hopefully not on the toilet.

To say I’ve seen plenty of bad movies is an understatement. In my two and a half decades, I’ve witnessed hordes of has-beens, also-rans, and other two-word phrases that imply failure. I’ve sat through (most of) Manos: Hands of Fate. I saw Beowulf in three dimensions of unholy stupid. I saw Bewitched. In the theater. Don’t ask. So, when I say that George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead is the worst movie I’ve ever seen, it means something.

Diary of the Dead is Romero’s latest installment in the saga that began with Night of the Living Dead in 1968. Diary returns to the original zombie outbreak portrayed in Night, but spices up the story by couching it in contemporary fixings like YouTube, digital filmmaking, and independent Web news. The movie looked to bring Romero’s trademark black humor to the information age, the same way Night of the Living Dead addressed 1960s race relations, or 1978’s Dawn of the Dead satirized rampant consumerism. The movie also looked to be fathomable by beings higher on the evolutionary ladder than, say, lungfish or USC fans, but by three minutes into the film, it’s clear that boat has sailed.

Only you can prevent zombie attacks.

The story, cobbled together by a survivor, Debra, is presented as a documentary she’s making about the documentary her boyfriend was making about a group of film students making a horror movie. There's so much meta-overload I'm about to meta-vomit in my meta-toilet when, thank God, the apocalypse arrives in the form of lurching Thriller extras. This forces the valiant group of film studies majors* to embark on a perilous journey across the Land Culture Forgot ( Pennsylvania). The cast is predictably thinned along the way, meeting in due course Romero’s traditional stable of goofy looters, evil farmers and saintly inner-city poor.

An aside: The rural vs. urban dichotomy is a tragically backwards fixture of all of Romero’s movies. The guy seems convinced that if you’re poor and you farm, you’re an inbred, gun-toting lunatic. If you’re poor and you live in a major metropolitan area, however, you’re hardy and morally innocent. It’s basically Barack Obama’s perception of America, only people get eaten. So I guess there’s some Bill Clinton thrown in there, too.  

That’s the setup. As a reviewer, I’m now presented with a problem. Expository prose is not up to the challenge of delineating all of Diary of the Dead’s faults. I could be George freakin’ Orwell and still wouldn’t be able to weave a coherent critical essay around the colossal brain fart that is Diary of the Dead. So, in the dumbed-down, YouTube spirit Romero wanted to satirize, I present to you a list of bullet points.

>Plot: Diary of the Dead doesn’t have plot holes. Oh, no. Plot tesseracts is more like it. Diary is a shimmery fabric of plot possibilities through which the characters transmute at will. It’s a cinematic veil of Maya that would probably make a logician’s head explode—so maybe it’s not totally useless. I realize horror movies are not known for the rational decisions of its characters, or the explicability of events, but Diary’s torrent of head-scratching happenings would make even the kids from Friday the 13th look like Rhodes scholars.

>Actors: Picture Broadway. Then picture off-Broadway. Then picture the deepest sub-basement of summer stock awfulness, and you have the talent of Diary’s cast. It doesn’t help that the characters have the attention span of gerbils and the emotional depth of goldfish. Did the boom mic operator buy it? Whatever. Did the Texan chick shoot her boyfriend? Don’t worry, she’ll forget it in a few minutes. Did Debra catch her beloved family eating each other? A thirty second cuddle session with the makeup guy and it’ll blow over. Maybe that’s a commentary on the way the Internet has whittled our attention spans to rodent levels — but if it is, the cast sure doesn’t convey it.

>The British professor guy: for some reason, the film students’ EXTREMELY British professor accompanies them on the journey. If Romero’s country folk are two-dimensional, then Professor Maxwell is a graphite scrawl on a post-it note. He makes Anthony Daniel look like Joe Pesci. Professor Maxwell took archery at Eton. He complains about how a gentleman “can’t get a bottle of bourbon” anywhere. At one point, he lovingly clutches a first edition of Tale of Two Cities to his chest. His dialogue is so predictable one expects there to be a pull-string on his back. 

>Romero’s argument: I honestly looked forward to seeing Romero take down the YouTube generation. He made his distaste for the information age clear in interviews given around the time of Diary’s theatrical release. Unfortunately, the edgy wit that informed his first two Dead movies ( Night and Dawn) is absent from Diary. Satire was a part of the story in those films. It was woven into the events, and gave both flicks their smirking, sucker-punch effectiveness. Diary contrastingly never integrates social criticism with story. The hapless zombie-chow cast chugs merrily along with an occasional interjection from the narrator about how protagonist Jason is unable to stop filming. The script makes a stab at undermining the dubious ethicality of recording evil instead of stopping it, but the feeble pokes never become the critical head-shots Romero dispensed in Night or Dawn.  

>The take on Handycam Horror: I was hoping Diary of the Dead would take the first-person horror genre to task. Instead, it convinced me that the genre is creatively exhausted. Like the camera jockeys of Blair Witch Project or Cloverfield, protagonist Jason Creed is unable to stop taping the horrible events around him. Unlike other first—person scare-fests, Jason’s colleagues become visibly annoyed with his cinematographic fixation and make their voices heard. It’s good that Romero has the supporting cast complain (realistically) about the ever-present 16 millimeter, but complaining is all they do. There’s no revelation about the limitations of the genre, about the ideas that underlie it, about the technocratic self-centeredness represented by first-person horror.  

The missed opportunities, the confusing structure, the totally unsympathetic characters — Diary of the Dead has them all. To be fair, it does take a certain kind of talent to make a flick this bad. By the time the movie drags to its lethargic close, you may find yourself contemplating that fact, impressed by the way an entire team of filmmakers was unable to salvage a promising idea. Or maybe you’ll just be thankful Diary of the Dead wasn’t Bewitched.

Worth the money? For an answer to this question, listen to the first twenty words of “Nobody but Me” by The Human Beinz.

*not, strictly speaking, a real major.