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| George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead | 
 enlarge | Actor: George A. Romero
Studio: The Weinstein Company
Category: DVD
List Price: $24.95
Buy Used: $8.00
You Save: $16.95 (68%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  129 reviews
Sales Rank: 1526
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Ntsc, Subtitled, Widescreen
Languages: Spanish (Subtitled), English (Original Language)
Rating: R (Restricted)
Number Of Items: 1
Running Time: 96
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 7.1 x 5.4 x 0.6
MPN: 81173
UPC: 796019811736
EAN: 0796019811736
ASIN: B0013D8LA4
Theatrical Release Date: 2007
Release Date: May 20, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Like new! Disc is guaranteed to be in perfect working condition.Machine buffed before shipping. Rental sticker on disc.
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Amazon.com
George Romero has always come up with new ways of treating his zombies, and Diary of the Dead is no exception: Romero keeps his dead fresh, with an original approach to the undying subject. This one purports to be the video record of a group of young people who are shooting a low-budget horror movie when the terror strikes: corpses begin re-animating, intent on chewing the living. Our heroes trek across Pennsylvania, encountering the staggering zombies as they go. Other pieces of video are incorporated, which gives Romero a chance at some great set-pieces, including the brilliant opening sequence, a live local-TV feed that goes horribly, horribly wrong, and a home-video tape from a family birthday party, where the party clown turns out to be a dead ringer. All of Romero's Dead films are political, and this one's no exception, with a stark view of the way things are today; it doesn't offer the Hawksian heroics of the survivors in Dawn of the Dead or Land of the Dead for comfort, just a group of bickering, shocked youths. There's too much talk about the detachment of watching things through a lens, but in general this is a bracing, intelligent movie. Plus, there's some excellent splatter. --Robert Horton
Product Description
From legendary frightmaster George A. Romero comes one of the most daring, hypnotic and absolutely vital horror films of the past decade (fangoria.com). Romero continues his influential Dead series, this time focusing on a terrified group of college film students who record the pandemic rise of flesh-eating zombies while struggling for their own survival. Intensely gruesome and relentlessly grisly fueled by the directors signature realistic special effects Diary of the Dead is must-see horror that is Romero at his finest (bloody-disgusting.com).
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| Customer Reviews: Read 124 more reviews...
Enjoyable zombie flick. May 15, 2008
36 out of 41 found this review helpful
When it comes down to Romero's zombie flicks. I have to see them all and I could careless what anybody says about them. I waited for awhile to see this one and I wasn't completely disappointed at all. I did enjoy this and I didn't miss the point Romero tried to express. But the movie does have flaws that did irritate me.
The biggest reason I had to see this movie is because of the documentary form. I fell in love with the story before I saw it. The problem is, it just didn't completely feel like a documentary being recorded under fire. The main character behaved unrealistic at times. And like someone else mentioned, it felt like the cast were really acting. It completely lost its feel of realism in my view. I could explain this alot better but that would require spoilers. So, I won't go that route. But I was annoyed by the, "people have to know" deal. Again, I understand Romero's message but I felt he was beatin' on a dead horse. I will admit this, at times I really did like the camera angle. It added to the suspense and I loved the zombie close ups. I felt the best scene was at the very beginning. Even though it was unintentionally funny, it still served its purpose.
Now lets be honest here. When people go to see a zombie flick. They want to see zombies in groups causing ruckus and doing some serious dining. It's very unfair to compare this to the trilogy but this pales in comparison to all of the films concerning gore. The death scenes and the gore were ok at best. But they really needed more. I wanted to see some serious he11 on earth. To be straightforward, I really didn't feel the use of CGI in this one.
I know people are going to hate seeing 3 stars on this flick but oh well. The message was understood, the story and plot was fine. However, at the end of the day. We all want to see zombies completely tearing people apart in great detail. And on that end, I wasn't satisfied. This movie is still worth seeing though and I don't regret buying it.
I can't hate the man at least he tried May 29, 2008
32 out of 33 found this review helpful
I thought the film was okay but I know to myself it will never be my favorite out of the bunch. Though it was a documentary I didn't quite catch it as one or for the majority of the film. In here we have a film crew that made up of different characters: The director Jason (Joshua Close) who acts though he believes that if it didn't happen on camera, then it never happened at all. There's his girlfriend Debra (Michelle Morgan) who gets increasingly annoyed with his filming everybody, Tony (Shawn Roberts) who looks like he is prepared to beat Jason to death, and there's even the drunken film professor Maxwell (Scott Wentworth) who looks upon everything with a bemused attachment. What George Romero succeeds in doing as a writer is give us characters who aren't simple types and break those cliches to become increasingly unpredictable in their actions.
