It’s the irony of ironies that the early-aughts zombie craze owes everything to George A. Romero, yet the one person somehow unable to cash in on the early-aughts zombie craze was George A. Romero. It’s also ironic I used “somehow,” because the reason for his wipeout is clear: His three tries didn’t try enough.

By incorporating another craze in found footage, Diary of the Dead, entry No. 5 in a six-film series of bread and butter, looks entirely accessible on paper, yet earned minimal theatrical engagements before shambling to video to be ignored further. To be blunt, it deserves total anonymity — and would, were it not from a beloved brand-name director. Barring product placement by MySpace, it elicits nary a shudder.

Diary’s conceit is University of Pittsburgh students making a mummy movie called The Death of Death (!) pivot to shoot the real-world events — the zombie apocalypse, of course — that interrupt their work; after all, shouldn’t their journey to safety in an RV be documented? (Mmm, debatable.) As captured by their cameraman leader, Jason Creed (Joshua Close, The Exorcism of Emily Rose), the kids’ banter is too forced for Romero’s cast — mostly Canadian, mostly unknown (now excepting Orphan Black star Tatiana Maslany) — to handle credibly. Could anyone?

The camera itself is too showy, ODing on movement in hopes you never forget found footage’s rules. I’m not sure Romero quite understood them, because the device is so labored, it’s fully dilated to 10 cm. Twenty-four long minutes in, when the low-battery icon first flashes in the corner of the screen, I found myself agreeing with Creed’s girlfriend (Michelle Morgan, 1999’s Road Rage) pleading with him to “leave it!”

In select past works — most notably 1968’s Night of the Living Dead — Romero has excelled with low funding, particularly in practical effects that chilled in their authenticity. That’s not the case here, as Diary of the Dead not only goes the CGI route, but detours toward the cheap kind, which looks especially ugly and phony in an already harsh and muddied picture. The one nifty gore gag, although still executed with seams showing, sees a nurse’s eyeballs explode into a coffee-creamer consistency when live defibrillator paddles are placed on her head. A distant second entails a mute Amish farmer (R.D. Reid, 2004’s Dawn of the Dead remake) committing the Mennonite equivalent for seppuku with a swift scythe to his own forehead.

Although he didn’t know it at the time, Romero would write and direct his final zombie pic — and final pic, period — two years later with Survival of the Dead. It’s even worse, which is really saying something since Diary is the only one with a plucky country cutie (Amy Lalonde, 5ive Girls) dispatching a cannibal corpse, then victoriously shouting, “Don’t mess with Texas!” The only creative choice that could make that embarrassment more cringe-inducing is if “The Yellow Rose of Texas” then shit-kicked its way onto the soundtrack as an aural punchline.

Yeah, Romero does that, too. —Rod Lott

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Call it what you will: Toxic Zombies, Bloodeaters, Forest of Fear, Crying Fields. No matter the title chosen, this Pennsylvania regional with many a name remains a nifty little horror film with more on its mind than splatter — although it delivers plenty of that, too, with cheap but effective makeup.

Somewhere among the 60 square miles of hill country, hippies — one of whom looks like “Refugee”-era Tom Petty — are growing $2 million worth of marijuana plants. After our far-out farmers kill a pair of federal officers looking to make a bust, the government retaliates by crop-dusting the area with a new herbicide. As you’ve guessed long before now, this action has an odd side effect in transforming the druggies into cannibalistic zombies.

In his one and only film, writer/director Charles McCrann (tragically a 9/11 victim) resourcefully takes the lead as Tom Cole, a “forest department” exec who uses a visit to the hills as a good excuse to bring his racist joke-spouting kid brother (Phillip Garfinkel) with him so they can fish; Tom’s wife (Beverly Shapiro) basically invites herself to third-wheel the outing.

Meanwhile, the toxic zombies wreak havoc on local campers, immediately orphaning a teenaged Amy (Judy Grown) and her overalls-wearing, learning-disabled brother (Kevin Hanlon), whose name seems to vacillate between Tommy, Timmy and Jimmy. Tom and company come to the kids’ aid, forming a temporary nuclear family for a fairly tense final stretch that holes them up for part of it, per subgenre rules established by George A. Romero.

Shrewdly crafted, Toxic Zombies was too late to ride the ecological movement of the 1970s and too early for the nuke-fueled zeitgeist ushered by Reagan’s America. Perhaps now, with the undead’s rise at the dawn of this millennium as a cultural phenomenon that still lingers strong, the movie finally can find its proper audience. Aside: Look for a cameo by the largest can of Campbell’s Pork & Beans the screen has dared show. —Rod Lott

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As staged by the New York-based Ravacon Collective, Lake Nowhere replicates the all-but-lost experience of watching horror movies on VHS — in particular, slashers whose three-digit rental counts show in an image quality so degraded, your VCR’s tracking buttons were of little use. It was a magical time; you had to be there.

Like a lo-fi Grindhouse, the film begins with a pair of fake trailers for the giallo Quando Il Fiume Scorra Rosso! (When the River Runs Red!) and the eco-terror/SF hybrid Harvest Man; sandwiched in between is a beer commercial so very ’80s, it’s more convincing than the short on either side.

From there, it’s on to the feature presentation, Welcome to Lake Nowhere. Shot in six days in the tiny town of Edinburg, its setup is practically pulled from a studio template: A group of young men and women go to a cabin for the weekend; regret follows. The only difference is this isn’t made by studio suits for financial gain, but artists for the shared love of being creative; therefore, we get an original take on well-trodden territory.

What that means is in addition to tits, there’s penis.

The “kids,” so to speak, aren’t your standard lineup of brand-name jocks and cheerleaders; they’re the thrift-store hipsters who avoided jocks and cheerleaders. One of them even looks like Doug Kenney’s Stork from Animal House. Together they chop wood, play games, smoke pot, fuck and die, so some things never change.

The death portion comes at the hands and blade of whom the credits call the Masked Maniac. Being fashioned from tree bark, his mask is folk horror-friendly, but his actions may not be as by-the-numbers as your everyday slasher villain, and same goes for your “final girl.” Co-directors Christopher Phelps and Maxim Van Scoy cannily upend expectations in a compact 50 minutes. Within such a short amount a time, Lake Nowhere may be one turn too clever, effectively getting high on its own supply, but at least our host is gracious enough to share a hit. —Rod Lott

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