The Zombie Diaries (2006)

Wow! Such a good movie.

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

Watching it is like watching the spectacle of a class clown at their best: you laugh at their jokes, instigate their defiance, and "ooooh" when they get in trouble.

Why people are saying that this is a bad film, I have no idea. Yes, it is a low budget British film. Yes, none of the actors are Brad Pitt. But that doesn't make this movie a bad one, because it is not!! I will now take this opportunity to explain why.A lot of films nowadays, mainstream or otherwise, have a specific fantasy to fall back on whenever we watch them. The reason why these films are like this is because it is based on pure FICTION. None of it is real, it is just what the critics and the mainstream suckers want to see (by which, I mean anyone who watches a film purely because it is mainstream and nothing else). The Zombie Diaries, however, even though it is a work of fiction, is based on real life and what real people would've done if a situation like the events of the film ever occurred. You do not need a plot for this, each group of survivors have their own little story to tell, and real life is not a plot that is already written.The quality of the cameras is mediocre, mainly because of the fact that they are using affordable cameras that anybody can use to document their lives or make films. Again, I am moving back to the real life spectacle. The characters are using this chance to show the surviving world what is happening, if anyone else manages to find their camera whilst on scavenging duties; and if the camera still works, they can continue the legacy from there. Not everyone in the entire world has a tripod, or SteadyCam, or a giant crane to capture an overhead shot or establishing shot of their surroundings. The camera would be shaking if the person holding it was running or focusing on something else entirely. Personally, I wouldn't be holding the camera perfectly still if I was scared to death and running for my life from a group of zombies. It's just not natural, and it's just not realistic! Anyone with half a brain can see my point. Realism is the center of 'The Zombie Diaries', not fantasy.Now I move towards the acting. Yes, all the actors are professional, just not well-known. Believe me, I checked. I personally found the acting to be really good, considering what type of film 'The Zombie Diaries' is. There are no over-the-top emotions that I thought needed to be toned down, everything I saw from an acting perspective was believed to be real, and how people reacted to different situations was accurate. Top notch acting for a realistic drama.How people can even think about comparing this movie to 'Diary of the Dead' makes me sick, because they are both completely different films! Yes, 'Diary of the Dead' is a good movie, and it is also shot in a video diary perspective, 'Blair Witch Project' style. It doesn't make it the same movie, just shot in America! 'Diary of the Dead' only focuses on one group of survivors, which are University students and their professor. 'The Zombie Diaries' focuses on three completely different groups that have their own way of surviving. If you still think 'Diary of the Dead' is better, then you should watch the sequel 'Survival of the Dead'. I dare you to say one good word about that film! But, I digress.In conclusion, 'The Zombie Diaries' is the closest thing to reality in a zombie apocalypse that an audience can experience, and it proves that professionalism can appear in the smallest of packages. That is why my final vote on this movie is a very enthusiastic 9.I do welcome any comments that anyone might want to express, but nothing that anybody says can change my opinions on this movie. Please keep this in mind.

Zombie films have been all the rage in the past few years. George Romero has returned to the fold, making new entries in his long-running "living dead" series; different countries have been putting their own invigorating spins on the genre, like Spain's sublime REC. THE ZOMBIE DIARIES is a distinctly British spin on the genre, but sadly it turns out to be an almost worthless exercise in box-ticking that had the potential to be so much more.First off – the false advertising. The DVD box shows a scene of gun-toting survivors battling a huge horde of the undead as London burns. It looks like some big budget mayhem is due, in the same vein as 28 WEEKS LATER. Once you begin watching the film, you quickly realise the budget is in the same region as THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT – i.e. this is a shot on video film with a handful of actors and never more than half a dozen zombies on screen at once. I didn't mind the budget constraints too much, as at least realism is often heightened in such productions.And, indeed, the film starts off on a strong footing. The zombie outbreak is vaguely explained with just the right level of detail, and there's mucho atmosphere building as a quartet of documentary filmmakers find themselves in a seemingly abandoned rural farmhouse. All the locals have vanished, and just what is making that thumping behind the bedroom door? The answer is utterly horrifying and genuinely scary, an exceptional bit of well-directed shock that promises so much more than what comes later. I could even forgive the poor acting.Unfortunately, the film then proceeds to fall apart. Utterly. One of the biggest problems is the stupidity of the script, which is aimless and derivative. For some nonsensical reason, the film cuts between different groups of survivors and we never get to know or care about any of them. Stupid non-linear twists are made which make trying to piece together what's going on even more of a chore, and one that's frankly not worth bothering with. For the rest of the film, it's just seeing people shooting zombies. Oh, and there's a twist in which some of the survivors turn out to be bad eggs themselves – like we haven't seen that one done before.I didn't have a problem with the lack of budget or scope. The special effects are pretty good, even if they have a Halloween-party look to them. The actors are diabolical, but that's a flaw that's easily overlooked. It's the pointless, plot less story that drags this one down, and the need to repeat endless boring "action" sequences. The film should have stuck with the initial characters and perhaps presented an under siege NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD scenario instead – that would have cut down on budget costs and could have been genuinely tense, if derivative. Instead, THE ZOMBIE DIARIES turns out to be one of the most disappointing zombie films in recent history.

