what's on my mind grapes?

George A. Romero needs to quit making movies.

The director revolutionized zombies and has a track record of quality films, but after Diary of the Dead, anything else can only disappoint. The independently produced film has set a new bar for serious zombie movies, and perhaps for horror in general. While it provides more than enough gruesome violence and suspense, it takes Romero’s trademark social commentary to a new level. As much as I can enjoy a deliberately cheesy B-movie, the combination of meaning and emotion with raw entertainment value is an alloy that creates the best of the best films, and Romero now has an entry on that short list.

Romero has used zombies in undisguised metaphors for consumerism and class warfare, but Diary raises the stakes in both the scope of the message and how heavily it is delivered. When it comes to sociopolitical polemics, I’m no great fan of subtlety. Its bluntness may have been perceived as “Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip”’s weakness, but to me, it was what made it great; there was little ambiguity to the overall messages of the show. And like “Studio 60″ raised my standards for televised dramas, Diary leaves any “serious” horror film with a high hurdle to jump.

Is it a “smart” film? Perhaps not. Diary’s dialogue is fairly run of the mill and its humor nothing wildly inventive; its plot is an amalgam of films ranging from 28 Days Later and Romero’s own Night of the Living Dead to Psycho. But it is stirring. One of the most disquieting works of fiction I’ve seen, Diary’s faux-documentary format is played to optimal effect. The movie has its share of laugh-out-loud dark humor, but it is grimmer and more human than anything Romero has done. Even the gritty, this-could-really-happen style of 28 Days Later does not match Diary’s attempt at portraying what “real” everyday people would do if thrust into a nightmare.

Yet one of the film’s strongest themes is how “real” anyone is in a world that is constantly filmed on cell phones and broadcast on YouTube. The major characters are film students (in a horror movie that becomes the aptly-named documentary “The Death of Death”), and are often found lacking in genuine humanity as a result of their own exposure to horror films. Even as she fights for her life, one character enacts the very “hapless female victim” stereotypes she mocked earlier in the movie, and viewers are left to wonder if she was humorfully playing out a role all along, or if her obsession with how she “should” act in such a situation stripped her of any true instincts. The film has another particularly self-aware moment where it is debated why the living dead would be able to run, and Romero’s on-screen proxies explain the director’s case for slow-moving zombies.

The lumbering aggressors, it should be noted, are far scarier than one would expect. It is here where Romero shows his ability to create a great horror film as well as entertainingly explain his sociopolitical thesis. The cast (notably the inexplicably undiscovered Michelle Morgan, whose character serves as the audience’s voice in the film as she doubts the practicality and morality of the group’s actions on several occasions, and Scott Wentworth, whose alcoholic professor is the film’s requisite disillusioned man with a mysterious past) is skilled enough to keep viewers in the moment, and any complaints of cheesy or cliched dialogue goes to the theme that media consumption has devoured human originality.

Of course, Romero’s own humanity shows greatly throughout the film. With nods to the impact and coverage of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, the movie seems to ponder why, with so much media, society still remains so woefully uninformed and consequently terrified, particularly in times of crisis when the coverage is practically inescapable.

Diary becomes more disturbing near the end, with the lines between “us” and “them” increasingly blurred and perhaps, in the end, irrelevant. One of the aspects that has always attracted me to zombie films is their moral clarity – killing hordes of mindless, already-dead bodies leaves not even a hint of guilt in acts of self-defense, as anything short of lethal force is entirely ineffective. Yet the human propensity for cruel, dehumanizing acts for no purposes but amusement is reprehensible; while several of the major characters have a certain gravity about them, they may be in a minority in that regard. The film’s final scene, which stuck in my mind hours after I left the theatre, is reminiscent of the images from Abu Ghraib and other recent war crimes. One wonders if, in the final images, Romero is confronting us with his ultimate question; perhaps there is nothing truly novel or unimaginable about the scene, but have media clichés and endless violence robbed us of our ability to be moved?