Romero Fails to Live Up to His Own Genius

George Romero, progenitor of the Dead series has, in very few ways, failed to live up to those famous movies.  I sat down and viewed a recent Romero film, Bruiser, which he also wrote.  While the direction of the film was good, the storyline was not.  Couple Bruiser with his most recent attempt at a zombie movie, Diary of the Dead, and one has to wonder what happened to such a creative genius.  Could it be that he faltered under his own genius or is it the fact that he’s given up?  I go with the former; the latter seems rather pretentious because he created a genre that’s at times hard to duplicate.  I find it rather difficult to think someone gave up on his craft.  After all, Ernest Hemingway collapsed under his weight as a literary mastermind so it’s not uncommon in the literary business.  The chilling suspense and the action of his Dead movies are far from a movie like Monkey Shines or Bruiser where the storyline is often convuluted with watered down themes that fail to make the viewer cheer for the protagonist.  Rather, his latest string of films, including Diary of the Dead, fail to make viewers understand the deeper meaning of conflict as expressed in his Dead movies.  Don’t get me wrong, I still love Romero and his previous works, but in an age where writers are resorting to cliche and generic prose…Romero is no different.