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George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead
The Weinstein Company

5.4 based on 29 reviews Read critic reviews How did we calculate this? based on 44 votes Read user comments Rate this movie

FILM:

• Land of the Dead

• Internet Movie Database

MPAA RATING: R for strong horror violence and gore, and pervasive language

Starring Michelle Morgan, and Shawn Roberts

Jason Creed and a small crew of college filmmakers are in the Pennsylvania woods making a no-budget horror film when they hear the terrifying news that the dead have started returning to life. Led by Jason's girlfriend, Debra, the frightened young filmmakers set off in a friend's old Winnebago to try to get back to the only safety and security they know: their homes. But there is no escape from the crisis or any real home for them to go back to anymore. Everything they depend upon--all that they hold dear--is fractured as the plague of the living dead begins to spread. (The Weinstein Company)

GENRE(S):	Horror  |  Suspense/Thriller
WRITTEN BY:	George A. Romero
DIRECTED BY:	George A. Romero
RELEASE DATE:	DVD: May 20, 2008  Theatrical: February 15, 2008
RUNNING TIME:	95 minutes, Color
ORIGIN:	USA

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

100

Premiere Glenn Kenny

A giddy kick-out-the-jams entertainment. Diary takes a tack that's not exactly new, but is new to Romero, and as one might expect, the director brings a sharp and uncompromising new perspective to it.

90

LA Weekly Scott Foundas

In most horror movies, it's a given that we should root for the heroes to make it out alive, but Diary of the Dead isn't nearly so certain, and so it terrifies us all the more.

90

Variety Eddie Cockrell

Gripping, intimate genre triumph.

88

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

This one belongs with the leaders of the scare pack. Isn't it time that we give Romero his due? It's hardly an accident that Stephen King, Quentin Tarantino, Guillermo del Toro, Simon Pegg and Wes Craven recognize Romero as a master. He is.

88

Boston Globe Ty Burr

Horror movie Rule #1: The only way to kill a zombie is to shoot it in the brain. George Romero himself laid this maxim down with his first film, the endlessly influential 1968 gutter classic "Night of the Living Dead." Forty years later, with George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead, the venerable filmmaker has done something almost as startling: He has put brains back into the zombie genre.

80

Empire Kim Newman

A raw, vivid despatch from the frontline, this melds content with frights in classic Romero style. An outstanding exercise in showing the kids how to do it.

78

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

Diary of the Dead is meant to scare your pants off, blow your mind out the back of your skull, and then deposit you ungently back into reality, quaking a little, maybe, but still alive and, unlike the undead, thinking.

75

Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips

The way Diary of the Dead chooses to deliver its gore, you know you’re in the hands of a grown-up uninterested in the excesses of the “Saw” or “Hostel” pictures. I mean, there’s gore, sure, and flesh gets eaten. But the way Romero shoots and cuts the shot of a girl’s reunion with her parents, one dead, one undead, it’s played for keeps--the right kind of gross, with a touch of mournful gravity.

75

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker

The film's take on media and personal responsibility recalls Brian De Palma's faux Iraq documentary, "Redacted," here dropped into a homefront turned guerrilla war zone.

75

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Liam Lacey

There are zombie movies and then there are George Romero films.

75

ReelViews James Berardinelli

All-in-all, the intelligence of the approach combined with good old-fashioned zombie blood-and-gore (as opposed to the slicker, sicker torture porn variety) makes this not only the most satisfying motion picture Romero has made in a long while, but one of the best of his career.

75

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

What divides opinion is the film's tone: Are those naive, portentous pronouncements about media, voyeurism and the numbing, pornographic allure of atrocity footage a sly reflection of the YouTube generation's boundary-free narcissism and callow youth, or evidence that Romero – never one to underplay a metaphor – has become a hectoring, tin-eared fogey?

75

San Francisco Chronicle Peter Hartlaub

It's one of the least scary films that he's made - but still entertaining, and very, very gory.

