DVD Review: Zombie Diaries
The Zombie Diaries (2006)
Studio: Dimension Extreme
DVD Release Date: November 18, 2008
Directed By: Michael Bartlett & Kevin Gates
Cast: Russell Jones, Craig Stovin, Jonnie Hurn, James Fisher, Anna Blades, Imogen Church, Kyle Sparks
Brutal As Hell Rating: 1½ out of 5 stars
Review By: Benjamin Bussey
Something strange is going on in the world. A virus, about which little is known, is said to be growing at an alarming rate. The public, by and large numb to such reports after years of mad cow disease, meningitis and avian flu scares, seems to be taking it in their stride, and the government does not appear to be taking it too seriously. But when it hits, it hits big time – and the only option available to those lucky enough to escape infection is to seek solace in the countryside, and do all they can to stay alive.
And from that moment on, kiss all interest in The Zombie Diaries goodbye. What starts out promising to be an interesting new take on the living dead degenerates almost immediately into yet another by-the-numbers survival story; and while the characters struggle to maintain day-to-day existence, the viewer will most likely struggle to give a damn.
It is fascinating how, with The Blair Witch Project having happened almost a decade ago, suddenly in 2008 a rash of camcorder horror movies pop up all over the world at once; fascinating also how, Cloverfield aside, all these movies were about zombies. In such a climate, The Zombie Diaries would seem doomed to suffer by comparison – though to be blunt, to my mind it’s no more dull than Romero’s heart-breakingly lazy Diary of the Dead. Like Romero’s lax effort, Zombie Diaries seems to rely almost entirely on the gimmick of first-person perspective to make it stand apart, in the meantime not attempting to bring anything new to the table in terms of plot or character. While ‘REC’ and Cloverfield got away with their lack of narrative innovation by keeping the action thick and fast with a near-real time structure, Zombie Diaries crawls by at a pace that even the living dead would consider a bit slow, making its eighty minutes feel more like three hours. It certainly wasn’t a bad idea to tell the story from three different perspectives, through three different video diaries, and finally bringing all three stories together. But nowhere amongst the three stories is an endearing character to be found.
For here’s the big problem with trying to maintain verisimilitude (oh, how I have longed to use that word in a sentence without it seeming gratuitous): you’d better make damn sure that your script and your actors are up to the task. This is especially true if you’re aiming to create horror by maintaining tension, with only the minimum of bloodshed and monster action. The Zombie Diaries falls way, way short of the mark in this regard. The few zombie sequences are handled reasonably well, with perfectly acceptable make-up effects, but the movie’s ultra-low budget origins are completely betrayed by a slew of ham-fisted amateur performances, not one of which comes close to convincing.
In a marketplace saturated with the living dead, not to mention an overabundance of first-person DV movies, The Zombie Diaries needed to pull something pretty special out of its hat in order to stand apart. Unfortunately, it’s just another tepid piece of been-there, done-that mediocrity. It saddens me to have to speak this way of a low-budget British horror film; being British myself, I’m always keen to see more of those. But if the UK’s indie horror films hope to compete with international fare, they need to put in a hell of a lot more effort than was put into The Zombie Diaries. What a shame.
