Agree with you on that.


IMHO, it is a great storyline. The best dead films are the simple ones. Trapped in a farm house or a mall. They dont have to go thru the whole "how they came to be" thing.

Land already did that. You may want to avoid the James Bond movies, they will cause similar headaches. James Bond has enjoyed shaken martinis in five decades and not gotten any older!

I saw it last night, and it wasn't good. for one thing, Romero is still mired in a 60s mentality. There's a scene where the college kids run into a group of black militants who are happy that the zombie menace has chased out all of the white folks, leaving the blakc man in charge of the town. In 2008, when a black man is poised to become the next president of the United States, it seems naive of Romero to insert racial politics from the early 1970s into his movie.

A big problem with DofD is the weak characterization. Apart form the lead actress, the rest of the cast are ciphers. The audience never gets to know them, so we ultimately don't care if they get chomped by the undead.

George also breaks the #1 rule of film, "show, don't tell". His characters talk without end about how filming violent events desensitizes the audience to real violence, and how video voyeurism alienates us from each other. George, that's not subtext, that's just text.

However, there are scenes that work very well indeed, and in those moments we catch a glimpse of the movie we could have had if George hadn't let his message obscure the action, particularly the bit with the deaf Amish farmer. Let the kids get eaten and let me see more of the black guys in the warehouse, or the venal state troopers. I think following those characters would be a lot more interesting.

I am a old-school Romero loyalist.

Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, and The Crazies are films that are at the top of their genre.

Day of the Dead, Land of the Dead, Creepshow, Martin, and Knightriders are pretty rock solid as well.

I could honestly not give two shits about Two Evil Eyes, The Dark Half, Bruiser, and Monkey Shines.

If Cloverfield did not exist, I feel like I would enjoy Diary of the Dead more.

Cloverfield is 20 minutes of build-up and 60 minutes of shit just continiously hitting the fan. Every scene launches right into the next leading more mayhem. There is a serious sense of dread throughout the film. People can die at any moment and the whole world that we all once knew is slowly fading away.

Diary of the Dead has some great build-up to a climax that leads nowhere. The sense of dread Cloverfield holds in spades is not present in a film where death is inevitable.

All of Romero's films have had amazing build-up to climaxes that where everything that can go wrong does. Nobody survives Night, only two people make it out of a mall after the final 45 minutes of Dawn, an entire army bunker is taken over after Day, and an entire city is done after Land.

The first two acts of Diary lead to something great.

The third act? Nothing happens. This may be the most anti-climatic zombie film ever made.

This is also coming from somebody who actually enjoyed most of the acting from this film with the exception of the two lead main characters who may be the least unlike-able characters from a mainstream motion picture in years.

I have to get back to doing work, I'll finish this up later.

Saw it tonight and thought it was awful. Possibly even worse than Land of the Dead.

The characters are somehow more annoying than the Cloverfield kids.

The dialogue is didactic and stupid. While Night, Dawn and Day managed to say volumes in subtext and imagery, Diary clubs us over the head with its "message." Ugh.

Also, I never for a moment felt like I was watching a documentary.

O.k. some of you say you didn't like and failed to mention the most important thing about these Romero zombie movies! How's the fx and make-up?
NIGHT was damn good for it's time and still holds up.
DAWN was like the real thing!
DAY was like I'm gonna puke it looks so real!
LAND was like cheap Halloween make-up and cgi.
So how's the fx & make-up!!!!

It's closer to Land than any of the others. So, not good, to answer your question. Lots of CGI blood. No real standout moments in the makeup department that I can think of off the top of my head.

I just saw it last night. To qualify I am a huge horror fan and Zombie horror is my favorite "sub-genre". Romero is the undisputed master so that makes him my Kubrick and that means I forgive a lot of his faults.
I liked Diary of the Dead but didn't love it.
I can now say I rank the movies in order of release with Diary being the weakest of the series.

What I liked: Zombies. Simply put, it is a better than most (non-Romero) zombie flicks with none of the extra shit most other directors feel the need to shoe horn in (like stupid zombie origin stories and the need for resolution).