70

Village Voice Nathan Lee

Visually, Romero's ersatz-DIY experiment isn't as suave as Brian De Palma's similar effort in the recent and risible "Redacted," nor as exactingly engineered as the video convulsions of "Cloverfield," but its scrappy, ultra-low-budget edges are part of its charm.

70

New York Magazine David Edelstein

Compared with other first-person motion-sickness horror pictures like "The Blair Witch Project" and "Cloverfield," George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead is weak tea, yet there’s enough social commentary (and innovative splatter) to acidulate the brew--to remind you that Romero, even behind the curve, makes other genre filmmakers look like fraidy-cats.

70

Slate Dana Stevens

Hardly top-drawer Romero. In fact, it may be his worst zombie film yet. But even bad Romero is a far sight more interesting than the coolly sadistic guts-porn that currently passes for mainstream horror.

70

Film Threat Zack Haddad

I love zombie movies. I love George Romero even more. It is easy to say that every movie he comes out with is an event for me, so it brings me great sadness to say that I felt let down by his latest effort, Diary of the Dead.

67

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

Diary of the Dead isn't bad; it's a kicky B movie hiding inside a draggy, self-conscious-work-of-auteurist-horror one.

60

The New York Times Manohla Dargis

The body has its needs, and one of the problems with Diary of the Dead is that it doesn’t get into your body; it doesn’t shake you up, jolt you, make you shiver and squeak. It’s clever, or at least clever enough to keep you going and interested from start to finish. It just isn’t scary.

58

The Onion (A.V. Club) Nathan Rabin

As in the more successful "Land Of The Dead," Romero makes an admirable attempt to update his beloved franchise for contemporary audiences. But this time out, his heavy-handed intellectual concerns get in the way of a perfectly good fright flick.

58

Baltimore Sun Chris Kaltenbach

With Diary of the Dead, Romero goes back to the beginning, only this time the amateurish look is calculated and the resulting film far less effective - if only because a handful of filmmakers have beaten him to the punch.

50

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

Diary of the Dead is at its best when Romero is just goofing off, like when he shows us home video footage of a children's birthday party.

50

Los Angeles Times Carina Chocano

The movie suffers from the same malaise Romero diagnoses in society. It's just too mediated to be scary, despite its zeal for gore. You can't feel the characters' fear, and they don't seem to feel it either.

50

Chicago Reader J.R. Jones

Diary of the Dead features some of the most hilariously gross images since "Dawn of the Dead." In one online video the filmmakers find, a father playfully pulls off a birthday clown’s red rubber nose and the guy’s real nose comes off with it.

50

The Hollywood Reporter Michael Rechtshaffen

This "Living Dead" exercise delivers far less monstrosity and a great deal of pomposity, not to mention dull characters who aren't nearly as lively as those dead guys.

50

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

Moderately scary, moderately amusing, intermittently dull and obvious, Diary of the Dead is not groundbreaking, nor even ground-quaking.

50

New York Post Kyle Smith

Romero's we're-all-doomed-and-maybe-we-deserve-it pessimism is so extreme he would fit right in with a real group of brain-eaters: the French.

50

New York Daily News Elizabeth Weitzman

There are a few clever moments, as when an Amish farmer saves the tech-savvy students. But mostly, we're in it for the gore.

40

Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir

A limp and dreary experience, at least after you get past its intriguing premise. It's poorly written and woodenly acted, completely formulaic and hopelessly imprisoned by both its genre and finally its form.

