DIARY OF THE DEADPlot in a Nutshell
George A. Romero’s 2008 “reboot” of his zombie-movie universe, in which a group of student filmmakers making an amateur horror movie confront a real-life outbreak of zombies, and decide to document the escalating mass panic, uploading their footage to MySpace whenever they get a chance to breathe.
Thoughts
It’s been awhile since I saw George A. Romero’s original Night of the Living Dead, but my memory of it is that it, even though it was constructed as a “conventional” dramatic feature, it achieved a far more convincing sense of naturalism in the midst of unfolding horror than this disappointing new film, which actively aims at handheld documentary-style realism.
There are two big problems with the film. One is Romero’s surprisingly amateurish, overemphatic dialogue. Most of Diary of the Dead consists of a film-within-the-film, a documentary about the zombie outbreak called The Death of Death, begun by student filmmaker Jason Creed (Joshua Close) and completed by his girlfriend Debra (Michelle Morgan). Debra is not, sad to say, a gifted editor—her voiceover narration, full of banal observations about human nature and the fear of death, most of it perfectly obvious from the footage she’s showing us, is a major distraction.
Romero ruins some of his best jokes this way. For instance, the film begins with Jason filming a chase scene from his horror movie—a mummy slowly shambling along, chasing a nubile Elisha Cuthbert lookalike through the forest. When Jason yells cut, the actress sourly complains about what a horror cliché the whole sequence is: the girl falling down as the monster chases her, tearing her dress and exposing her tits in the process. Inevitably, that same actress winds up being chased through the woods by the same actor—only now he’s a zombie and he really is trying to kill her. And she really does fall down and tear her dress and briefly expose her breasts. It’s not the most inspired gag in movie history, but it could have been an amusing bit of cheap irony. So what possessed Romero to actually have the actress underline the moment by looking straight into Jason’s camera and saying, “It’s the same thing as in your stupid fucking movie!”
The actors in general struggle to sound spontaneous while reciting Romero’s awkward dialogue—none more so than Scott Wentworth, playing the students’ world-weary, alcoholic professor, whose lines are filled with lofty, pseudo-poetic turns of phrase that I guess reflect Romero’s notion of how literary people speak. It’s surprising that he didn’t dress him in a cape.
The film’s second big tonal problem is that, even though Diary of the Dead tries to create a “raw,” “in-the-moment” mood—we’re constantly told that Jason’s camera is documenting a “truth” that the mainstream media is trying to hush up—Romero can’t resist the urge to stage awesome “kills” at every opportunity. True, it’s pretty spectacular to see someone kill a zombie ER doctor with an IV pole, or to watch an Amish farmer ram a scythe through his own forehead, having it come out the back of his head, and penetrate the brain of the zombie who’s just bitten him—but these phony “Hollywood”-style death scenes only work against the low-key documentary universe Romero is trying to set up.
I know Cloverfield (another horror movie that purported to consist entirely of “found” footage) took a lot of critical flak earlier this year for its shallow characters and a few of its plot contrivances, but I think it does about as good a job as any movie ever has of establishing a successful aesthetic of what you might call “fake naturalism.” And I suspect that as more and more people become accustomed to the notion of filming their lives with ever-smaller videocameras and ever-smarter cellphones, I think more and more movies will adopt the “fake naturalist” approach to storytelling, with actors finding ever more sophisticated performing styles to accommodate it.
Diary of the Dead seems terribly dated even now—I hate to think what it will look like 10 years from now.
RATING: 2/5
C.H.U.D.Plot in a Nutshell
Radiation and improperly stored industrial waste combine to turn New York City’s homeless population into horrifying “cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers” in Douglas Cheek’s 1984 cult horror movie.
Thoughts
I remember a horror-loving friend of mine showing me this movie on video when I was maybe 15 or 16. I think it may have been the first film I’d ever seen on home video, so there was something exciting and thrilling about the idea of being able to conjure a movie onto your TV set whenever you wanted. And I was kind of a sheltered, sensitive movie-watcher back then—to be honest, I was always a little bit afraid to watch horror movies, even into my teens—and so I remember also feeling a little apprehensive as this one started. My friend was a big Fangoria reader and had a much higher tolerance for gore and violence than I did, so I wasn’t sure I’d be able to handle a movie with “cannibalistic” right there in the title.
I hardly needed to worry: ’80s horror movies don’t get much more goofy and genial than C.H.U.D.—much like Tremors about a decade later, C.H.U.D. has a quirky, good-hearted sensibility. It feels like the creators would have been just as happy to leave out the C.H.U.D.s entirely and make a movie about John Heard’s photographer hanging out with Daniel Stern’s soup-kitchen owner—which would have been just as well, since the monsters look pretty ridiculous—but had to put all the horror stuff in if they wanted anyone to invest in it.
There’s a surprising amount of talent in front of and behind the camera in C.H.U.D.: besides John Heard and Daniel Stern (both of whom are eager participants in the DVD audio commentary), the cast includes Kim Greist (from Brazil and Manhunter) as Heard’s model girlfriend, as well as early performances from future Coen Brothers regulars Sam McMurray, John Goodman, and Jon Polito. The film was edited, amazingly enough, by Claire Simpson, who just two years later would win an Oscar for editing Platoon. (She was nominated again recently for her excellent work on The Constant Gardener.)
The big mystery man in the credits is screenwriter Parnell Hall, whose name is roundly booed on the DVD commentary when it appears onscreen. According to Daniel Stern, he and co-star Christopher Curry (who plays Captain Bosch, the Roy Scheider figure in the script’s Jaws-like scenario) wrote “at least 50 per cent of this fucking movie” but never received credit for it.
I couldn’t figure out if Hall rewrote Stern and Curry or if it was the other way around, but C.H.U.D. is one of the rare movies that could have benefited from a worse screenplay—or at least a screenplay that was a little bit more comfortable with its own genre. Stern and Curry keep inserting “serious acting moments” into the action—most notably a long monologue for Captain Bosch in which he talks about the death of his wife—that just don’t have any place in a horror movie about radioactive monsters crawling out of the sewers.
At the same time, it’s kind of refreshing to watch a monster movie that has absolutely no teenagers in it whatsoever—everybody in C.H.U.D. is at least 30, living in a crummy apartment, and struggling to pay their rent or just hold down a job. You know what? I can actually relate to C.H.U.D. much better now than when I was a dumb 15-year-old watching monster movies at my friend’s house. I never thought I’d say this, but... C.H.U.D. speaks to me.
Anyway, here's a clip of Kim Greist chopping a C.H.U.D.'s head off. It's masterfully edited!
RATING: 2.5/5
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