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Year One
Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead
EMAILPRINTThe Weinstein Company

Generally favorable reviews
Based on 29 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 53 votes
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Movie Info
Genre(s): Horror | Suspense/Thriller
Written by: George A. Romero
Directed by: George A. Romero
Release Date:
Theatrical: February 15, 2008
DVD: May 20, 2008
Running Time: 95 minutes, Color
Origin: USA
Summary
RATING: R for strong horror violence and gore, and pervasive language
Starring Michelle Morgan, and Shawn Roberts
Jason Creed and a small crew of college filmmakers are in the Pennsylvania woods making a no-budget horror film when they hear the terrifying news that the dead have started returning to life. Led by Jason's girlfriend, Debra, the frightened young filmmakers set off in a friend's old Winnebago to try to get back to the only safety and security they know: their homes. But there is no escape from the crisis or any real home for them to go back to anymore. Everything they depend upon--all that they hold dear--is fractured as the plague of the living dead begins to spread. (The Weinstein Company)
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
Premiere Glenn Kenny
A giddy kick-out-the-jams entertainment. Diary takes a tack that's not exactly new, but is new to Romero, and as one might expect, the director brings a sharp and uncompromising new perspective to it.
Read Full Review >LA Weekly Scott Foundas
In most horror movies, it's a given that we should root for the heroes to make it out alive, but Diary of the Dead isn't nearly so certain, and so it terrifies us all the more.
Read Full Review >Rolling Stone Peter Travers
This one belongs with the leaders of the scare pack. Isn't it time that we give Romero his due? It's hardly an accident that Stephen King, Quentin Tarantino, Guillermo del Toro, Simon Pegg and Wes Craven recognize Romero as a master. He is.
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Ty Burr
Horror movie Rule #1: The only way to kill a zombie is to shoot it in the brain. George Romero himself laid this maxim down with his first film, the endlessly influential 1968 gutter classic "Night of the Living Dead." Forty years later, with George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead, the venerable filmmaker has done something almost as startling: He has put brains back into the zombie genre.
Read Full Review >Empire Kim Newman
A raw, vivid despatch from the frontline, this melds content with frights in classic Romero style. An outstanding exercise in showing the kids how to do it.
Read Full Review >Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov
Diary of the Dead is meant to scare your pants off, blow your mind out the back of your skull, and then deposit you ungently back into reality, quaking a little, maybe, but still alive and, unlike the undead, thinking.
Read Full Review >Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips
The way Diary of the Dead chooses to deliver its gore, you know you’re in the hands of a grown-up uninterested in the excesses of the “Saw” or “Hostel” pictures. I mean, there’s gore, sure, and flesh gets eaten. But the way Romero shoots and cuts the shot of a girl’s reunion with her parents, one dead, one undead, it’s played for keeps--the right kind of gross, with a touch of mournful gravity.
Read Full Review >Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker
The film's take on media and personal responsibility recalls Brian De Palma's faux Iraq documentary, "Redacted," here dropped into a homefront turned guerrilla war zone.
Read Full Review >The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Liam Lacey
There are zombie movies and then there are George Romero films.
Read Full Review >ReelViews James Berardinelli
All-in-all, the intelligence of the approach combined with good old-fashioned zombie blood-and-gore (as opposed to the slicker, sicker torture porn variety) makes this not only the most satisfying motion picture Romero has made in a long while, but one of the best of his career.
Read Full Review >TV Guide Maitland McDonagh
What divides opinion is the film's tone: Are those naive, portentous pronouncements about media, voyeurism and the numbing, pornographic allure of atrocity footage a sly reflection of the YouTube generation's boundary-free narcissism and callow youth, or evidence that Romero – never one to underplay a metaphor – has become a hectoring, tin-eared fogey?
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Peter Hartlaub
It's one of the least scary films that he's made - but still entertaining, and very, very gory.
Read Full Review >Village Voice Nathan Lee
Visually, Romero's ersatz-DIY experiment isn't as suave as Brian De Palma's similar effort in the recent and risible "Redacted," nor as exactingly engineered as the video convulsions of "Cloverfield," but its scrappy, ultra-low-budget edges are part of its charm.
Read Full Review >New York Magazine David Edelstein
Compared with other first-person motion-sickness horror pictures like "The Blair Witch Project" and "Cloverfield," George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead is weak tea, yet there’s enough social commentary (and innovative splatter) to acidulate the brew--to remind you that Romero, even behind the curve, makes other genre filmmakers look like fraidy-cats.
Read Full Review >Slate Dana Stevens
Hardly top-drawer Romero. In fact, it may be his worst zombie film yet. But even bad Romero is a far sight more interesting than the coolly sadistic guts-porn that currently passes for mainstream horror.