Which is one of Romero's strong attributes is that he gives us strong characters with females and minorities. He started doing this a long time ago with "Night Of The Living Dead," and it continues on with this one. The female character that comes across as the strongest here is Debra, played by Michelle Morgan. She is driven to get back to her family who are back at home, and she is not about to get sucked into watching things through a camera lens. Michelle gives the strongest performance in the movie, and she also narrates the movie within the movie, so you have a pretty good idea of what happens to her character. The group does run into a squad of African Americans who have taken over a small town and all its supplies, and who refuse to leave the town. This is because for once, they have power over something that they have never had before, and you could see it as a sort of revenge against the white man for all they have put their people through.
The movie does have its share of good scares, and has that same morbid humor that has been present in all of Romero's "Dead" movies. This does make this film relevant in a way even after four decades after the very first one. The last scene in the movie questions the audience directly as to if we as a race are really worth saving or not. That scene will stay with you long after the movie has ended because the characters have only started to learn how to exist in a post-zombie world (shades of 9/11 do abound here and there).
The suspense was there along with the blood and gore, it was giving to us in a fair dose though not quite on the same level as "Dawn" or "Day." Still, there are some good kills throughout, and the characters make good use of a scythe and a bow and arrow. Romero, after all these years, doesn't skimp on the good stuff. However, it still takes these characters way too long to figure out that the best way to defeat a zombie is to shoot it in the head. Aside from that I was slightly disappointed with this film or documentary. I'm thinking there may be room for another one Romero zombie yet, and there is hope to be had in that even if the world is still falling apart. I wouldn't mind seeing him do one more, but I hope it comes out before the apocalypse hits us.
I just saw my dead grandma chew a mans face off on YouTube man! May 7, 2008
29 out of 38 found this review helpful
When a friend comes up to you and tells you he has something for you but the only way you're going to get it before he watches it, is for you to rub his feet and suck on his big toe, you just know he has something good. I laughed and asked him "Come on man... just tell me what it is." He tells me, "I got a copy of Diary of the Dead...sup."
After gargling some mouthwash and wiping my mouth, I stuck Diary of the Dead into my laptop with Zombie glee pouring out my brraaaainnnss. The film begins with one of the best opening scenes to a zombie movie in my opinion. A new cast is filming a gruesome murder scene, to only witness the dead rise and begin to attack. When the lady zombie gets up, you can see her eyes fixated on the camera man from the start, but he's looking at another zombie mainly and sometimes you can see the female getting closer and then BAM in your face. And she looks wicked thanks to the zombie makeup that does not go over the top.
We then come across some college students (our main attraction) who are filming what I'm pretty sure is a low budget Mummy movie. During a break to fix makeup, they learn about how the dead are rising. Whether it's real or not, everyone decides to go home. Two head to the `Mummy's' house (more like mansion), the rest decide to go get the director's g/f and then everyone at once head to their parents houses which are, thankfully, on the way to someone else's parents house. While on the road, they are basically safe, but it's during the stops that the troubles begin.
The story was great and the zombies were fantastic. I can see what Romero was doing here and I totally enjoyed it, but there were things that just really bothered me about the movie and I'll got into a little detail for them
1. The acting was atrocious. The movie is supposed to be filmed like a documentary, but the acting seemed like acting. None of it had a real feel to me. I saw actors, trying to act like, they weren't acting. And bad acting doesn't bother me, it's just the fact that it kept taking me out of what I was supposed to be feeling, and that was that I was watching a documentary.
2. The camera. The documentary feel doesn't bother me. I liked how Cloverfied was filmed because I KNEW that it was supposed to FEEL like a documentary. And that's what it felt like. This though felt more staged. To me Diary felt more like a videogame the way it was filmed. Like I was watching a rail camera.. It felt like HUD was actually behind the camera in Cloverfield. Jason Creed, well, he felt more like a camera machine and not a human. Yeah I'm sure this helped a lot with the shaky camera problem that a lot of people hated about Clovefield and made them run out to get Dramamine pills for, but it took away from the REALNESS that I believe Romero wanted for the movie. What I meant about the rail camera above was that it felt like certain scenes were choreographed to give us a scare or put action into the scene. Sure I know ALL scenes in ALL movies are choreographed, but they don't FEEL like it. Hopefully you get what I'm saying, I might be having trouble trying to explain it.
