still suffers from the unavoidable weakness of this sub-genre. The acting ropey …
Rating of
1.5/4
Sadly Misses the Mark
ZJW - wrote on 05/04/2009
An interesting concept for sure, but George Romero’s Diary of the Dead doesn’t quite gel as well as his previous zombie films. The film takes place in a timeline separate from his other ‘Dead’ films and starts the story anew in the present day. While Romero’s initial zombie outbreak had worn thin after four films there were still more stories to be told. Theoretically though there should be even more possibilities after scrapping everything that has already been established.
The story begins when a group of college students, in the process of filming a horror film, realize there is a real life zombie outbreak. They decide it is their responsibility to document everything that is happening around them. Despite several arguments during the movie about why they are documenting …
Rating of
1/4
A Vapid Zombie Movie
Franz Patrick - wrote on 10/08/2008
There’s nothing scary about this movie. Throughout the picture, I feel like the actors were a bunch of amateurs who are going for camp more than anything; since their characters weren’t convincingly scared, the audience, too, weren’t scared. The social commentaries felt beyond forced and heavy-handed to the point where I thought, “Enough already! I get what you’re trying to say about the media. Now, give us solid thrills!” But the commentaries weren’t just about the media. It covers issues such as racism, feminism, dependence on technology, anarchy, terrorism… I like that the picture has ideas, but in this instance, the ideas overwhelmed the script and the story. I didn’t get to know the characters so I didn’t care what would happen to them. You’d think that a film …
Rating of
3/4
The dead can still entertain us
kcvidkid - wrote on 07/01/2008
I'm a sucker for a gimmick. And the "discovered" footage of "The Blair Witch Project" or "Cloverfield" is one of my favorites. "Diary of the Dead" is a riff on the formula by having a survivor of one of George A. Romero's zombie outbreaks post video on the Internet to reveal to the world what was "really" happening.
The movie is extremely clever in its continuity, explaining how a scene was shot from two angles and when the victims would have time amid the bloodletting to put together a film. However, I could not always keep up, sometimes asking myself, "All right, who is filming THAT?"
There's not much more original here, though. We've nearly seen it all during the night, dawn, day and land of the dead. But the creative angle provides yet another fresh social commentary from …
Rating of
4/4
Hes Back
chiggles - wrote on 05/31/2008
Taking place before the events of the previous Romero films, Diary of The Dead follows filmmaker Jason Creed and his friends as they try to survive the zombie massacre going on around the world. On the way though, Jason and his friends use 2 cameras and other sources of cameras to documents the events that occur.
In the 5th installment of the Holy Trilogy, George Romero takes a more advanced trip into his zombie world with Diary. Instead of being shot like a straight movie, George makes it so the whole movie takes place from Jasons camera. On the way they find another camera and they use other sources such as security tapes and such to edit together the final film which we are watching. I honestly believe that this camera style actually makes the movie better because we get a real …
