There are three major flaws that undermine every minute of George Romero’s fifth zombie movie, Diary of the Dead. They are insurmountable, inescapable, and ultimately fatal to Romero’s thesis, no matter how eerily relevant that thesis may be.

The first flaw is central to the movie’s premise: A group of film students and their professor are in the woods making a film when the zombie apocalypse goes down, and what we see is what the student director puts on camera, narrated by his pragmatic girlfriend, presumably after the director himself checks out and she gets to a place safe enough to narrate a movie. In short, it’s voyeur horror, something many have lumped in with The Blair Witch Project but probably fits more comfortably beside Strange Days, as both exercise in and commentary on the vicarious jollies audiences get from watching others suffer.

What sinks the concept right out of the gate is Romero’s florid and melodramatic dialogue and characterization, though his actors share some of the blame for the latter. Romero has always been an idea man whose creative virtuosity makes up for his often slipshod execution. And that’s fine, provided you’re working in conventional storytelling and you’re just that damn good. But the clunky dialogue coupled with half-baked ideas (that’s the second flaw) has nowhere to hide in the docudrama format. The artifice, the fakeness, of the story’s construction becomes that much more apparent. It’s embarrassing.

The third and final flaw is that Romero’s shambling zombies just aren’t scary anymore. I feel like I’m defrocking myself in public – me, an avowed Romero fan – but there it is, and we’ll all just have to live with it. In massive hordes, the slow shamblers still have some potential fright to them, but here their numbers are even less than in Night of the Living Dead. One or two, here and there, shambling along to be struck down in various serio-comic ways. Romero’s shambling zombies have been so thoroughly strip-mined by almost every zombie story since Night that they hold little, if any power on their own anymore. They are video game targets; they are the subject of dumb flash mob pranks; they are Count Chocula to their predecessors’ Count Orlock. Just saying this will discredit me among the more hardcore of the horror movie fans, but there it is. It’s simply true.

To be fair to Romero, his zombie movies aren’t about the zombies; they’re about the ideas behind them. (This is the crucial factor that Romero’s imitators almost uniformly miss, which is why the man is a legend and the others are known only to the hardcore.) So what’s the idea here? Something to do with the instantaneousness of modern, “participatory” media: the Internet, blogs, a half-dozen 24-hour news networks and an inability to find anything like useful information when times of crisis hit. It’s also a little bit about the sheer creepiness of voyeurism in horror, particularly prescient given this film’s close release to the all-sizzle-no-meat Cloverfield.

This latter argument is where the movie has its rare few (and genuinely entrancing) moments – one memorable sequence shows the film’s fictional director editing together a sequence we just witnessed, and for a moment the meta-telescope shifted into perfect, crystal clear focus. The previously snickering critics around me dropped into fascinated silence. Here was a filmmaker not afraid to indict both his audience and himself. The moment was gone almost as soon as it had arrived, but it was no less potent for its transience.

Perhaps if I could transport myself back to a pre-ironic time, I could appreciate this film more. Maybe the zombies would be less laughable, the melodrama less painful. But I can’t do that, and a movie must stand up in its cultural milieu. Diary of the Dead doesn’t. If Romero had allowed this movie to percolate for another six months before he went to the camera, he might have crafted something worthy of the Dead films. It’s our loss that he didn’t.