The Zombie Diaries (2006) by Michael G. Bartlett and Kevin Gates


Director: Michael G. Bartlett, Kevin Gates
Year: 2006
Country: United Kingdom
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Zombie

Plot:
With the world ravaged by a deadly virus, a group of filmmakers out in the British countryside doing a story on the events finds a small group of survivors and joins up to stay alive but soon finds a far more dangerous threat than the zombies may be among them forcing them to survive together.

Review:

Overall this one wasn't that great of an effort but does have some positives. One of the film's main issues is the fact that there are just so few zombie attacks throughout here that it really drags and lets itself go into spells of extremely bland and dull moments for way too much of the running time. The fact that this one takes a while to get to the village for the first attack is a real shame, and with the seemingly endless wandering around in the car or getting instructions for their trip that it really tends to go from extremes bouncing around in the plot. Likewise, that gets enhanced later on with the constant jumping around in terms of the timeline that this supposedly covers with it never really making any kind of sense what's going on with the film going on through weeks or months at a time before there's anything of note involving them encountering the creatures as the preference on defense and avoidance gives this one the feeling of pure aimlessness as it doesn't really follow through any kind of set patterns in what's going on as it just goes from one piece to another without really doing much of any kind of connection around these events.

That also goes hand-in-in-hand with the film's biggest flaw which is the utterly deplorable and inexcusably bad found-footage angle here which just looks completely amateurish and just dreadful here with this one filling in just about every single negative factor hurled at the genre in one place. The jerkiness of the camera is non-stop making this one such a struggle to even make out what's happening in the regular scenes but the action scenes are truly a lost cause here not only being so haphazardly jerking around in the way they're shot as to be headache-inducing but are oftentimes out-of-focus so nothing is effectively captured or shown, the tracking on the camera makes the picture blurry or not even comprehensible at times and there's nothing more infuriating about this one than being in the middle of a zombie attack that's been edited into indecipherability by the inabilities placed into the finished film by its chosen method of production.

As well, the concepts' other underlying flaw in this one being filled with scenes that shouldn't be filmed as trying to preserve a camera at that time instead of themselves really undermines a lot of what's happening here, and these here are what really hold this one down considerably. The fact that the zombies are considered threats and have plenty of continuous action scenes here requiring lots of action to put them down is a big deal of compensation, as there's a lot to like that way with the lumbering creatures closing in on them in some decent action scenes. The quantity is enough to raise it, but not enough to overcome the flaws.


Overview: */5
A troublesome and really weak zombie effort, this was a rather disappointing feature that had some positive points but gets wiped out by the slew of negatives here that hold it back. This is mainly just for the most ardent found-footage fanatics or zombie aficionadoes as the majority of the others out there should heed caution for better genre efforts instead.

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