3. CG was used. I couldn't believe this. On little things such as gunshots to the head cg was used. Blood splatter from the back of the head was CG. That really pissed me off cause I hate when CG is used for things that special effects artists can CLEARLY make look better with actual real life blood packets and whatever other cool gadgets they got. There was one scene where the CG was used correctly and looked really good and it involved acid. Sure we've seen acid scenes before with make-up effects or whatever, but this looked really good. But it doesn't make up for the other countless CG effects that could've been easily done the good old fashioned way.
4. The editing on some scenes made me scratch my head in befuddlement. I get the fact that Romero is giving us a lesson on how we are using camera, phone cameras, whatever else is out there gadget wise, to film everything around us now. But I don't need that to ruin a good scene for me. In one part, the Winnebago the crew is driving, runs over a group of zombies. Well right when we are getting ready to see a nice scene, the camera switches over to one of the camera phones somebody was using. So we don't get the good sound or video we were witnessing. It goes to a very crappy looking and sounding shot of these zombies getting run over. I was pissed at that.
In the end, I get the message. The media. The constant updating of OUR lives. The youtubes and MySpaces. The car wreck syndrome. The `not really being there feel' when you are behind the camera. I get it. But when I'm watching a zombie movie, I'm watching it for the zombies first and..well..second. The message can go in there somewhere also, but I REALLY could care less. I want my carnage. I want my blood. I want my gore. I want my feel of hopelessness. I got what I wanted, but I honestly think Romero could've done better. Will I watch this again? Hell yes. It's better than a LOT of the zombie movies out now. I will own it also and spend the extra dough on the blu-ray version as well. I think EVERYONE should at least rent it and give it a try. Just don't going in it's going to be blockbuster quality because it's just not... in my opinion.
To my zombie and gore friends, please don't hate me for giving this 3 stars... lol. I just have to rate it how I feel.
P.S. The scene looking out of the barn via the camera was very cool looking.
 Dear Diary: this movie blows goats. March 28, 2008
20 out of 46 found this review helpful
George Romero is a hack.
Or: The Dead Walk. I snore.
"Diary of the Dead" is absolutely about the Dead getting up and walking around: it's true, it's amazing George Romero can even lift a camera, let alone have the audacity to slap something this slipshod, this mediocre, this stupefyingly dull together. Here's a hint George: time to hang up the cam and spend those royalties on a nice tropical timeshare and mebbe a pair of decent glasses. Not those giganto loopy things you've been wearing since "Night". It's affected your vision, in every sense of the word.
If you really wanna see a zombie flick where about 95% of the run-time is spent with obnoxious community college types going on and on (and my God! on and on) about the meaning of blogging---I'm not making this up!---and cinema, and the reality of media, and the reality of reality---this is your flick. If you wanna see an engaging, visceral, shiggola kicking zombie film, stay away.
"Diahrea of the Dead" is Romero doing his zombie thing by way of the "Blair Witch Project": student filmmakers scoring a mummy flick when Earth passes through a meteor shower, or the Arrowhead Project gets all outta whack, or the Illuminati raise Nixon from the dead and he starts really taking a bite outta crime. Whatever.
The premise is that one talky student (the pretentious Joshua Close, who 'plays' Jason, who...forget it, who can't act, even describing this thing is making me groggy) and his crew of derelicts, misfits, social morons, and college student apes, are shooting their crappy little film when the recently dead start hankering for human canapes. Chaos ensues. Or does it?
1)"Diary" cuts its own throat: you can have instant, on the spot realism, or you can have a typical studio film. You can't have it both ways. "Diary" doesn't trust its audience, and why should it? So even though we've got a handicam film, it's got background music. The chick narrator (see below) says she edited that stuff in to 'scare us'. Yeah. We're viewing a flick about the zombie holocaust, and we need bad synethesizer tunes to get creeped out.
2) Irritating Chick Monologue: Jason's squeeze is "Debra", played by Michelle Morgan, who, with her big puppy-dog eyes and nice cheekbones and raven waves of cascading black hair and taut little nubile muscles and toned up thighs and arms and....where was I? Oh yeah, she's easy on the eyes. But I've seen autistics who were better actors. She does voiceovers. Constantly. Voiceovers that make you want to cringe, as in: "we were all in this dark corridor of meaningless violence together, the camera showing us what was real, only because it was a camera, it wasn't real, and so we weren't really real."
