Movie Review - The Zombie Diaries

This is a very cheap looking movie with a cast of unknowns (apart from 1 chap soap fans might recognise as being former Eastenders character Dr Legg, Leonard Fenton in his blink and you'll miss it role in the newsroom fairly near the start of the movie), its a British movie with a 1st time director (which is painfully obvious from the disjointed way the various sections of the movie are cut, its probably done to try to seem clever & thoughtful when its merely annoying & seriously disjointed).

The film is presented by way of various video camera diaries giving the director an excuse to shoot a lot of handheld camera work which is annoying and difficult to watch and follow, this kind of thing has been very en vogue since The Blair Witch Project and this movie is just as bad and annoying as that was.

The film opens with some soldiers in non-matching uniforms (someone obviously doesn't know what the word Uniform means then? Get a dictionary) showing the low budget, it obviously didn't allow for SUSAT's either which are standard issue on all British Army rifles, only the really poor RAF use iron sights. Theres also the huge goof of the 2 scientists who aern't wearing filter canisters on their respirators so they'd be killed by what they'd hoped to avoid breathing in.

During the opening titles we're introduced to the idea of a spreading disease gradually starting to get bad. Diary 1 - The Outbreak, we follow the news story of the disease as it grows increasing worse with interviews asking public opinions. We're also introduced to our 1st group of people, a group of 4 people on a news crew covering the story of the disease. The crew are sent out of London into the country to film a news piece and their journey is recorded for a documentary the cameraman is hoping to make about the disease.

Even though the disease is in its early stages we encounter the paranoia (listen to the news piece that says infected school children will be quaratined together, its almost like a Guantanmo Bay for kids the way they talk about it) in the form of an exodus of traffic as people flee the city (obviously aware any infection will spread quickly in a densly populated place like London) meaning their journey takes them much longer than expected but they do arrive at the farm where they were due to film but find no-one home.

Their car breaks down and the local village is in the middle of nowhere forcing them to return the farm where they break in to seek shelter, there we face the breakdown in civilization as the phone lines die then the power goes out. It is then the horror angle kicks in with noises from upstairs in what they had thought to be a previously empty house, the effects are good but the scare is well placed if not very scary.

There is a lot of annoying hand held camera filmed on the run but also in near complete darkness which I can never see the point of, the zombies are revealed and we're left fleeing with them as the group eventually make a fire in a field & contemplate their next move.

Diary 2 - The Scavengers (One Month Later), this follows a completely different group of 3 people foraging for supplies and parts for their radio which they do manage to fix and hear a message but they are too far away to hear what is being said clearly.

Diary 3 - The Survivors, this introduces us to yet another group living in a farmhouse fighting off zombies who stray onto their area. They burn bodies to avoid infection and always sterilize themselves after any combat with zombies. This group have members out foraging for supplies as well and they hear a message on their radio which is too far away for them to hear. (I guess we are supposed to assume they have heard the members of group 2)

We see how what initially seems to be a tightly knit group of rational people who are living well as a group gradually breaks down as tempers flare with lack of sleep. The film gets very disjointed in this section as we cut between shots of group 2 and group 3 so it becomes very hard to know exactly who you are watching and from which viewpoint.

We cut back to group 2 who are still trying to make contact on their radio and after one of the men is bitten they are involved in a car crash (we never see what caused it) and the woman in their group is injured and left in the car and eaten by the zombies (I assume the accident was related to them in some way but it is never shown or explained making this section seem even more badly disjointed in its editing).

The other 2 men flee from the car through the forest, the injured man dies of his wounds and his friend shoots him to make sure he doesn't become a zombie. The last man has an odd journey in the dark (with far too much hand held camera filmed in near complete darkness) and almost survives to reach group 3 who sadly mistakenly kill him as a zombie.

We return to group 3 and the farm house and one of their members is bitten & killed and 1 member Goke who just seems to go insane (they discover he was sexually abusing a zombie for his own perverse pleasure). Eventually the farm is over run by sheer numbers of zombies but it doesn't help that Goke seems to go even more mad and starts killing the rest of the group. This would have made a logical end to the movie but there is a final section titled "One Month Earlier" where we return to the news crew.

We discover they met Goke and Amine (who got bitten and died after a foraging trip, probably what sent Goke over the edge at the farmhouse) who spend a night with them but they discover Amine torturing someone (its hard to tell if he's a zombie or not) and the news crew are hunted by Goke & Amine who kill all but one woman who you later realise is the zombie Goke had been sexually abusing. The end of the movie shows you the soldiers at the start storming a farm and finding a lone survivor of group 3.

Its low budget, its handheld camera work is awful as are the pitch black scenes. Probably the worst thing about it is its non-linear awful editing to seem arty and thoughtful but it just renders it very annoying. I'd only recommend it if you were renting it.