It’s not lunchbox-peddling production designer George Lucas. Nor kiddie-torturing, Oscar-botherer Steven Spielberg. Nor is it Francis Ford Coppola, Hollywood’s finest vintner. Nope, the beard responsible for the most consistent franchise in film history – that’s one per decade since 1969 and no duffers – is auteur of the undead, George A Romero.
Rebooting his own ass back to the guerrilla techniques that informed Night of the Living Dead, Romero’s latest is a breathless movie-within-a-movie shot by an obsessive documentarian (Joshua Close) and assorted student chums, and edited by his feisty girlfriend (Michelle Morgan). “I’m hoping to scare you,” explains Morgan, sounding like Sarah Connor’s special-school sister. “So maybe you’ll wake up.”
As the zombie apocalypse rages around them, and the team make pointless pilgrimages to family homes now crawling with stiffs, Diary achieves all this and more. Close’s twitchy, first-person footage brings us a constant live feed of the carnage because, he reasons, in this world of spin and surveillance, “If it doesn’t happen on camera, it doesn’t happen.”
Chronicling the disease of each new era like a wily old witch doctor, Romero doesn’t just want to brown the collective trouser; he wants to make us think. To this end, he employs the sort of hammer-headed satire beloved of Michael Moore against racial inequality, the rubbernecking media culture and humanity’s manifold failings. “Are we worth saving?” asks Morgan, as tape of rednecks torturing zombies unspools before us. While Romero’s tendency to (literally) say things twice may grate, it’s galvanising that a 68-year-old exploitation filmmaker is still so angry; his unerring – if unusual – moral compass still showing the way.
Playground polemic aside, Romero packs more inventive offings into 95 minutes than most slasher franchises, despatching his shuffling coffin fodder with scythes, swords, acid and – in a moment of ironic, eye-popping showmanship – the electrical resuscitators doctors use to restart hearts.
His mortician’s wit is equally in evidence. In Diary’s funniest sequences we meet a deaf, dynamite-wielding Amish chap who’s a shoo-in for cameo of the year, and an infected children’s clown whose nose is red for all the wrong reasons.
Pittsburgh’s pre-eminent professor of splatology even finds time to have a pop at pretenders to the throne such as 28 Days Later, a fine-but-flawed genre movie that had the temerity to make its antagonists run. “Dead things don’t move fast; their ankles would snap,” whines Close. Romero should know. After 39 years messing with things that go bump in the Night/Dawn/Day, King George remains the original and best.
