Diary of the Dead

The master of all things zombie George A. Romero is coming out with a new movie! Yay! This picture is of the cast from his upcoming movie Diary of the Dead (I pilfered it from Firstlook.net) and I must say the premise sounds promising.

A group of young filmmakers are out filming their own B-horror film when they come across some zombies, havoc ensues.

What I like about this premise is that it's not a continuation of Land of the Dead but goes back to the time frame of the original Night of the Living Dead. Here's the fun thing, in my opinion, about zombie films. Everyone is experiencing the same thing only in their own individual way. There are a million stories that can be visited from the very first night of the zombie apocalypse, and this is one of them.

I'd like to see more films with this premise, you could take anyone in any position and throw them into the mix with the unstoppable multitude of the zombie hoard. Zombies, individually, are not scary, but if you run into a couple hundred of them, there's only so much you can do. This is why I love the genre. Supernatural killers such as Freddy and Jason can only do so much, but with an ever expanding amount of zombies to deal with the tide always goes in their favor.

I'm also glad this isn't going past the ill-conceived Land of the Dead. I don't really care for the idea of zombie retaining their humanity and learning to do things, "evolving" in a sense (I used the "" since evolution is of course something that takes place over many generations by bringing out favorable traits that benefit an organism but since zombies aren't exactly reproducing (except for Braindead but that's something different as well) but for the sake of argument...). Using weapons was a little over the top. I like my zombies the way I like my pets: mindless killing machines.

So, we shall see what happens. This movie is slated to premier at the Toronto Film Festival and unfortunately it has not set release yet, but when it does, I'll be there. With bells on. And brraaiinnnssss (that's from Return of the Living Dead, people have the idea that the phrase originated from a zombie movie, which it did, but not a traditional zombie canon film. These zombies can run, talk, use equipment, etc. and in that film world, Night of the Living Dead was a movie that was based off an incident that happened in their world which was altered as to cover up the truth!)... more updates to come. In theory.

-Michael