Read Full Review >Film Threat Zack Haddad
I love zombie movies. I love George Romero even more. It is easy to say that every movie he comes out with is an event for me, so it brings me great sadness to say that I felt let down by his latest effort, Diary of the Dead.
Read Full Review >Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman
Diary of the Dead isn't bad; it's a kicky B movie hiding inside a draggy, self-conscious-work-of-auteurist-horror one.
Read Full Review >The New York Times Manohla Dargis
The body has its needs, and one of the problems with Diary of the Dead is that it doesn’t get into your body; it doesn’t shake you up, jolt you, make you shiver and squeak. It’s clever, or at least clever enough to keep you going and interested from start to finish. It just isn’t scary.
Read Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club) Nathan Rabin
As in the more successful "Land Of The Dead," Romero makes an admirable attempt to update his beloved franchise for contemporary audiences. But this time out, his heavy-handed intellectual concerns get in the way of a perfectly good fright flick.
Read Full Review >Baltimore Sun Chris Kaltenbach
With Diary of the Dead, Romero goes back to the beginning, only this time the amateurish look is calculated and the resulting film far less effective - if only because a handful of filmmakers have beaten him to the punch.
Read Full Review >Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez
Diary of the Dead is at its best when Romero is just goofing off, like when he shows us home video footage of a children's birthday party.
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Carina Chocano
The movie suffers from the same malaise Romero diagnoses in society. It's just too mediated to be scary, despite its zeal for gore. You can't feel the characters' fear, and they don't seem to feel it either.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader J.R. Jones
Diary of the Dead features some of the most hilariously gross images since "Dawn of the Dead." In one online video the filmmakers find, a father playfully pulls off a birthday clown’s red rubber nose and the guy’s real nose comes off with it.
Read Full Review >The Hollywood Reporter Michael Rechtshaffen
This "Living Dead" exercise delivers far less monstrosity and a great deal of pomposity, not to mention dull characters who aren't nearly as lively as those dead guys.
Read Full Review >Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea
Moderately scary, moderately amusing, intermittently dull and obvious, Diary of the Dead is not groundbreaking, nor even ground-quaking.
Read Full Review >New York Post Kyle Smith
Romero's we're-all-doomed-and-maybe-we-deserve-it pessimism is so extreme he would fit right in with a real group of brain-eaters: the French.
Read Full Review >New York Daily News Elizabeth Weitzman
There are a few clever moments, as when an Amish farmer saves the tech-savvy students. But mostly, we're in it for the gore.
Read Full Review >Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir
A limp and dreary experience, at least after you get past its intriguing premise. It's poorly written and woodenly acted, completely formulaic and hopelessly imprisoned by both its genre and finally its form.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 5.3 (out of 10) based on 53 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
J C gave it a6:
Basically the first half hour of this movie was crap. but the next hour, was very entertaining after they had killed off most of the bad actors and actually got things going. the main thing hated about this movie were the characters themselves, many of them were very unlikeable but that's just my opinion. and whoever the actor was that played ridley should be the next Joker, he suits the role perfectly. if the movie was a bit longer and put some more emphasis on survivors against survivors, its would've been great, but alas, its didn't.
Michael K gave it a1:
WOW. I am very open minded when it comes to movies, and love everything zombie, but dang, this movie is HORRIBLE. I don't care who made this, there are no redeeming factors. The director tried WAY to hard to make some social commentary and the acting was horrible. I could barely watch this to the end.
MiKE gave it a0:
When you're watching this movie you get a feel, like its a low budget movie that was shoot in few weeks. Horror movies are suppose to be scary but this movie is a pure joke! AVOID at all costs!
Alex C. gave it a1:
It has the premise to be good, but just ends up dull. the only reason i kept watching was because i'm not wasting £14, which romero did not earn. i step back from the glory days of the dead. What's more annoying is how some gave it five stars, convincing me to buy it!
IanRey P. gave it a2:
No scare, no thrills. Fine, but was there a good story to compensate? Not even.
IanRey P. gave it a2:
No scare, no thrills. Fine, but was there a good story to compensate? Not even.
J-me gave it an8:
This is a must see for Romero films. If you're looking for a modern day MTV style zombie rock-and-roll flick this might not be your cup ot tea. For me, this took me back to his earlier works (which I consider classic). The humor is there, the quiet social commentary is there (actually, not so quiet in this film), and of course, the gore is there. Many of these negative reviews are by people looking for this to be another film. (cmon people, Cloverfield? Really?) If you like Romero, you'll love this.
