Diary Of The Dead

George Romero’s Diary of the Dead premiered as a sold-out midnight show at TIFF. It doesn’t disappoint, keeping up the gore and fun of the series. The framing context of this particular undead episode is a bunch of film students and making a mummy film in the woods when the dead come walking home. They decide to flee to their family homes as they struggle to come to grips with the reality of the situation, somehow (against demographic) apparently not having seen any of the previous “… of the Dead” movies and not immediately grasping the seriousness of the situation and so making those wonderful horror movie mistakes.

As they go on, one of the gang becomes obsessed with capturing the disaster on film and the story is told from the perspective of his UGC (user generated content). In the end it isn’t clear whether the meta-comment is that UGC is valuable (“mainstream media is lying”) or detrimental (“with so many voices, nobody knows what to believe”).

Either way, it’s a fun movie with plenty of blood and gore.

2007 Toronto International Film Festival