The zombies may be dead but George Romero's taste for social commentary certainly isn't in Diary of the Dead, the latest instalment in his long-running walking corpse series. Forty years after the Pittsburgh filmmaker unleashed the modern zombie movie in Night of the Living Dead, he returns to dissect our media-saturated culture as it heads down the YouTube. Josh Close stars as Jason, a student filmmaker who copes with the zombie apocalypse by shooting it on his camcorder and uploading the footage to the Internet. Think Cloverfield... with zombies.

While Night, Dawn, Day and Land of the Dead were loosely chronological, Diary offers a fresh founding myth. Taking us back to "the night when everything changed", Romero shoots the action through Josh's always-on camcorder and gives us a victim's view of the rolling zombie apocalypse. Josh reckons he's countering the mainstream media's cover-up of the disaster. But as girlfriend Debra (Michelle Morgan) argues, having his eye clamped to the viewfinder while the world ends actually makes him as heartless as the zombies he's filming.

"FLASHES OF GHOULISH INSPIRATION"

Unlike his endless imitators, Romero knows how to setup a zombie attack and Diary is effortlessly thrilling in its vision of social collapse. Committed deadheads will lap up the flashes of ghoulish inspiration including a swimming pool full of living dead "goldfish" and a zombie getting its brains fried by an E.R. defibrillator. Yet there are an abundance of rough edges and some embarrassingly ropey scenes, none of which are helped by a no-name cast who struggle to make their identikit characters distinctive (the one exception is Scott Wentworth's heavy-drinking film studies professor who prefers a bow and arrow over a gun because "it seems friendlier somehow"). Worse still, with low-budget Brit flick The Zombie Diaries already trying out the subjective camcorder approach, Romero's in danger of looking like he's slavishly following the zombie pack.

Diary Of The Dead is out in the UK on 7th March 2008.