Tuesday, August 29, 2006

Lots And Lots Of Diary Of The Dead Spoilers

There's a script review out there that contains very many plot spoilers for George Romero's Diary of the Dead - his upcoming fifth zombie film, again to be made and financed independently after Land of the Dead was made for and distributed by Universal.

The most important spoiler is that the entire film - I stress, the entire film - is seen through the various cameras that exist in the film's narrative, be they news cameras, security cameras or the camera of our main character, Jason, a would-be indie filmmaker.

Before the plot begins proper, the first sequence captures the moment when the dead very first came back to life. A whole family have been killed in a murder-suicide and a news crew are on the scene to cover the events. The shock reveal comes that the family aren't staying dead - they're the very first zombies in this film's world.

So, to extrapolate from that, this isn't a direct sequel to any of the previous Dead films, and in fact, it is much more clear in breaking away from their perceived chronology.

When we meet the main characters, they are filming a cheeseball mummy film. One line seems to criticise the recent fashion of fast-moving zombies. The quote goes:

How many times do I have to tell you? Dead things don’t move fast! You’re a corpse, for chrissake! If you try to run that fast, your ankles are gonna snap off!

I'm told that this line also works as set-up for a key scene that comes later.

The remainder of the film is a trio of escalating zombie siege scenes, and we know that Romero is a dab-hand at these kinds of sequences - in fact, he invented, refined and then perfected such set pieces. There's some fear in the review that this structure might make the film feel a little repetitive, but personally, I trust Romero, I know that he knows what he is doing.

The review tells more about the script, though not a great deal of further plot information. If anybody can send me a copy of the script, I'd truly appreciate it.

1 comment:

Mark Kardwell said...

Read a really dumb-arsed piece about this at AICN and tried not to groan. Failed.