Cinema Suicide

Inspired?  Maybe.  George Romero laid his new zombie festival on the general movie going public at the last Toronto International Film Festival and the reviews to come out of the show were positive across the board.  I, personally, have not seen it but I’m wringing my hands in anticipation.  Land of the Dead wasn’t a particularly bad movie but I didn’t feel like it was everything it could have been.  Early word following Land was that the next Romero project was another zombie movie, which is unusual, and even more unusual was that it featured the same cast as Land heading to Canada in Dead Reckoning.  Thankfully, news of that stopped and weird rumors of a zombie reboot were in the works.  Turns out that was true.

Diary doesn’t even have distribution yet and it looks like George is ready to roll on his next feature, a direct sequel to Diary.  Quite frankly, I got the impression that Land of the Dead was a pretty tough experience on George.  When I met him at the ‘05 Rock and Shock he seemed very tired and I’d read reports that fans weren’t shy about giving him hell about Land of the Dead.  Things seem different now, though.  The wheels of Romero’s filmmaking machine have been a typically slow-turning affair in the past but now he’s making a new movie before his last has even hit the light of a projector.  Bring it on!  Here are the details from Bloody Disgusting:

UNTITLED GEORGE A. ROMERO DIARY OF THE DEAD SEQUEL

Principal photography begins March 2008.

To be written directed by George A. Romero.
Cast to be announced.

The “diary” saga continues. Our heroes, trapped in the mansion where we left them, battle waves of ravenous zombies, barely escaping alive. In search of a safe place to settle, they commandeer an abandoned ferry and sail to a deserted island, only to find that it is already populated by a civilization of the dead. Told in the same first-person style that distinguished “George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead”, the next episode of the saga is a violent siege set in the middle of nowhere, a desperate struggle for survival, and peace, between two tribes: the living and the living dead.