What I didn't like: Poor acting. I guess it takes a certain kind of actor to pull off the ad lib sounding, off the cuff, mockumentary style of acting (they need to take some tips from the cast of shows like Reno 911). Almost all of the dialogue delivered by the main characters sounded false and flat. I don't demand top notch acting from my horror movies (mostly because it isn't there usually) but in this case the style itself demanded better quality to allow suspension of disbelief.

Characters I cared about. This may be a reflection of the poor acting but I simply didn't care what happened to any of them. Because I didn't care about them I didn't worry about them. Without worry there was no tension.

Shut the hell up. How many times did we need to be specifically told that the lead character "needs" to view the events through the camera? The fact that he is a film student who wants to make documentaries was enough. Had they not needed to explain and argue about his "compulsion" every ten minutes it would have naturally come out and actually have been more effective.

"The message". This has probably been complained about the most but I'll bring it up one more time. I think Romero must be worrying about his own mortality because he seems to be thinking this will be his last chance to make a "social commentary" and he damn sure doesn't want anyone to think this is "just a horror movie." I honestly kept expecting Keenen Ivory Wayans to pop up in a mail man's uniform every ten minutes and shout "MESSAGE!"

The FX. George, two words: CALL SAVINI

I got a kick out of seeing that guy (forgetting his name) from the recent Dawn remake in this film. Made me think that this guy later went off and had the Dawn adventure.

A little bit of a WTF ending, though. I mean, it was pretty much telegraphed as to who lived/died, so that wasn't a shocker. All you could do is sit back and wait to see the "how."

The biggest groan in the audience came with the "Don't Mess With Texas" line and the banjo music. Seemed very out of place, even in this movie.

Overall, I certainly found it enjoyable, but it could have been a lot more. I also was left wondering exactly where does he go from here? I, for one, would like to see him given the chance to make at least his final balls-out zombie movie.

I as a former fan of the series I would like a resolution to the zombie problem that started in 1968 when the average home had a b/w t.v.! And not a movie with kids running around with color cameras and zombies with make-up that looks worse than 1968.

Wow, these reviews are discouraging. But then again, I didn't expect much. Maybe now people will realize Romero hasn't made a truly memorable Zombie flick since "Dawn".

Hoping this plays near me soon.

Just saw Day of the Dead (2008)...ugh...what horse crap.

Also LAND had some name stars and DIARY doesn't.
I guess even the Hollywood crowd didn't want to be in this after watching LAND.

I went down to the valley to see this film.....

UGH. George Romero should stop making films.... IMMEDIATELY! I never thought that I'd see the day that I would dislike a Romero zombie film. That day arrived on Monday Feb. 18.

The whole shakey handheld camera shtick didn't work. All it did was give me a headache that lasted most of the afternoon and prevented me from eating my popcorn.

The acting was horrible. If Romero's intent was to create the illusion of raw amateur footage capturing "real" events, then he failed... massively. The dialog was not believably real or natural. Sorry, it takes more than carpetbombing the sound track with F-bombs to make something sound authentic and unscripted.

The only expectation that I had going in to this film was that it would be better than LAND OF THE DEAD and was simply hoping that DIARY would blot out memories of LAND. NOW I have to go back and watch LAND with the newfound knowledge that LAND could've been much worse... it could've been DIARY.

guess I'll put this in the queue so I can watch it and not feel like I'm paying for it.

I'm sure when I watch this movie on dvd I will be sharing your comments.

I'll be skewered alive for this, but I couldn't make it through Dawn of the Dead. Sure, I only tried it once, but it just seemed really boring. I still have it on DVD so I will try to see it agaib eventually. Night, of course, I love.

Land of the Dead? Not that bad of a movie. Sitting at home, having a drink and eating something while watching it on TV is not a terrible way to spend some time. Granted, it's like a really good Resident Evil movie which isn't saying much, but it's not unwatchable.

