Last week, I had to attach a disclaimer to my review of Shrooms. Next week, it’s The Signal. This week, it’s the latest from the granddaddy of Zombie Cinema himself, George A. Romero.

Back in the day, I saw the original Dawn of the Dead on 16mm film in my college dorm, and even though I was an impressionable teen, I simply didn’t understand what the fuss was about. I must admit I still don’t today—but as an experienced movie critic, I can at least appreciate what one character in this film describes as the “underlying thread of social satire” (of which, as a teen, I was largely ignorant). And this even if I don’t find the whole zombie schtick very entertaining.

So here are Romero’s basic rules of zombiedom: The dead come back to life, for some unknown reason. When they do, because parts of them tend to be pretty rotten and broken and such, zombies tend to have problems thinking and moving very quickly. They also develop a very advanced and profound taste for human flesh. If you get bit by one, you’re bound to die… and then come back to living death. The only way to kill a zombie (or keep from becoming one) is to disperse all gray matter as effectively as possible.

So to stay one step ahead of zombies, one only needs to be marginally more able and bright than the average uncooked bread roll. Nonetheless, living breathing humans bite the dust constantly in zombie films.

This time out, one of the intelligence-limiting factors for the living is—and this is really pretty funny, given the current craze for reality TV and YouTube—hand-held DV cameras. Yup. Given a crisis of mind-blowing and harrowing proportions (kind of like a monster crushing Manhattan), more than one genius in our crew of heroes decides that battling zombies is a good time to have one’s eyes glued to an LCD screen and one’s hands preoccupied with zoom levers and battery packs.

But it gets better. The reason that Jason Creed and company find themselves in this curious position is that they are filming a low-budget mummy movie when the contagion breaks out. Yes! “Who’s going to believe a mummy movie in the first place?” complains Tony when Jason gets a little too anal about his mummy’s makeup. And a good starting place this is indeed, as we are asked to believe that what we are seeing is a documentary film called The Death of Death which Jason’s girlfriend Debra has stitched together from the various cameras used to film the “actual” events.

So it all starts out as a one-camera jump-cut shoot à la Cloverfield; when they pick up a second (oddly) abandoned DV cam in a hospital (!), Debra gets the chance to do some more conventional editing; and when the survivors rendezvous at mummy-boy Ridley’s posh estate, the security-camera footage, uh, fleshes things out for us nicely.

How clever all of this is.

But the cleverest part of it all is the way in which Romero’s script gets us past mere Cloverfieldization. Yes, he manages to make the entire film a metaphor for the way in which our obsession with documenting our births, our anniversaries, our weddings, our disasters, our kid’s failed potty training, our puppies’ haircuts, our friends’ drunken stupors, our fist fights, and even our deaths have become something even Charleton Heston could admire. In many ways, this film would be a hoot in a double bill with Bowling for Columbine.

Yes, America’s Funniest Home Videos has helped kill our imaginations and intelligence as surely as if we ran IV poles through our skulls.

But do we really need Diary of the Dead to tell us that? Maybe we do. I dunno. But if so, does it help?

Diary of the Dead is rated R for “strong horror violence and gore, and pervasive language.” Yes, this is a zombie movie, and if they aren’t your thing this one won’t be either. If you’ve never seen a zombie film before, though, you could do worse. There’s not a lot of truly gratuitous gore (for a zombie film), and there’s no sex or nudity whatsoever (for whatever that’s worth). So if you’re looking for a “safe” zombie film to try on the fit (!), you couldn’t possibly do better. You know.

Courtesy of a local publicist, Greg attended a press screening of Diary of the Dead.