Yeah, babe. Make me a pie. And then vamoose: Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner" was a visionary masterwork in spite of Harrison's lame narration. "Diary" sucks, but it sucked worse because you opened your mouth. And not in a useful way, dig?
3)ATTACK OF THE 80 FOOT CAMERAMEN! having a guy hoist a camera and film throughout a zombie apocalypse is hugely silly. Rotting folks are trying to make you their power lunch: you gonna keep filming? The only way to get us to suspend our disbelief is not to dwell on it overmuch---the way "Blairw itch" did it, or the way "Cloverfield" did it. The camera, then, becomes our own eyes, as opposed to an intrusive screen or barrier to the story unfolding before us.
Romero's cam is artless, distracting, and constantly takes me out of what might have been scary or worked. Worse still, when you have a mini zombie rampage in a hospital, and the Zombies are really working it, you know, working it to make chicken McNuggets out of the actors, and you've got about 3 people shooting videotape while everyone else is wigging out----well, it's funny. Funny not ha-ha. Funny Liberace. Dig?
4)Zero Scares. Every time romero starts playing around with an idea that might be cool & nasty (the dead guy in the warehouse hide n seek, or the rampage in the fortified mansion, all covered room to room by this creepy dead-eye surveillance camera) he immediately deep sixes it to return to monologue babe (Morgan). Yeah, she's a hot chick, but she can't act her way out of a paper sack. Every time we get a quease inducing idea (Mummy boy!) we gotta talk about blogging. Or the Internet. Or the Media. Or Global Warming. You're getting sleeeeeeep-ier, or I am.
5) the mummy scene actually worked. Phil Riccio, who played the wicked, doomed socialite Ridley Wilmott, did what he could to make this flatline flick amusing. Thanks Phil!
Oh, and the pool zombies (what we saw of them) were fun. Seriously. Maybe sticking to the mansion the whole film through might have been more fun and given things a nasty "Resident Evil" vibe. Same with the Warehouse thing: you got a buncha brothas together, and they're all hardcore, you know, all Harrisburg PA and all, and they get to do NOTHING. Zero. Bummer.
6) not enough of the talky annoying people die. Big bummer.
7) not enough guts by far.
"Diary of the Dead" is pretty much a diary by way of King Louis XVI, last King of France (who did his own undead shuffle by way of the Guillotine), who wrote in his diary on Bastille Day (when Paris's infamous political prison was obliterated by Jacobins) "Nothing Happened Today".
Serve that up as an epitaph for "Diary" and bury this corpse.
JSG
The horror of modern technology May 28, 2008
20 out of 20 found this review helpful
Good evening. This is Tom with Channel 4 news. The stock market crashed as oil prices hit record highs. The unemployment rate ballooned nearly 10% the past month while crime keeps escalating at an alarming rate. Home equity plummetted, health care plans are becoming invalid, taxes rose, debt skyrocketed, and the soldier's death toll suffers its most jagged increase since the opening weeks of the war. But to heck with all that irrelevant junk, did you watch American Idol last night? Hahaha, that's some funny stuff!
My biggest problem with the latest Dead installment is the seesaw effect between the serious and the comical. Throw in so much cheese and corn, and it's hard to digest all of the social and political commentary. George makes some great points, some important profound statements, and then shows something totally absurd to spoil the moment. I didn't particularly care for that.
I've got some more issues with this one. The acting is pretty bad, but that didn't really bother me. Neither did the CGI. I hated the tone, or the mood of this entire story. George never really establishes a dark, gloomy, foreboding atmosphere. In my opinion, an adequate feel of desperation never settles in, I'm sorry to say.
I did love the idea of the homemade zombie documentary. Romero tries to bring a fresh element to the horror genre, and for that he should be commended. But the camera work was not too convincing. It rarely has a real feel. And I was shocked at how underdeveloped the characters are. Maybe this story is about people as a whole, but some closer connection with some individuals would have been nice.
Diary of the Dead starts strong, but quickly fizzles out in many aspects. There are some nice gore scenes, although it seemed to be lacking in that department a bit. It has some undeniably great pieces from the master, but are bogged down by chunks of disaster. I will say that I'm impressed with Romero's efforts at something original in the zombie saga. Hopefully his latest effort will grow on me.
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