George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead is his personal fourth spinoff-sequel-retelling-redux of 1969 Night of the Living Dead. Forty years on now, this new no-name-cast feature looks still low budget despite news commentator voices of cronies Quentin Tarantino, Wes Craven, Guillermo del Toro and Stephen King, the latter of whom appears in the director’s Creepshow and Creepshow 2 (script only) assemblages of the Maine author’s tales.

Perhaps for tongue-in-cheek, pre-première premièring at the last hour on Valentine’s Day the night before Lincoln Center’s “Film Comments Selects” final fortnight of the month, Diary is a Living Dead for text-messaging YouTubers. Laying The Blair Witch Project on Redacted and Untraceable, the scriptwriter/director enlarges upon the earlier, seminal work’s purported Vietnam-era critique of war, vigilantism, racism, sexism, updating it with newer, current fears. The thriller is gone, if ever there truly was one: color has replaced b&w, though neither the first nor the last of these ghoul installments is scary or that high on gore. Those who come to this “new version of terror” will do so unaware that, more blatant than before, the message has taken over from the monsters.

Equally unaware -- of the genre in-jokes in their grousing -- under the tutelage of alcoholic professor emeritus Andrew Maxwell (Scott Wentworth) a UPitt cinema-and-semi-lit class is doing a beauty-and-the-mummy thesis project film in the night woods of Romero’s stomping ground of Butler County (actual location is southern Ontario). The kids furnish the traditional mix of personalities whose mettle is tested in turmoil and found true or wanting. Start to finish, in keeping with the media theme, much is voiced over by Debra (Michelle Morgan), who wants to go home cross-state to Scranton and is the plucky girlfriend of Jason “Jay” Creed (Joshua Close), director of this student “The Death of Death.”

A garbled broadcast gives the first inkling of what will flower into Wellesian Hallowe’en War of the Worlds rumor and panic. TV captured but not mainstream aired, the resuscitation of a murdered immigrant family and their biting attacks on police, paramedics and an anchorwoman are unquestioned fact. As throughout the entire ”Dead” franchise, suggestions are shuffled but causes not pinned down, zombie never breathed, and inconsistencies taken in stride. Standing in for whatever historic or modern plague, the pandemic gallops geometrically through, presumably, saliva. Not overpowering, the reborn shuffle slowly and are readily dispatched between the ears by bullets, arrows, axes or poles, without garlic or silver content. Conscience-stricken driver Mary (Tatiana Maslany) dies from a self-inflicted wound yet becomes one, wealthy Ridley (Phillip Riccio) takes forever to change over but in his mummy bandages furnishes the haunted mansion, while others jump off their gurneys in seconds.

Hobgoblin of little minds, consistency is not a strong suit of the genre, and, anyhow, this edition shoots for bigger game. Playful but more thoughtful -- too obviously so -- than most other stalker slashers, it ratchets up its own punditry.

Debra’s end-question aside, whether cruel America is worth saving, the insistent target is the inadequacy of conglomerate circus media. Mainstream things fall apart while the isolated group symbolically RVs across a state/nation with comic touches in a deaf-mute Amish farmer, pragmatic ones in national guardsmen turned “not murderers, just thieves,” and semantic ones in black paramilitaries whose looting is classed as “doing what you gotta do.”

Romero’s Diary was once conceived of as a Web broadcast, and in it bloggers, Webcasters, cellphoners and surveillance cameras are fittingly the new newsgatherers, each beaming its own truth in this “best of times worst of times.” Amidst the white noise of technology, Jason claims that “if it’s not on camera it doesn’t exist” and that he is delivering reality to 72,000 hits in eight minutes and thus to a hypothetical future. But in standing back to camcord rather than acting to save lives, his own included, he inadvertently serves as commentary on media voyeurism and on the uncertainty principle observer as contributing to, even creating, the atrocity he records. The consequent Godlike rush is seductive and addictive, as when Debra and prospective hero Tony Ravello (Shawn Roberts) film not only death rattles but also each other filming the scene.

Quickie references to natural and manmade disasters, and throwaway quips about aliens crossing life-death rather than international boundaries -- regaining self-esteem, the Professor mercifully refrains from quoting Hamlet on that bourn no one crosses--pile up in clumsy emphasis on what we have made of the world. With ample grounds for grievance but also a total lack of compassion, San Antone bubblehead Tracy (Amy Ciupak Lalonde) ups and offs in the Winnebago, sensibly or selfishly leaving to their fates the victims, victimizers and diarists, who are for all purposes indistinguishable from one another.   

(Released by The Weinstein Company and rated “R” for strong horror violence and gore, and pervasive language.)