You just can't keep a good zombie franchise down. Forty years after George A Romero reinvigorated the horror genre with his low budget classic Night Of The Living Dead, the sexagenarian godfather of gore returns with the fifth instalment of the blood-soaked franchise.

For Diary Of The Dead, Romero returns to his low budget, guerrilla filmmaking roots, shooting this from the perspective of a group of students who use their camera to document bloody encounters with the flesh-eating denizens.

Romero uses a film within a film (like in Cloverfield) to introduce us to aspiring filmmaking Jason Creed (Close) and his masterpiece, The Death Of Death. Tensions flare when the team hears bewildering news reports about reanimated corpses.

Cramming into an old Winnebago van, the friends drive through the night to reach their loved ones, invariably coming into contact with the undead and other survivors of the deadly plague.

Diary Of The Dead is starved of decent scares. Some of the set pieces are clumsily contrived - one character, incredibly, remains behind in a room while the rest flee to the hills, necessitating a dangerous rescue mission. Special effects are suitably yucky, but without a meaty storyline, the zombies have little to sink their teeth into.

Horror/Thriller. Josh Close, Michelle Morgan, Philip Riccio, Amy Lalonde, Joe Dinicol, Shawn Roberts, Scott Wentworth, Chris Violette, Tatiana Maslany. Director: George A Romero.

RATING: TWO STARS