What a disappointment this George A. Romero horror movie has been. Romero, the heralded director of many zombies movies, serves us a wafer thin plot that’s hardly worth the paper it’s printed on.
He clearly took a page from the new handheld-camera documentary shooting style that was first successfully employed by The Blair Witch Project and subsequently, and less successfully, by Cloverfield, but didn’t support the gimmick with a well thought out story that justified it.
The plot, if we can call it that [SPOILERS AHEAD, skip to the last paragraph if you really want to watch this crap]: a group of college kids are making a documentary (whose subject I won’t even get into, it’s that dumb) when news breaks of the dead coming back to life to hunt the living. They take off on an attempt to reach the family of the documentary director’s girlfriend while trying not to fall victims of the undead themselves. The boyfriend won’t stop filming, with the excuse that the mainstream media can’t be trusted to spread the truth and the truth must be told to the public.
Now, while I may agree with such a point, I certainly would put saving my own life and the life of those around me at the top of my priorities. So, I would assume, would do anyone sane of mind. Who would agree to go through an experience like that with a jerk filming every reaction, scare, and misstep? Who wouldn’t mind having a camera pointed at themselves when the world as you know it has seemingly ended and you have to fight for your own life? Hardly anyone, I would think. But these guys go half-grudgingly along with it.
Bullshit, if you ask me. The very fact that this dude goes around with a camera on his shoulder, which limits your field of vision to what’s right in front of you, while zombies might be coming at you from your sides is ridiculous. The fact that no one of his friends ever gets fed up enough to react badly to his constant demands for documenting everything is preposterous and, frankly, unbelievable.
When, towards the end, the group is about to enter a house that they don’t know whether is safe or not, and this imbecile tells them to wait while he positions himself so as to get a good shot of them crossing the doorstep, and no one, NO ONE, tells him to F**K OFF, the whole flaky apparatus crumbles miserably under the weight of unbelievability.
And that’s the crux of it. Movies require the audience to believe what it is watching and hearing. Good movies don’t make you roll your eyes in your head every five minutes and never let go of that fragile bond they created since the first frames started rolling. Bad movies, like this one, feel fake and put together with silly putty.
Spare yourselves the aggravation of throwing away a couple hours of your life.
Grade: 2
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