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

Get it at Amazon.