Movie Info
Movie Name: The Zombie Diaries
Studio: Off World Films
Genre(s): Horror
Release Date(s): October 29, 2006
MPAA Rating: R
So I love what you did with your hair
A plague spreading across the world hits England and a team of reporters out on a story find themselves fighting for survival. As they and other survivors fight the growing plague of zombies, they discover that the undead are not the only horror they will face.
Directed by Kevin Gates and Michael Bartlett, The Zombie Diaries was an independent film which premiered in 2006 but released as part of the London FightFest Film Festival on August 27, 2007.
The movie is shot as a found-footage film much like the bigger budget Diary of the Dead by George R. Romero in 2007. With a much smaller release, it is too bad that this movie didn’t get more credit on that aspect, but despite easy comparisons, this film isn’t very good.
Can I have more intestines please?
I’ve never been a fan of this style of film even when the groundbreaking Blair Witch Project really popularized it. The shooting style limits what can be shown which is usually used as a budgetary means to avoid special effects in many films like this. The camera is rarely held steady and much of this movie had night scenes which are hard to watch and follow.
The zombies in this film are possibly the lazies zombies I have ever scene. Obviously movies like 28 Days Later and the remake of Dawn of the Dead upped the ante by having running zombies, but these zombies seem barely mobile. The “survivors” can pretty much walk away from the danger.
Heads up, zombie dude!
With zombies being a minimal (if that) threat to the survivors, they needed to invent an enemy with a couple of crazies to pick off the survivors. When zombies are this slow and unthreatening, I always wonder why people don’t just take a crowbar and start bashing their heads in to thin the herds…Instead, they keep shooting and acting like it is the biggest deal in the world. The zombies aren’t very threatening…just kill them and be done with the zombie plague!
With uninteresting zombies, the characters must be really interesting. The Zombie Diaries characters aren’t very distinguishable. The non-linear style doesn’t help with the characterizations and when that is combined with shaky camera movement, I found I didn’t really associate with any of the characters…therefore not caring if they died.
The Zombie Diaries wasn’t very interesting or good. Just attaching “zombie” to a movie isn’t good enough for me to make it interesting. The Zombie Diaries was followed by a sequel in 2011 called World of the Dead: The Zombie Diaries 2.
