Review: The Zombie Diaries

It would seem that diaries are popular things these days. Last week I reviewed George A.Romero’s latest zombie film, “Diary of the Dead”, and this week I’m following it up with a review of the British equivalent – “The Zombie Diaries”.

This review has minor spoilers in it, so please govern yourself accordingly.

The Zombie Diaries is a film by first time British directors Michael Bartlett and Kevin Gates, that chronicles the outbreak and rapid spread of a virus – “not unlike the bird flu” – as it propagates across the United Kingdom and the world. This movie is really only similar to Romero’s film in a couple of ways. The first of course is the title, but while Romero’s “diary” followed a small group of characters in their quest to get home, The Zombie Diaries has a wider scope and offers the audience a greater overall picture of the catastrophe.

The other similarity is the handheld filming style used by both movies. I must admit it’s never been my favourite filmmaking method, but I can live with it in the right circumstances. It works pretty well in this movie as it did in Romero’s film.

The Zombie Diaries is broken out into three main sections – The Outbreak, The Scavengers, and The Survivors. Each section involves a different group of characters, but the filmmakers do a great job of tying them together in the end. In fact, the story essentially follows the travels of the camera itself as it’s picked up by a variety of people. The audience is seeing what it happens to film during its journey.

This is one of the bleaker zombie films I’ve seen, which I thought worked really well. Very little “good” happens to anyone in the film, and it was interesting to see living characters that were far more evil than any of the walking dead. Most zombie films simply pit the living against the undead in a war of survival, with no further character development than that. Here we’ve also got living characters taking advantage of the situation in unique and disgusting ways. I saw it as a scathing commentary on the state of humanity and could appreciate this kind of message in a move that fits into a normally one-dimensional genre.

This movie was much scarier than Romero’s Diary. I nearly crapped my pants a couple of times during the film and actually yelled “holy shit, get outta there!” once. I also found the writing superior as we didn’t have to listen to characters argue about putting the camera down and helping. There was a little of this, but they got it out of the way in the first 15 minutes and simply accepted the fact that a camera was on the rest of the time.

If you can only watch one zombie movie with the word diary in the title, this should be it. “The Zombie Diaries” is superior to “Diary of the Dead” in nearly every way and is one of the better zombie films I’ve seen in a while. I recommend you check it out.

On the Zombie Scale, I give The Zombie Diaries a Zombie Crisis.