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SimplyScripts Screenwriting Discussion Board    Reviews    Movie, Television and DVD Reviews  ›  Diary Of The Dead Moderators: Nixon
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James McClung
Posted: February 16th, 2008, 8:38pm Report to Moderator
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After Land Of The Dead, George Romero thought it might be a good idea to start his legendary Dead series fresh. This means make a small independent zombie movie outside the studio system that shows the beginings of a zombie outbreak in a whole new universe (Night, Dawn, Day, and Land all occur chronologically in the same universe). Sounds like a good idea, right? The result is Diary Of The Dead. Some people really hated LOTD and thought this Diary was Romero's chance of redeeming himself. Whether or not Romero's new one can be considered a comeback for Romero probably depends most on whether or not you hated LOTD and, more importantly, how much...

Diary Of The Dead is essentially a film within a film. That film is called The Death Of Death, a documentary directed by film student Jason and edited by his girlfriend (both of whom are characters in Diary, just to avoid confusion). The Death Of Death chronicles a group of film students' (plus Jason, his girlfriend, and their professor) attempts to survive as, you guessed it, the dead starting waking up and munching on their living counterparts. Jason is hardly seen as he's behind the camera about 90% of the time so his girlfriend basically fills in the protagonist slot.

I thought LOTD was mediocre but still showed some innovation on the part of Romero. Not the case with Diary Of The Dead, which I think is the worst film Romero has ever done. Everything about it is cliche. The characters, the dialogue, the situations... and somewhere between Cloverfield and The Blair Witch Project, this whole documentary style filmmaking stopped being cool (not that it was all that great to begin with). Diary Of The Dead is buried so deeply beneath cliches, it basically re-explains the entire zombie mythos, which even mediocre directors would have the sense not to do. It's as if Romero's never seen a zombie movie before (can you imagine?!). He retreads on just about every zombie movie trademark in the book from characters learning to aim for the head to accepting that the dead bodies of their former loved ones are nothing but. The characters are all typical horror movie archetypes except for Jason who is the worst of all, a total scumbag. He's an idealist who becomes so wrapped up in filming that he just stands there and watches as his friends are attacked.

All of this recycled material is covered by a suffocating blanket of Romero's least subtle, not to mention least interesting, political commentary to date. First off, he points out that the media has desensitized people to violence. I guess that's why you're making a zombie movie, eh George? Second, the mainstream media is not impartial and you're better off getting the truth from MySpace and YouTube (I'm not being sarcastic; references to both sites pop up all over the place). Okay. Fair enough. Except you're preaching to the quire. If you watch Fox News and think it's the infalable truth, you're probably not going to see a George A. Romero film. What Romero really did here was open my eyes to a far more disturbing possibility... when zombies take over the world, millions of people will still be signing on to MySpace *shudders*.

Worst of all is the fact that, unlike Romero's other Dead entries, Diary Of The Dead is virtually humorless. It's just so stuck up its own ass with messages that it forgets zombie movies are supposed to be fun. The one breath of fresh air is when the students run into a deaf Amish man who communicates by writing on a chalk board around his neck. He comes in quite handy when he's weilding a scythe and hurling dynamite at zombies and definitely kicks the film up a whole butter churner full of notches... then he gets killed after five minutes. The only other time you're likely to crack a smile is during a cheap scare where a flashlight lands on a fat guy in an abandoned girls dorm who gleefully admits to "stealing shit."

Long story short, Diary Of The Dead is a by-the-numbers zombie movie that tries to shove messages down your throat when it's not rehashing scenes from the director's other (better) films. Don't let the "George A. Romero's" heading fool you. You're better off Netflixing the original Dead trilogy and calling it a night.


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Scar Tissue Films
Posted: June 7th, 2011, 5:26am Report to Moderator
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Nowhere near the quality of his original trilogy, but not as bad as I expected.

I agree with the lack of originality, although there were some things that I enjoyed (Ridley burying his family in the pool).

What let it down was the acting and the lack of tension imo. Just wasn't visceral or energetic enough. If you compare it to something like REC it just didn't have the edge it needed.