The average user rating for this movie is 5.4 (out of 10) based on 44 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Chad S. gave it an8:
"Diary of the Dead" just might be the most shocking zombie picture yet in this filmmaker's oeuvre. Blood has nothing to do with it, or exposed guts. This latest tale of the undead by the guy who made little kids wet their pants at bijou matinees all across America back in 1968 with "Night of the Living Dead", delivers a horror film that's more about filmmaking than zombies. In particular, the decisions made in post-production are foregrounded. Debra(Michelle Morgan) finishes the film for Jason(Joshua Close). It's out of his hands. He doesn't get final cut. She does. If you think the voice-overs and the lyrical flashbacks of their deceased friends are hokey, remember that Debra is a college student, not Thelma Schoonmaker. Jason would hate what Debra did to his masterpiece. "Diary of the Dead", among other things, is shrewd about the subjects in a documentary film. It's not reality; it's movie reality, because the people in your non-fiction film are indeed acting; acting as if they're not aware of the cameras. And finally, in the final scene, this filmmaker brilliantly fesses up to the inherent immorality of staging pretend murders in grisly fashion for fun, in a roundabout fashion. He knows he's not subtle when it comes to depicting violent acts. He shows everything, albeit wittily. But Jason, the film's filmmaker within the film, makes the directorial choice to not point the camera at a transformed friend who's put down by friendly fire, during their stay at the hospital. Jason is like the filmmaker's alter ego, so the filmmaker experiments with his normal manner of shooting a scene, because he's Jason Creed, student filmmaker, not the guy who made "Dawn of the Dead". This film is so much more fun than Michael Haneke's "Funny Games", another film that tackled the complicity of filmmakers and audiences in pertaining to movie violence.

[Anonymous] gave it an8:
Low-budget title that's nevertheless decades ahead of any competition in the genre, be it low-budget or high-budget. The master of zombie movies is back for good! Thank you Mr. Romero and congratulations to this masterpiece. And all this after the utter crap that was "Land of the Dead." Awesome!

[Anonymous] gave it a2:
A very dull and generic film. if you are expecting this movie to bring something different to the zombie genre you will be very disappointed. the film follows the same pattern you have seen in hundreds of zombie movies before and the first person camera adds absolutely noting. the characters are very dull and lifeless and the professor character is unbelievably cliched. the movie has no tension, no scares and no decent action scenes. other reviewers may talk about it's "dramatic social criticism" but that means noting when the film itself is a tedious bore from start to finish.

intodeep gave it an8:
Don't go see [rec]....now thats a boring movie.....this is much better then that one.....i'll tell you now that the only part in [rec] that is "scary" is at the end....so if you want to sit through a bunch of ppl saying "whats going on?" for a hour go see [rec]....but if you want a good horror movie full of scares see this one.

Shawn S. gave it a9:
This film is easily an 8/10. It gets a 9 from me, to counteract some of the biggest morons like "Daniel C.." who gave it a 0 calling it one of the worst movies ever made. My advice to people like Daniel C. is to stay out of the genre, and grab his copy of "Joe Dirt" off of hi sshelf. As far as zombie movies go, IMO this one is the best since Romero's 1985 masterpiece "Day of the Dead" Decent zombie films are few and far between these days, despite the fact that there are at least 10 new zombie films released a week. George Romero is a master at this genre, and deserves the recognition as such. Without George Romero, there would be no zombie films. Films like this are a cut above the MTV generations poor excuse for a zombie filme, for example the 2008 remake of Day of the Dead. Officially, George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead gets an 8 out of 10 from me.

Cenobia gave it a0:
Terrible film. If you can actually sit through the first half without leaving you deserve an award. The acting is horrible and the shots are worse. They actually set up alternate camera shots by looking at the person holding the other camera. It is unbearable. There is maybe 45 minutes of actual movie here. The rest is just random news clips, and slow motion shots of what we've already seen. At one point they basically re-play an entire clip that had occurred seconds before. The voice over is just annoying, and they feel the need to spell things out for you multiple times. Redundancy is all this movie is good at. There aren't even any decent scares. Everything is easily anticipated, and pretty much every zombie kill ends the same way, so even watching the horrible actors die doesn't save this piece of trash. Avoid at all costs. If you want a good zombie flick re-watch one of the 28 days films.

Jay H. gave it a7:
I like George Romero's film, I feel he is a skillful horror movie director. He is particularly good at delving into the characters personalities and delivering genuine chills. Well paced.

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