Bashing George Romero’s newer Dead films has become one of these tiresome fashions, like complaining about George Lucas ruining your childhood or going on about how R.E.M. were so much better before they were popular. (They weren’t.)
These are probably the two main reasons:
- Romero has refused to repeat himself, with each movie taking a completely different approach to the story and questioning many of our assumptions.
- The old movies have become enshrined as “classics” by a generation of nostalgia-obsessed geeks, and to ensure the holiness of “the originals” everything new has to be bashed.
Thus many people quickly dismissed Land of the Dead, possibly the best entry in the series, despite its thoughtfulness (or perhaps because of it), its politics, its interesting setting and characters. Land of the Dead was a rare thing: a zombie movie full of moments of poetry and grace – as well as horror and gore.
Diary of the Dead was a very serious – again I have to use the word thoughtful, which I think really describes Romero’s work – movie about the media, new and old. Unlike the dreadful and unrealistic Cloverfield, Diary gave its characters a reason for carrying around the camera – they’re trying to make a documentary – and actually had them use the camera like real people would, not like monkeys on ecstasy.