I can't give this a negative score, because the opening - the faux news parts - actually scared me. That's not something that happens too often. Unfortunately, thats it for scary parts, as groups of people are introduced, usually without us knowing much about them. The first character set genuinely seemed to be overwhelmed and trying to understand what was going on. The other character sets made zero impression. Oddly enough, sometimes the cameraman inexplicably filmed stuff that was helpful to the film audience, yet remained illogical in-universe. At one point group split up. On seeing the others again, the cameraman starts filming because... er, the film audience needed to be informed about the discovery they made. SPOILER TERRITORY: I can't give the film a positive, because a tacked-on ending segment - which is shown out of chronological order, inexplicably - tries being "edgy" and pushes boundaries that haven't existed since the seventies. Yeah, humans can be horrible, can't they? Newsflash: people have already portrayed rape during films. They did it decades ago, actually. You're not taking risks, you're just being tasteless.

I was expecting an action movie, but this is actually one of those stupid "found footage" movies, where producers pretend that there's a reason for some character to be filming every little argument that goes on between them and their friends. That just makes absolutely no sense at all to me. Why the hell would someone randomly film the countryside from a moving vehicle? Why would you choose to hold a camcorder, rather a rifle, when you're facing off against the legions of hell? I'm just completely baffled.At one point, a character weakly explains, "I'm documenting everything, because this could be important". OK. That makes some minor amount of sense to me. First, this character is part of documentary film crew. Second, the "zombie apocalypse" or whatever has just begun, and any information could actually be somewhat useful. Third, the character seems like a lazy, whiny, useless person who wouldn't be doing anything else, anyway. However, what does he document? He documents his friends bickering. He documents the ground, as he runs. He documents everything *except* useful information.Eventually, the movie abruptly skips ahead a month, with a different group of survivors. They, too, have a useless person who helpfully documents every argument they have. However, he doesn't have the explanation of being part of a documentary film crew. He's just some guy with a camera, who inexplicably records random crap, while not helping out in any way. At this point, I started to lose interest in the movie.Finally, we're introduced to a third group of survivors. You're not going to believe this, but they also have a camera-obsessed member. Who are these people, and where are they coming from? Where are they finding all these cameras? Why do their friends tolerate this behavior? Why aren't they kicked out, when it's obvious that they'd rather stand around, documenting everything, rather than helping out? It's a mystery, and not one that the movie makes any attempt to explain. Anyway, the movie takes a rather strange detour in this story, switching subgenres without much warning. The zombies are nearly forgotten, though they do get a bit of lip service here and there. I won't ruin the twist for you, but it's really not much of a twist, if you're a zombie movie fan. Zombie movies have always been primarily about social dynamics (especially the original Night of the Living Dead and its remake), but the whole "zombie apocalypse" thing seems almost incidental to this movie, like some sort of background noise that could easily have been removed, without changing much of anything.For what it's worth, the zombie effects are pretty tolerable, but almost everything else is terrible. The characters are rock stupid, the dialogue is boring, the acting is generally poor, and the writing is bland. I'm sick of low budget zombie movies where people mindlessly mimic the most basic elements of George Romero's movies, without injecting any creativity or insight of their own. I prefer slow zombies, but does every zombie movie need to have shuffling, mindless undead who chomp on the living? No! Try coming up with your own ideas for once. As much as I dislike the whole "fast zombie" movement, at least they managed to bring some original thinking to their movies. I fail to see why these very fresh zombies would be moving so slowly -- or even why they'd bite the living. It's never explained. It comes across as lazy, unoriginal fanfiction set in the Night of the Living Dead world. That might work for some people, but it doesn't work for me, especially when the rest of the movie is poorly done. I could forgive a bit of unoriginality, if the rest of the movie were worth a damn.