Entertainment

DEAD MEN SQUAWKING

WHICH is scarier: zombies chasing you – or some one reading you the day’s headlines? “George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead” delivers both, gambling that the two fear sources will combine for a multiplier effect – like being set on fire while you’re drowning. Instead, each reduces the other’s impact. You’re left with something more like the feeling of having a sore knee and a mild toothache at the same time.

“Blair Witch” and “Cloverfield”-style, Romero’s fifth film in his 40-year corpse corpus purports to be a true video record made by real people involved in a massacre. A group of student filmmakers in Romero’s base city of Pittsburgh are putting together a cheesy horror film about a girl being chased by a zombie (“There’s always an audience for horror – believable horror,” someone says) when they hear the news. A family of murdered immigrants being carted off to the morgue leaped off their stretchers and started biting every EMT and newscaster within their lunging radius.

The students (played by a no-name cast) take to the road, trying to get back to their parents in the eastern part of the state. But since a cup of cocoa from mommy isn’t going to solve the problem of a zombie-led Armageddon, this is a movie in which victims wander as aimlessly as their undead stalkers.

As the script drops references to Hurricane Katrina, global warming, terrorism, the war in Iraq, MySpace and everything else you go to the movies to escape from, Romero has a lot of fun teasing out the implications of a zombie attack. Sometimes he’s only after a quick joke; a talk radio host notes that the main problem with border security now is that too many people are crossing the border from dead to living. But the film is more thoughtful than most horror product, and it’s got more to say than some of your more feeble-minded Oscar- -brand flicks (“Babel,” “Michael Clayton”).

For instance, after the deluge, mainstream media might cut and run, leaving bloggers to carry on with newsgathering, but one character notes that the upshot is just “noise” – too many competing voices, none with any authority. Which leaves us with a sour taste: The media are deplorable now, and they will be even when the little guys take over.

Blacks get to enjoy a new position of leadership. The white power structure has collapsed, and Romero serves up lots of stuff about a new world of looting (which a black paramilitary redefines as “doing what you gotta do”), how the media make us complicit in the horrors they cover, how “killing becomes easy in wartime,” even warnings about paranoia. But is it really being “paranoid” when dead bodies get up to boogie?

Romero has been gradually moving his allegory to the foreground of the series, losing interest in thrills (though there is a lovely shot here of a zombie’s eyeballs exploding after cardiac-arrest paddles are used on its skull). He seems unaware that this lefty vision of hell – he cooks up the same direness and dread as “Children of Men” – unwittingly inspires its own counter-allegory. The conservative watching “Diary of the Dead” will think: Wait a minute. Rampaging killer zombies are on the loose-and this crew is all guilty and conflicted about blowing them away? Romero’s we’re-all-doomed-and-maybe-we-deserve-it pessimism is so extreme he would fit right in with a real group of brain-eaters: the French.

GEORGE A. ROMERO’S DIARY OF THE DEAD

The hateful dead.

Running time: 95 minutes. Rated R (profanity, brief nudity, gory violence). At the Empire and the Village East.

kyle.smith@nypost.com