Aside from the 28 DAYS/WEEKS movies, THE ZOMBIE DIARIES, from co-directors Kevin Gates and Michael Bartlett, is a rare serious British entry in the crowded zombie movie market. It’s a flawed but ambitious no-budget verite chiller underscored by overt references to 21st century fears and tragedies, particularly the Bird Flu virus and, heavy-handedly, the events of September 11th, 2001.
A mysterious zombie-spawning virus engulfs London and, it seems, the whole world. No one knows where it came from, how to stop it, or where the world goes from here on in. The movie unfolds in the form of three video diaries from different stages of the escalating crisis. It opens with a depiction of the initial outbreak, as a city documentary crew travel to a rural town to do a piece on an apparent epidemic and find the place deserted except for the roaming undead. Subsequently, a couple fleeing from London stumble upon the zombies and a group of survivors become trapped by the hostiles on an abandoned farm.
Like this year’s American indie THE SIGNAL, THE ZOMBIE DIAIRIES appropriates the structure of an anthology film, with the same apocalyptic crisis and the same interconnected characters populating all three segregated “diaries”. It is an admirable lo-fi attempt at a sincere, doom-laden zombie movie, with the grim irony and overall bleakness of early Romero tied into a now-overused faux-reality approach that has already been employed for at least one British zombie movie (namely, Andrew Parkinson’s superior, character-based I ZOMBIE CHRONICLES OF PAIN from over a decade ago).
The film particularly, and inevitably, apes THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, complete with characters who keep filming even in the direst of circumstances simply because otherwise we’d be watching a blank screen. Unlike BLAIR, however, this doesn’t attempt to explain how all this shot “footage” was found and who by, and it side-steps its “reality” boundaries to employ an omnipresent, effectively discordant music score and jump-cuts where required.
The film doesn’t have anything of great significance to add to the sub-genre and its ending needed more punch. Where it does succeed is in making its modest on-screen army of zombies genuinely menacing – no mean feat in an over-exposed genre where the undead have often become the brunt of gore-gags. Judicious use of handheld camerawork yields some decent scares involving the zombies looming out of the shadows.
Directors Gates and Bartlett, using this as a calling card, surprise by downplaying the gore (save for the standard entrails-munching set piece) and the usual shoot-em-in-the-head antics in favor of an emphasis on tension and mood. Adequate performances just about sell the encroaching apocalypse, though the inventiveness, wit and raw power of Romero’s movies are largely absent.
-Steven West
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
