I do like a good zombie film, especially those made by George A Romero, so I was dead chuffed to see a DVD in the shops the other day of Diary Of The Dead.  After reading the back of the box I was in two minds about getting it, despite my great affection for the genre, because it was described as a group of film students making a horror movie and then real zombies start appearing so they film them.  I dislike the whole genre of supposedly homemade, handheld films as much as I like zombie movies and didn’t want to sit through something as annoying as Blair Witch or as confusing as Cloverfield but because it was Romero I went for it.

The film gets around the normal limitations of fake amateur films in a couple of ways. First of all the cameramen are film students so they know how to frame a shot and keep a camera steady.  Secondly they are shooting with high-definition professional quality cameras – so it is not 90 minutes of grainy camcorder effect. Being film students they have also edited it together properly, and even filmed themselves editing it.  On top of that there is footage from TV and from CCTV edited in – and the film even shows how they got hold of the CCTV footage.  Early on in the film the characters find a second camera, opening up the scope for multiple angles of a scene. It is a video diary but with decent camera work, multiple angles and proper editing.

So basically it is a lot more like a normal film, with all the normal zombie film features you would expect, and as its a Romero film there is no happy ending to get in the way and there is a bit of commentary on aspects of modern life.  While his first film is often seen as referring to racial attitudes in America and Dawn of the Dead is seen as a satire on consumerist culture, this one has a few of its own targets.

The most obvious theme is about the whole online ‘citizen reporter’ concept and the morality of filming events instead of getting directly involved in doing anything.  The characters are often criticising Jason for the way he persists in filming everything, even their pleas to stop filming, and for his pleasure in finding that the first bit of film he uploaded got 72,000 hits in eight minutes.  The film does not criticise this completely as it also features the counter-argument about the official news channels not showing what is really happening.

Beyond that, there are also parallels drawn between the zombie situation and ‘normal’ warfare.  The film professor says at one point “in wartime, when the enemy can be marked as this son of a bitch or that son of a bitch, then cruelty… becomes justified” which gets right to the heart of how, in wartime, the enemy often gets de-humanised so that it is easier for troops to be able to kill them.  It is why we always find a word for the enemy (the hun, krauts, gooks, argies, towel-heads) to make us forget they are just people. The logical conclusion is found at the end of the film when we see some rednecks using tied-up zombies for target practice – a reminder that real soldiers in real wars can become capable of similar acts.

But away from all the subtexts, its one hell of a good zombie film with a few black-humour laughs along the way and some inventive gore – top marks for the unusual use of a defibrillator and for the Amish scythe double whammy.