Wel­come to The George A. Romero Zom­bie Cycle Film Fes­ti­val. Join The Dork Report in revis­it­ing all five canon­i­cal episodes in the orig­i­nal epic zom­bie saga:

• Part I: Night of the Liv­ing Dead
• Part II: Dawn of the Dead
• Part III: Day of the Dead
• Part IV: Land of the Dead
• Part V: Diary of the Dead

This is not an opin­ion you’re likely to find any­where else on the inter­net, but we here at The Dork Report are pre­pared to argue that Diary of the Dead is the best of the entire George A. Romero zom­bie cycle so far. It sports the best spe­cial effects, is the least repet­i­tive or trigger-happy, and is a wel­come return to the focused social satire of the first (Night) and sec­ond (Dawn) installments.

Curi­ously, Diary of the Dead is the first to break the con­ti­nu­ity of Romero’s ongo­ing story of soci­ety in zom­bie melt­down. The first four films fol­low a rough chronol­ogy: Night of the Liv­ing Dead depicts the ini­tial wave as seen by a small group caught in a coun­try farm­house. Dawn of the Dead takes place a few weeks later, show­ing the break­down of cities (and even the media). Day of the Dead fea­tured an iso­lated group sur­viv­ing in iso­la­tion as the world was long since over­run by the undead. Land of the Dead shows the ulti­mate gated com­mu­nity fall to an evolved zom­bie horde. But Diary of the Dead is a return to the early days of the out­break, a more fer­tile ground for sto­ry­telling: you never get tired of human char­ac­ters wit­ness­ing such hor­rors for the first time.

Sav­ing the human race, one non­fic­tion doc­u­men­tary short sub­ject at a time

The rules are still the same: sim­ply, the dead don’t stay dead. The zom­bie epi­demic is not due to a plague or virus, which was the potent con­tri­bu­tion of Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later to the zom­bie genre. Arguably, Romero’s con­cept is more bleak. A virus might be mit­i­gated or even cured, but if any­body, any­body at all, that dies will revive as a unin­tel­li­gent car­niv­o­rous mon­ster that feels no pain and never tires, it can­not be stopped. If human­ity is to some­how regroup and sur­vive, it will for­ever have to burn or decap­i­tate any­one that ever dies.

Diary of the Dead opens on a group of Uni­ver­sity of Pitts­burgh film stu­dents mak­ing a tongue-in-cheeck mummy movie in the woods of Penn­syl­va­nia, under the guid­ance of alco­holic Pro­fes­sor Maxwell (Scott Went­worth). Many of these kids are priv­i­leged, but judg­ing from the events of Romero’s other zom­bie films, we know that the lux­u­ries of the rich are of lit­tle worth against the liv­ing dead. Obvi­ously none of these movie afi­ciona­dos have ever seen a zom­bie flick. One of them, Eliot (Joe Dini­col), wears Coke-bottle glasses in an appar­ent homage to Romero’s famous spec­ta­cles. Bud­ding direc­tor Jason Creed (Joshua Close) looks down his nose on the com­mer­cial hor­ror genre, and has the not-so-secret ambi­tion to become a doc­u­men­tary film­maker. But Jason gets his chance to do both, as he doc­u­ments their their flight from a real-life plague of zom­bies. Jason’s footage, later com­pleted by girl­friend Debra (Michelle Mor­gan) com­prises a film within a film: “The Death of Death.”

Romero’s scathing indict­ment of our bro­ken health care sys­tem, or just some more zom­bie gore?

In a world in which nearly every­one car­ries a cell­phone cam­era around in their pocket, “shoot me” can have a dif­fer­ent mean­ing than you usu­ally hear in zom­bie movies. With a batch of young film­mak­ers doc­u­ment­ing a real-life tale of hor­ror using new portable video tech­nol­ogy, Diary of the Dead super­fi­cially resem­bles Clover­field (read The Dork Report review). One of Cloverfield’s most telling moments showed a group of New York­ers instinc­tively react­ing to the hor­ri­ble sight of a chunk of the Statue of Lib­erty hurtling into the mid­dle of a street by whip­ping out their cell phone cam­eras and tak­ing pic­tures to trans­mit to their friends. But Diary of the Dead’s true inspi­ra­tion is actu­ally a bit older; it rips off the basic plot of The Blair Witch Project, in which a batch of stu­dent film­mak­ers set off to shoot a hor­ror film in the woods and acci­den­tally stum­ble onto the real thing. Clover­field became increas­ingly implau­si­ble as the flee­ing teenagers cling to their cam­eras through­out their tra­vails. In con­trast, Diary of the Dead sur­pris­ingly sports more believ­able psy­chol­ogy than Clover­field, con­stantly ques­tion­ing its char­ac­ters’ com­pul­sion to doc­u­ment every­thing. Indeed, it’s one of the biggest themes of the movie.

Diary’s mix of themes also includes the return of the media as a promi­nent pres­ence for the first time since Night and Dawn. In what I felt was one the film’s only dra­matic mis­steps, the char­ac­ters first learn of the zom­bie break­out via radio (really? radio? in an age of instant text mes­sag­ing?), and are con­vinced of the incred­i­ble news reports a lit­tle too quickly. But per­haps their imme­di­ate accep­tance of what the voices of author­ity tell them is one of Romero’s points.

Two char­ac­ters in Dawn of the Dead were mem­bers of the tra­di­tional media of broad­cast news. But in this case, some­thing only pos­si­ble in the 21^st cen­tury inter­net age, the Diary of the Dead kids are able to become part of the medium itself. Jason starts out as a frus­trated doc­u­men­tar­ian mak­ing a silly com­mer­cial mummy film, but given the chance he chooses to doc­u­ment. As cit­i­zen jour­nal­ists, they edit their footage on lap­tops and post to YouTube and MySpace. They also down­load other clips from around the world, pro­vid­ing the film with what are basi­cally a series of short vignettes. They watch as U.S. SWAT clean out zom­bies from an apart­ment com­plex, and as coun­ter­parts on the other side of the globe doc­u­ment an over­run Japan. One of the spook­i­est clips is a brief shot from the point of view of a truck dri­ving under a bridge from which some­one has hung them­selves. After the truck cab jos­tles the corpse, it starts to move.

Three radio mono­logues were voiced by hor­ror genre lumi­nar­ies Guillermo Del Toro (whose ghost story Devil’s Back­bone shares some ele­ments of the zom­bie genre), Simon Pegg (who paid homage to the genre as com­edy with Shawn of the Dead), and Stephen King (bril­liant as a heart­land evan­gel­i­cal preacher: “Get down on your &$#@ing knees!”). There’s also a funny bit fea­tur­ing a badass Amish guy, who’s deaf but handy with a scythe and dynamite.

The end­ing to this very short movie (a lit­tle over 90 min­utes) is a bit abrupt. But given that it is nar­rated by Debra, it is pos­si­ble she has sur­vived beyond what we’ve seen, long enough to release “The Death of Death” in some form, per­haps after humans have reclaimed the planet. One might imag­ine Diary’s premise would lend itself to a lower bud­get than the grandiose Land of the Dead, which starred actual stars like Den­nis Hop­per and John Leguizom­bie — sorry — John Leguizamo. But Diary sports a big­ger cast, more loca­tions, and even more accom­plished CG, so it can hardly have been cheaper to make.

Offi­cial movie MySpace page: www.myspace.com/diaryofthedead

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.