Romero’s latest zombie opus
It was impossible to tell who was who and what preceded and succeeded what we witnessed, but one thing was clear: The dead were returning to life and massive head trauma was, as always, the only way to take the suckers down.
ShockTillYouDrop.com and a theater full of other lucky zombie fans were given an exclusive first-look at George Romero’s Diary of the Dead, the latest installment in his growing undead saga. A tantalizing two clips unraveled at the Bloor Cinema where Festival of Fear‘s “Speak of the Dead” Retrospective with Romero took place.
The first snippet was set in the woods where the film’s leads – a band of filmmakers – listened intently to radio reports of undead attacks. As Romero would later explain, the story is told from a subjective point-of-view, Ã la The Blair Witch Project, during the “first night” of Night of the Living Dead‘s zombie uprising. So, yes, there’s some hand-held action to behold, but it appears surprisingly slick. The second clip, on the other hand, was loaded with video drop-outs and occasional static as the zombie action grew more intense.
Here, our heroes venture into a hospital where they encounter two zombies. A character steps into our line of vision to pop off a couple of gunshots to his target’s chest with little results. “Try the head!” screams a voice off-camera. “Shoot it in the head!” Blammo! Another pull of the trigger and a bullet soars into the cranium of one undead menace. As a female zombie approaches, we hear one leading lady yell, “Wait!” hoping to conserve bullets. She slides into view, shimmies past the slow-moving zombie, grabs the paddles of a nearby defibrillator, powers them full of juice and slams them on either side of the zombie’s head, cooking it in the process.
The crowd went nuts as a faint trace of smoke erupted from both of the collapsing corpse’s eye-sockets.
And…that’s all we got. The zombies looked great and, of course, we were all warned that what we saw was not final. Romero was still in the process of tweaking things, yet it was obvious he’s having a blast with this one.
Those attending this year’s Toronto International Film Festival will be the first to check out Diary of the Dead when it makes its premiere next month!
Source: Ryan Rotten