I also though that it didn't go into enough depth in any area...everything was just scattered over. Maybe a limit of the length, but in comparison to something like the Walking Dead comics, which this is similar to in a way..it just didn't have enough.

The idea that it's not the dead who we need to be scared of, but other humans is shared by both, but wasn't really done well enough here.

Still, I enjoyed it. Zombie flicks make me happy.
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leitskev
Posted: June 7th, 2011, 9:40am Report to Moderator
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For the heck of it, I decided to crank out a zombie script. Finished last night. Reading this post reminds me of some of the issues with trying to be in any way original with zombies.

I have to admit, I have seen very few zombie films. When I sat down to think about the story, I started with the hurdle of the basic questions: how are zombies created.

The original zombie, I guess, was probably Frankenstein. But with the standard zombie movie, we need numbers, zombie hordes, so we need a more effective mechanism. The zombie virus seems to be the usual mechanism, understandably so. Has it reached the point where using this device is cliche? And I suppose another alternative is to simply not explain the walking dead.

For fans of zombies, do they just accept certain cliche elements as necessary and look for originality elsewhere in the story? I have actually seen so few horror movies that I am really curious to hear what more experienced horror fans like you guys have to say. Especially on the topic of originality.
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Scar Tissue Films
Posted: June 7th, 2011, 10:27am Report to Moderator
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The mistake people make is this:

They tell the same zombie story repeatedly:

The dead come back to life (for some reason scientific/unexplained/supernatural) and have an insatiable hunger for human flesh and start to attack people who must fight to survive.

There's hardly any zombie flicks that do not veer towards that template.

However, there are pretty much an infinite number of ways you can use them. You just have to think about what they represent more:

Issues of death, immortality, how they might act differently (what if they aren't aggressive?) affect on religion. politics, society, people's view of the after-life..issues of human rights, WHY are they coming back (their motivation, not the scientific reason)...is it all the dead or just a certain group (murder victims for eg)? What time frame are we talking? Immediately at the outbreak, 100 years after? How does that affect the plot? How has society changed?

Would someone choose to be a zombie? What would the advantages be of being dead, but alive at the same time?

I recently had a craving for some zombie action and bought some zombie literature anthologies...I was pleasantly surprised by just how many original stories there were...areas no film has even tried to address.

It was reading them that made me realise just how filmmakers and screenwriters have got stuck writing the same story over and over.

That being said...I never get bored of zombies for some reason. It's like they represent the same story somehow..like no matter how many you see they just create some sort of whole....and the joy of imagining the zombie apocalpyse and wondering how you'd react, how you'd protect your family never diminishes.
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Scar Tissue Films
Posted: June 7th, 2011, 10:28am Report to Moderator
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The original zombie was lazarus by the way!

There's a great story called Lazarus about him, if you can track it down.
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leitskev
Posted: June 7th, 2011, 11:48am Report to Moderator
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I decided on a couple of things in general when I started my script. One, was to embrace the cliche. That doesn't mean to not try to do things that are hopefully original. I'm merely recognizing that certain aspects of all films are familiar, especially with something as well worn as zombies. So I don't run away from the cliche.

I did determine that I would not do the virus explanation, and I don't like the idea of having no explanation. So I had to come up with something different. While I try to make it a little scientific, in the end, it's more comic bookish. But then, there's really no way to make the walking dead scientific. At least what I came up with was unique and I was able to weave into the story.

I also decided I wanted to have fun with this, and since I'm embracing the cliche, I combined it with another genre: 1920's Chicago gangsters. Whether that's original or not, I don't know. I couldn't find any movies like that, but I did find a video game.

The advantage of doing it this way meant the zombies did not have to be the whole story, and in fact are really just a device within it.

I was never at all into the zombie genre, but I have much more appreciation for it now. I think I can see the major difference between zombie movies and vampire. In vampire movies, the monsters are intelligent and complex. we get into their histories and their characters. Zombies have none of those attributes. They don't even speak, generally. What that does is keeps the focus on the humans dealing with them.

It is curious how zombie stories are apocalyptic, where vampires are not. Vampires are intelligent beings that want to live among humans. Zombies are just a monstrous plague. So it is the apocalyptic nature of zombie movies that captures people.

