I don't know whether Diary of the Dead was an honestly bungled attempt to move the zombie movie forward as a format...or a flagrantly half-assed attempt to make up for Land of the Dead. I can't see George Romero's heart. Anything is possible. Making a decent zombie flick only seems an impossible task. Dawn of the Dead was the last great hope, and that was 1978. The wave crested and it's been rolling back ever since we left that mall. Why can no one admit that mall was the last good idea George Romero ever had? Why must we have Diary of the Dead?

Framed as a documentary-within-a-movie, titled The Death of Death ("a film by Jason Creed") Diary is, as far as I'm concerned, exactly the type of film George would've made had he put together a Dead movie back in the 1990s. Full of young, pretty people who've never seen zombie movies before, Diary becomes much less than we've come to expect from ol' George.

After a local news cameraman's footage of a triple murder-suicide, which serves as our prologue and concludes when the victims rise from their gurneys to attack the MTs, we meet Deb (Michelle Morgan) in voice over. She introduces us to our Jason Creed production, a slick twist on a biodiversity article written by Eugene Lindon and appearing in TIME way the hell back in 1989. Intended as a straight-horror film, Deb's magic voice explains that it's became more than that now, with the...you know...zombie Apocalypse and all.

Deb's voice serves to explain why Diary is much slicker than Cloverfield or their common progenitor, The Blair Witch Project. Filled with a consummate professional's trappings. (Deb even admits, "I've added music for effect. Trying to scare you.") this is not found footage: this is a finished product, immediately placing itself above those other, lesser handheld films you see on your Netflicks. And right off the bat I'm disappointed: I expected a straight-up, POV zombie movie, goddamnit. Things like music, strategic cuts, and coverage are inappropriate distractions that do not fit here, George. You can't have it both ways. You've got to forge on, make your own damn way, and if that means reinventing the wheel, well...sucks, but...it's not like you haven't done it before.

In any case, the movie-proper opens amongst some of U of Pittsburgh students making a mummy movie in the woods. The radio tells them about six dead people mysteriously waking up. Mummy-man Ridley (Philip Riccio) takes this as his cue to leave, girlfriend in tow. The rest of the cast immediately loose my confidence when they mutually agree to split up. Retards. Idiots! You'll pay for that in blood, just watch.

Our cameraman and head idiot is Jason Creed (Joshua Close), who begins obsessively "documenting" the zombie carnage as soon as he discovers his obligatory girlfriend's (that is, Deb's) dormroom deserted. "Are you still shooting?" she asks, upon discovering him. "What are you shooting?" Good question. The Internets reveal chaos is already spreading, along with the usual, authoritative disinformation. Deb's voiceover chimes in from the future: "I think that's what started the panic - not knowing the truth." You don't think the zombie hordes might've helped out with that panic?

Deb-of-the-present is thankfully unaware of her future-self's judgement calls. Somehow, our group reforms in the back of a Weinebego, and it's time for the roll. There's Mary (Tatiana Maslany) behind the wheel; it's her Winebago. There's Tony (Shawn Roberts), the make-up man, pulled right from a Ralph Loren catalog. There's Tracy (Amy Ciupak Lalonde), from Texas, and her jock boyfriend, Gordo (Chris Violette). There's token-nerd Elliott (Joe Dinicol ) handling the AV. And getting drunk in the back, we find Professor Andrew Maxwell, Emeritus (Scott Wentworth - whom I recognized as Det. Kermit Griffin from Kung-Fu: The Legend Continues, showing my own nerd-creds). The gang's headed to Scranton, where Deb's folks have a house that might be just isolated enough to hold out against the living dead. Let the betting begin: who'll make it there alive?

Do we care? Not particularly, no. Beyond Deb, the cast is vague and flat as a whole, filled with people as empty as the zombies they kill. After encountering three zombies forming an impromptu roadblock, Mary mows them down, and is so distraught by this she pulls over and tries to eat her little Derringer. Failing to put one through her own brain, the gang does the right thing and trips to the nearest hospital. This ends badly, of course - but ol' Gordo becomes quite the capable zombie killer in the interum. So of course a former patient (and current corpse) has to bite him, allowing everyone to learn the rules of zombification all over again. Deb's voice over says, "God had changed the rules on us," but that's bullcrap, Deborah. Ignoring all those shitty remakes, we find Romeroian zombies haven't changed much in forty-odd years. Make-up and digital blood effects have gotten better, but so what? I want money shots, I watch porno.

Another hallmark of Romero's flicks: there's no time for speculation. The usual hoaxes, viruses and electrochemical upsets are mentioned in passing and dismissed, per usual. We're watching a road movie here, and realize this as soon as we leave the hospital.

