Critics reviews

He's [Romero] now gone postmodern in a north by north Wes Craven way with the apocalyptic gore-fest Diary of the Dead... This is the end of the world as a home movie, both chilling and funny.

At 68, George Romero has returned with another of his zombie movies and this one certainly has its bizarre, ingenious moments... [but] well, what more is there to say about the zombie genre and its metaphors for our undead society?

Unlike his endless imitators, Romero knows how to setup a zombie attack and Diary is effortlessly thrilling in its vision of social collapse.

Diary is something of a return to Romero’s roots: independently funded and stripped back to basics, the film attempts to recreate the atmosphere of terror and anxiety that made Night of the Living Dead so alarming.

Diary of the Dead isn't a perfect film; it's not meant to be a perfect film. It's rough around the edges, dirty in the middle, and stained through with a sort of nihilistic humanism that ultimately unsettles more than the lurching undead themselves.

It’s clever, or at least clever enough to keep you going and interested from start to finish. It just isn’t scary.

I mean, it's great that George Romero knows about MySpace, I guess, but spicing up a middling, muddling zombie flick with a few electronic-lifestyle fillips is beneath him, frankly.

George Romero’s fifth contribution to the zombie-movie-as-political-satire genre that he almost singlehandedly invented with 1968’s Night of the Living Dead, is hardly top-drawer Romero. In fact, it may be his worst zombie film yet.

[W]ith "Diary," Romero has joined the satirical rank and file, the filmmakers who simply reprise existing notions that reflect our times. The target this time is too obvious and easy: the downloading, amoral, perpetually media-obsessed youth of today.

But while horror provides the marketing hook, Romero’s movies are even more entertaining for their zesty sociopolitical satire, and like its ancestors, “Diary” explodes like an undead noggin with that stuff.

As in the more successful Land Of The Dead, Romero makes an admirable attempt to update his beloved franchise for contemporary audiences. But this time out, his heavy-handed intellectual concerns get in the way of a perfectly good fright flick.

Where Cloverfield uses the trappings of cinema verite to foster a sense of documentary realism, Diary, like Redacted, sets out to expose the false notion of realism in cinema, even (or especially) in works of alleged nonfiction. It's a zombie movie by way of Brecht and Godard: Where most directors strive to elide the audience's awareness of the physical filmmaking process, Romero delights in exposing the rivets and joints holding together his movie's disparate pieces.