Thanks for the zombie discussion. We have dead threads and threads about the dead!

James, I'll delete this post later so no one thinks it's thread hijacking. It caught my attention because I've had zombies on the brain for 3 weeks.
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Scar Tissue Films
Posted: June 7th, 2011, 11:53am Report to Moderator
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Don't delete it. It's relevant to the thread.

I am Legend was an Apocalyptic Vampire film, as was DayBreakers in a different way.

I'm sure there are others.
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James McClung
Posted: June 7th, 2011, 1:49pm Report to Moderator
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Agreed. Don't delete the post, Kev. BTW, I like the idea of gangsters and zombies together, especially in the 1920s. Even Depression-era zombies are interesting in and of themselves, if only for the change of scenery.

In regards to cliche, it's one thing to conform to established ones. It's another to treat the audience as if they're not already familiar with them. Like... any of them.

To this day, Diary just seems like such a dull, pretentious and misguided film that I can't with good conscience attribute anything good to it. The more I think about it, the more I feel like I have to lump it in with the likes of Inland Empire as among the most poorly executed films ever.


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Ryan1
Posted: June 7th, 2011, 2:58pm Report to Moderator
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I couldn't believe just how bad Diary of the Dead was, and frankly I'm amazed Romero slapped his name on this waste.  Every copy of this flick should have been buried, hopefully never to rise again.  The only thing worse than the total absence of story was the acting.  This really looked and sounded like a bad college semester project that got maybe a "C."  Just a sad attempt to cash in on the "found footage" horror subgenre.

As for the Zombie theory, Kev, your story of Capone era brain munchers sounds interesting.  Glad you tried to do something different besides the ol' virus explanation.  What was it?  Bad bathtub gin from a speakeasy?  

One aspect of zombie movies I'd like to see explored is do they continue to decompose after they rise?  If not, what's keeping them from decomposing? What exactly is driving their hunger?  
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Dreamscale
Posted: June 7th, 2011, 3:05pm Report to Moderator
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I agree that Diary of the Dead is a piece of crap.

I was shocked at how bad it was.  Sure, there were a few good scenes with some zombie action, but for the most part, it was terrible.

The big problem for me was the characters.  They were awful. Completely unrealistic.  Completely cliche.  Complete crap.  Almost downright comical in many ways.
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leitskev
Posted: June 7th, 2011, 3:55pm Report to Moderator
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What I used, Ryan, was Tesla, who was still alive at the time. He had attempted to build a huge electrical project earlier in his career, funded by JP Morgan, but Morgan pulled the plug before it was done. A picture of the tower is in the link below.

http://www.damninteresting.com/teslas-tower-of-power

Anyway, Capone finances a similar project, where they attempt to draw free energy from the ionosphere. But the field that's created causes...a zombie outbreak.

I know, crazy, but at least it's not a virus.

In the early days of electricity experimentation, scientists actually thought it had something to do with life force, since they say muscles in the lab move when they sent current through it. Mary Shelley knew about this work, which was actually very common at the beginning of the 19th century.

I don't go deep into the science of it in the script, though. When the rival gangs and the feds figure out what is causing the problem, they join forces to turn off the tower, and that's the story.
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Scar Tissue Films
Posted: June 7th, 2011, 3:57pm Report to Moderator
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Nice idea.

For some reason though, I see it as an animation. It's got that comic book vibe you mentioned.
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leitskev
Posted: June 7th, 2011, 4:11pm Report to Moderator
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I definitely didn't conceive it as animation, but that wouldn't bother me. I cranked it out in 3 weeks, and will pay around with it for a while, but there is no "artistic" vision at stake with it.

What I hoped to do was make the characters original and appealing. I don't know if I succeeded, but I didn't want the zombie or Tesla stuff to get in the way of the story.

One thing I didn't attempt was anything cryptic or difficult to figure out. There is a theme, but if a script like this was ever produced, it's obviously not targeting a thematic audience.

I do think the characters could attract some actors.

I don't, you have to write to learn how to write, so I am just going to keep trying stuff. this is my fourth feature, and the first I tried to consciously follow the 3 act structure. Hopefully each feature attempt improves.
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