Trailer Time: George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead

I just finished watching the new trailer for Diary of the Dead, and my first impression is that Romero has bad timing. You see, Diary of the Dead appears to be identical to the much-anticipated Cloverfield, but with zombies instead of a Godzilla-esque monster. Diary may well turn out to be a great Romero film, but it's destined to be labeled as a Cloverfield ripoff, or at least a cash-in on Cloverfield's inevitable success at the box office. Poor Romero, it never seems to all come together for him these days.

The movie itself looks just fine. It's a first-person, ground-level video document of a zombie outbreak. There is screaming, zombies, blood, and a whole lotta shaky-cam. I'll see it because I love zombies, and no one does zombies better than Romero. But if I've already seen Cloverfield by that time, it will hard to suppress the feeling that I've seen this all before. And that's too bad.