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Diary of the Dead

6/10

Stars: Josh Close, Michelle Morgan, Shawn Roberts, Joe Dinicol, Amy Ciupak Lalonde, Scott Wentworth, Philip Riccio

Director: George A Romero

A decent zombie movie, as one might expect from the king of the genre, George A Romero. Here, Romero goes back to the beginning, as corpses begin to revive and feast on the living. 'Everyone who dies,' gasps Debra (Morgan), 'is gonna come back - unless they get a bullet in the head. And it goes on and on.'

The gimmick here (soon to be outworn what with Cloverfield and the forthcoming [REC] is that the carnage is photographed on hand-held camera by the leader (Close) of a group of film students who had ironically been making a horror movie in nearby woods.

Packing into their transporter, their relatively safe passage across a zombie-ridden countryside is fractured when the traumatised driver shoots herself, entailing them taking her to a hospital where the only nurses are zombies.

Ultimately, the survivors end up at the mansion home of their film's star, but their 'refuge' proves to be just one more trap.

A little humour here and there helps to leaven the parade of lurching, leaping zombies and the performances from a cast of unknowns are suitably fraught, even if the characters themselves aren't that interesting. Romero brings home nicely the fact that there is no escape from the plague, although sometimes you get the feeling that he may have gone to zombie well once too often here.

David Quinlan

USA/Canada 2007. UK Distributor: Optimum. Technicolor.
95 minutes. Widescreen. UK certificate: 18.

Guidance ratings (out of 3): Sex/nudity 1, Violence/Horror 3, Drugs 0, Swearing 2.

Review date: 03 Mar 2008