Gordon dies of his shoulder-bite, leaving Trace to punch his ticket. My favorite character in film, a deaf Amish man, gives our main lunchmeat shelter after the Winnie breaks down, but that's just a temporary pit stop. An "army" of the dead descend on poor Amish man's barn as Tracy fixes up the fuel line. Poor Amish man doesn't make it, though he checks out in a way sure to please the gorehounds. (I can tell it pleased Romero.) The kids (what am I saying - they're my age) find their way into the sheltering arms of the Token Black Resistance, and Deb staring-contests their Keith David-esque leader into parting with some supplies. My hopes that he'd take her aside and advise her to, "Ditch that camera-lugging motherfucker before he gets his dumb ass killed," are in vain. As are Deb's hopes for a happy family reunion. Her folks (and little brother) are already dead to the world by the time she gets there. Yet they move. So its on to Ridley's house. Remember Ridley, the mummy man? Turns out he's a trust-fundian, and the surviving Scoobies arrive to find him still clad in his rags, the family mansion deserted. Mom and Dad ate the staff, and the staff bit Ridley's girlfriend, but it's okay. They're all "buried" in the poolhouse out back. The main house has a steel reinforced panic room all gassed up (where's the electricity coming from?) and ready to go. But is that a bite mark on Ridley's arm?

And so what? Are you, George Romero, of all flippin' people, going to argue that sensationalist media viewing inures us to real violence? Tell that to the next PTSD sufferer you meet, George. Better yet, have a bodyguard do it. You might want to keep your face.

"Why are you still shooting," indeed. Jason seems to be powered by altruism. Halfway through the film he argues for the validity of uploading to his MySpace page, creating a new Malius Zombifacarum. This scene features some good acting from Morgan. Her Deb is so obviously disgusted with Jason's logic she doesn't even try to argue the point. Nor will I, except to say "That's fine, asshole - as long as the internet still exists." As if no one in this wacky, parallel dimension has ever seen a zombie movie. And don't even try to tell me this is set on the same day as Night of the Living Dead. A cheaper cop-out I have not heard in a long time.

A period-piece remake of Night might look interesting - but only if Romero succeeds at channeling his younger self back into things. While this is meant as an "update" of the zombie flick, the presence of YouTube, cellphones with cameras, and the vague references to Katrina and those phantom Weapons of Mass Destruction are all incidental throw-away lines, anchors the plot tosses asside as it moves from set-up to set-up. Without them, the film is decoupled from time, and could just as easily have come out in 1999 as 2007. "There are over two hundred million video cameras in people's hands," a disembodied voice tells us, during one of the many disjointed edits that invade the main footage of our Scooby gang. "What gets into our heads when we see something horrible?" Deb asks, "...but we don't stop to help? We stop to look." Alright, fine; people suck. But we've been stopping to look since the explosion in home video technology way back in the 80s. Instead of focusing on that, Romero chose to take on that decad's militarism...in as highhanded a manner as possible, but still, I'm with him. This decade's militarism gets a free pass, apparently. Welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations, George. Happy to see ya.

Day of the Dead at least tried to add some twist to the mix with its "intelligent" zombie and its implicit questioning of just where the line lies between living, dead and undead. It tried, damnit. Diary of the Dead doesn't try to be much of anything. This doesn't even feel like Romero anymore. It feels like most of the crap zombie pictures I've seen these last five years and fully a third of the crap documentaries available on YouTube, and others. There's more money behind the cameras, but all the money in the world can't make me care about anyone other than Deb.

She is the Buffy of our piece, and Morgan does a good job fleshing out her transition from college student to bad ass. The other cast members stand still for a remarkably long time, their characterized in fits and starts too disconnected to be meaningful. They have less to do and fewer things to go on than their zombified foes. At the end, Deb's voice asks, "Are we-" collective humanity "-worth saving?" In your current state, no. It seems the last twenty years have only reinforced Romero's inherent nihilism. He seems to have given up on us as an audience and a species.

These days, old George appears to be firing over the heads of his core fans, aiming for today's crop of shallow, vacuous teenagers. To this end, he makes shallow, vacuous movies that look like a dozen other pictures produced twenty years ago by less-talent individuals. Even my vacuous, teenage self would consider Diary of the Dead an insulting waste of time, and audience intelligence. I can hear him now, shouting down from the past: "Tell me something I don't fucking know, ass." Of course our cultural epistemology is in crisis. Of course we're being led around by lunatics and lairs. Of course we live in a world of multiple, incompatible Truths. But you don't have the courage to give us that in this, your first true Dead movie of the twenty-first century. The truth (really, your character's truth) is an attempt at synthesize something out of not much.

Good luck with that, George. I'll be over here, with my popcorn and your old flicks. Come and get me when you have your next hot idea.