If you’re the inventor of the modern zombie movie, how do you up the ante in a genre you helped create? Well, if you’re George Romero, you evolve the concept by stripping it back down to its genesis. Call it “Land of the Dead Unplugged”, if you will.

The movie begins with a group of college film students and their professor on location for a mummy movie that is the project of one of bunch. While he has written and is directing a horror film, his dream is to be a documentary film-maker. So when news of the outbreak reaches them while filming, our director, Jason, remains behind the camera so that he can record for posterity “the night when everything changed”. The other students, while somewhat stereotypical (the beauty, the geek, the rich kid), are all solid characters that add different dimensions to the story. Jason’s girlfriend, Debbie, serves as Romero’s social commentator, more than once posing the question, “What, it isn’t real if you don’t get it on tape?”

Like Night of the Living Dead, Diary stands out because of its rawness. But since it is almost 40 years later, even the manner of “realism” must be updated.

Where Night evoked a sense of realistic horror with its grainy black and white almost documentary feel, Diary of the Dead uses the same media it satirizes to make the zombie apocalypse feel like something straight off of CNN or YouTube.

And far from a Blair Witch Project or Cloverfield rip-off (and really, how could it be when neither of those films would exist without NotLD), Diary of the Dead stays away from the blurry, jerky camera angles and presents a film that is realistic while at the same time easy on the eyes (and stomach). Since our “director” is a film-maker, he is using a real camera. Also, a second camera is located later, as well as security camera tape that is edited into the final product. Debbie provides this final editing, as well as the narration, as she seeks to see Jason’s vision to its completion. As Jason states in the movie, “if we can save even one person’s life by showing what happened here, isn’t it worth it?” There were several times I forgot the person doing the “filming” was part of the story because it looks that good.

But where Diary of the Dead really stands apart from Romero’s other zombie films is how overt the social commentary is in the film. I would even argue that where that commentary is a supporting character in the other films, the social satire is actually the star of this movie. The film students and the zombies really are secondary to what Romero really wants us to learn about ourselves as a society. In Romero’s view, we have become so accustomed to being bombarded by news and “facts” and media images that we no longer know what is real. Is reality what we see with our eyes, or is it what we view through a lens or on a screen? When we slow down to look at the car accident, are we seeing if we might be of assistance or are we looking for a cheap, morbid form of entertainment? Are the victims even real to us?

Don’t let all this deep sociological probing scare you away, however. At the end of the day, Diary of the Dead is an entertaining horror flick. The kills, while maybe not as frequent as in movies past, are some of the most gory and spectacular Romero has ever filmed. Most of the characters are realistic and portrayed well enough that you do care what happens to them. In the end, though, what really sticks with you is the belief that if we really did fall into the abyss of a zombie apocalypse, would our fates matter if no one was there to see it? Or, worse yet, would a person viewing our death from the other side of a screen even register the smallest pang of remorse? Heavy stuff, indeed.

8 out 10 ass-kicking, deaf Amish farmers