Perhaps it is because zombies are relatively unoriginal and cheap villains to create on screen. Maybe even this is due to a rapid depreciation of zombie movies to the extent that everyone thinks the film will be terrible before it starts. The world will never know.
Zombies seemed to have a mainstream resurgence after the remake of Dawn of the Dead and Shaun of the Dead, both good films in their own respective ways. After Land of the Dead came and went, fans of George Romero were excited that he was returning to his indie-roots as opposed the the previous studio financed film with the hope that it would allow more control to the master of the zombies. And when a remake was announced for Day of the Dead, directed by Steve Miner which would also feature Dawn’s Ving Rhames, some had hopes that this new version (of which I did not like the original) would carry on with zombie momentum from the last remake. I will safely say both films failed, albeit for different reasons altogether.
So why two films in one review? As I (for some unknown reason as I do not particularly care for either film) sat down and watched both films within a 24-hour span, I began to see some similarities between the two but mostly some vast differences. Both films came out just a few years ago, both are based in one way or the other on Romero properties. And both feature … zombies! What better way to branch out on Movie Scum than to do a classic English class compare/contrast?!
To start, both movies begin with the rise of the zombies so we get to see a slice of life as normal before everything turns to hell. In Diary of the Dead, we are with a group of college filmmakers when they hear of the “happenings” going on. Going without any verification other than a radio broadcast, they decide to get out of town and head home when they come across a barrage of zombie-laden detours. Day of the Dead starts with a small Colorado town being mysteriously quarantined by a brigade of Army soldiers. As the citizens are locked down and becoming sick from an unknown virus, shit gets real when the sick are turned into flesh-eating, head-exploding, ceiling-scaling zombies.
It was a bit jarring when a Romero movie rebooted the zombie uprising as opposed to continuing with the existing storyline but there was really not much to go on after Land. We get to the main story line fairly quickly as within the first few minutes of the movie, we see a zombie attack (on YouTube or whatever generic version there is) and the kids find out in minimal time about the attack. As Diary is now set in contemporary time with handheld video cameras, Winnebagos, and MySpace (contemporary for the time at least), I was surprised that no one phoned one of the kids on those new-fangled cellular telephones to warn them of the impending danger. Day on the other hand meanders around as we meet the townsfolk, the military, and see the bridge between the two before things kick off.
Characters in zombie movies never seem to have seen a zombie movie before. In a world with post-modern movies on just about every other subject matter, it is hard to conceive a movie where characters do not know that a zombie bite equals death at some point and shooting them in the head is the only escape. While I can almost forgive the characters of Diary on accounts that they are college kids, they are all pretty stupid. The last place I would go in the middle of a mass-resurrection of the dead is to a hospital but there they go, making classic horror mistakes along the way like splitting up in the mostly deserted hospital to find a doctor. Characters in Day though are pretty smart comparatively. While everyone in the town is sick by some virus (which is odd that the zombie plague is created by an airborne virus in this film) and yet they head to the local hospital, it more forgivable here as the outbreak has not yet presented itself. When shit does start happening though, they get the hell out of there, damn anyone else who may be trapped with the monsters and hide. When outside the hospital, they do what you or I would do in a similar situation: go to a gun store and load up. Just like Zombieland, these folks are armored up and just waiting to blow the crap out of some zombies. One of the characters in Day, Nick Cannon as the token black guy, is even smart enough to recognize immediately that a bite from the infected will change the person into a zombie. Mena Suvari however outranked him and was convincing in an argument based on “bleach kills everything.”
Romero obviously takes a more “realistic” approach to his film as his zombies are slow-moving, brainless machines driven by the compulsion to eat flesh only after lurking in shadows for a while. They seem to congregate in places where humans are but not by any intelligent design. Miner on the other hand has zombies who run, jump through plate glass to reach their prey, and can drive cars … poorly. These two differences change the underlying genre of the film: Romero pushes more towards drama and suspense while Miner goes toward action.
The problem with this distinction is that Romero’s take is extremely boring. Here we are following a handful of kids who are obnoxious and irritating through the backroads of Pennsylvania as they attempt to make it home or wherever. Not only does this lead to stretches of film with no zombies, in-fighting between the group about stupid stuff (7 billion Myspace hits in twenty seconds!), but also we have a very choppy pace as all of the stops could have easily been rearranged at will without little regard to the overall story. One of the most infuriating things I read was that the deaf-Amish part was shot after the film and just inserted into the movie after it was completed. It was the best part of the film and it was mostly an afterthought, made possible by the mini-episodic nature of the story.
Day however goes almost all action-based throughout the film. The title sequence is the only part that even tried to recreate a horror movie and the rest is just non-stop from there. This is fine though as the characters are decent enough to warrant cheering on but not necessarily being scared for as they run across our flesh-eating friends. Diary had some legitimate tense parts, especially during the warehouse portion, but the rest of the movie was more or less bogged down by the rest of the superfluous crap with the characters. Day makes no false claims to being a scary movie as the majority of the movie is played as a fairly straight-forward survival tale with the exception of the opening scenes in a “random” abandoned warehouse and a few other parts here and there.
So, where does the difference lie? In my opinion, Miner knows he is making just another shitty DTV zombie movie and tries to escalate the film a bit by jettisoning physics and reason and just making an enjoyable movie. Romero though thinks he is making a relative masterpiece, complete with social commentary and all. At the end of the film, you begin to think if your life is not complete without having a one-sided argument with your counter being “80 trillion hits in 2.5 nanoseconds” and “if it didn’t happen on camera, it didn’t really happen.” While it was more prevalent in his previous films, subtlety completely escapes us as we watch Diary and have it pounded into our heads multiple times about the perversion of truth and the corruptness of major media. This of course means that our heroes, and those random English-speaking Japanese ladies like them, are the true messengers of truth in a world easily spun by spin. Miner offers no commentary on society, new media, or anything else other than the notion that zombies can be killed by setting them on fire and making their heads explode.
In the end, I will say this: Diary is, on a technical level, a better film. Romero is far more restrained in unbelievably bad special effects and he creates a pretty good sense of dread during any portion of the film that is not spent in a damn RV. Ultimately though, it is pretentious and boring and makes you want to slaughter the dumb teenagers who occupy the film.
Day is the better movie to watch. Yes, the fact that zombies can scale walls and move faster than Neo is a bit much but you can at least have a good time while watching it (with maybe a chuckle here and there). It is not a good film (Oscar-nominees need not act here) but at least it has a fun and energetic atmosphere that is sorely missing from Romero’s.
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