Since Diary of the Dead got decent reviews, I went to see it. The movie this most reminded me of was Be Kind, Rewind. It is a movie that is well made but lacks a lot of soul, and I wanted to like it more than I actually liked it. I felt like I "had" to like it. There were a few inspired bits (the Amish farmer) but most of what Romero tried didn't work. I feel bad castigating the guy for trying though. He takes chances most horror movie directors don't. So I'll give him that.

I'd recommend this to Romero fans, but there's no need to see it in theatres.

I saw this last night with my chick. Wow, was this bad. Let me start off by saying I've been praying to the altar of Romero since I was a young lad. I own every single one of his films on DVD and have seen Night, Dawn, Day and Land enough times to quote them endlessly.

Some spoilers may follow:


Diary, unfortunately, will not become a part of that repertoire anytime soon. This film was so bad: where to begin? The script was not nearly as solid as I expect from Romero. Characters were annoying, cliched and poorly written. The acting was obviously from a theatre troupe because every line was so poorly delivered that it felt like a theater production. These people were seriously annoying. You mean to tell me that, if this were going on, you would keep videotaping a friend while she's being chased by a zombie trying to eat her? Give me a break. Or you'd stay sitting in a room in a hospital to charge your battery? Hell no. I'd drop my shit and get moving. At least Cloverfield got it right. One camera, one charge, covering the entire night. No stopping your friends to get them to enter the room properly for your shot. No crawling for the camera even after you've been bitten by a zombie. This was incredulous and insulting to me as an audience member. Even the off-hand remarks about slow-moving dead made me cringe. This was not at all what I was hoping it would be. Consider me very disappointed. Certainly not worth paying to see in a theater.

Romero fans be warned.

And still no solution to the zombie problem.
You know in the real world the gangbangers would be having a blast shooting at the zombies. Change that to missing and hitting the living.

So is this movie a flop? Was it limited release?

Box Office Mojo has it grossing $615,620 in 20 days of release with it's widest release being 48 theaters.

Opening Weekend: $232,576 / 42 Theaters

No production budget given.

The movie cost $2 million to make.

The Weinsteins bought it for $3 million.

I would disagree.

I think if the Weinsteins advertised the film and put it anywhere from 750-1000 screens, I believe they could've pulled an easy $10-15 million on it.

The beauty of that would be, the advertising and distribution cost would cost less than $10 million.

AND on top of that, it pretty much advertises the DVD if you can get it out in 3 months flat.

EDIT: For example, if the film had the same PSA it's first weekend on 800 screens, you'd be looking at a weekend gross of $4.4 million. This, in turn, would lead to a final domestic gross of $9-10 million. A lot better than the $600k it's grossed up to this point.

Oddly enough, this opened in Anderson, SC this weekend and I just got back from watching it. I don't even think it's opened at all in Greenville, so for this to be playing at a theater in Anderson is just totally weird. Any of you in the area, you know what I mean.

Anyway, yeah, this one wasn't so good. I'd give it an out of 10 rating of around 6.5 or something like that, but that's about it. It had moments that I really enjoyed, but the bad far outweighed it. As a matter of fact I almost just left the theater about 20-30 minutes in since it was so mind-numbingly bad. There are times when I see a film and I recommend it because it's so great. There are times I wouldn't recommend a film to anyone because it's so horrible. Then, there are times when I would recommend a film, not because it was great, but because certain aspects were so horrible. Diary of the Dead falls into the latter for me.

If you folks thought Crash bashed you over the head with certain themes, well, Diary uses a sledgehammer and goes straight through the skull. That, little things like the banjo music, the ending (or at least a sequence in the ending) being telegraphed to a point that anyone who doesn't see it coming is either bored to death and not thinking or either they're as brain dead as the zombies. Some of the stuff in this one is so bad, I actually recommend that people who are in the least bit interested in it just to see it so they can see what I'm talking about.

I give it a solid "ugh", and maybe a "meh" if I'm feeling really generous.

I've noticed that for the past 5 or 6 weeks, it has always been playing in 47 theaters, so I think the Weinstein company is just sending each print all over the country to different theaters each time it leaves another theater somewhere else.