Movie Review - The Zombie Diaries

Well, I finally saw the movie The Zombie Diaries yesterday. The British newspaper The Guardian rated it as "one of the best of the genre", but before I give you my review, allow me to state that this is a spoiler alert.

Spoiler alert!





Spoiler alert!





You have been warned that "Here There Be Spoilers".






In my not so humble opinion this movie is far from "the best of the genre". In fact, the movie is choppy, poorly filmed, often confusing, and misdirected into what can, by the end, be considered a sadomasochistic exercise that wasted the viewer's valuable time. It is put together as a set of poorly- and confusingly-related video diaries which appear to have been filmed by an amateur cameraman attempting to splice together another Blair Witch Project. In many cases the film so closely resembles BWP that it is obvious that the director was extremely heavily influenced by that film (not that I cared much for BWP either).

The film begins with a brief montage of a military platoon cordoning off and clearing the outbuildings of a farm. A pair of guys in biological protection suits examine a body on the side of the road and remove something from it. The film then switches to 12 hours earlier and follows the apparent outbreak of some kind of viral plague in China and a TV film crew as they head out of London to visit a farm where the farmer has apparently been forced to slaughter his chickens and has lost his livelihood. Leaving London, one of the lead male characters is informed by his producer that something appears to have happened in New York City, but he cannot quite determine what yet. As the crew arrives at the farm they find it apparently deserted, but their car breaks down as they attempt to leave and, of course, the two female characters and the cameraman wander off to the also-apparently deserted village nearby in search of help as their cell phones are not working. Shortly thereafter they return to the farm where the other male character receives a phone call (Huh, what? The phones weren't working just a short time ago at the farm, right?) stating that something has happened in London, 3/4ths of the city have been blocked off, and the hospitals are filling with victims of the virus.

The crew breaks into the farmhouse where they find the body of the dead farmer and are attacked by his apparently zombified wife or daughter. They then return to the village where they encounter and escape several more zombies.

The film then switches to a month later where several survivors are on the road attempting to retrieve supplies. The cameraman is apparently the only survivor of the earlier TV crew. This group narrowly escapes another group of zombies (these are the slow kind) outside a food store, and return to their sanctuary. There is a choppy nighttime scene, intended to be using night vision cameras, as the survivors fight off a group of zombies attacking them across an open field. The survivors, instead of fighting from a fortified position, engage the zombies with their guns, at night, in the open field, with flashlights illuminating the key figures (can we say let's destroy one's night vision), and some of the fighting gets within hand-to-hand range.

As I recall, because at this point I'd probably had one beer too many which is the only way I managed to watch this entire piece of crap, the film switches again. This time, we have the same, sort of, group of survivors with one or two new members. Several of them are again on the road while one of their leaders has gone off by himself. The group is hunting supplies on foot, find a body, check it (but not thoroughly enough), and declare the thing dead. As they move on they are attacked by the zombie and one of them is bitten. They jump in their vehicle and attempt to escape, but run into another group of zombies and have an accident. One of the female characters is knocked unconscious and the three men with her, one of whom is bitten remember, leave her behind in the car where she is eaten alive. On foot, the men attempt to escape through the woods, but the injured man is unable to go on and they kill him as he sickens further (as they should have earlier). The survivors manage to make it back to their camp where there's a confrontation, shot at night using night vision, between the leaders.

The next morning, two of the group move out to investigate the far side of the forest that the zombies have been coming from (crossing that open field mentioned before). Here they find the deserted farm from earlier in the movie (surprise!) and move in to investigate. They find one of the female TV reporters from the earlier video diary, naked, zombified, and tied spread-eagle in a stall inside the barn (you can guess what she was being used for).

From this point on the film switches back to a short segment of two, apparently Middle Eastern, men who joined the group a short while before. There is a segment where one of the men is apparently torturing a zombie by cutting off his finger joints one by one which was filmed by the cameraman earlier. Discovered, the villains set about killing the male survivors and tying up the females for their own private usage.

By this time I am thoroughly hammered, not to mention extremely tired of this pile of crap so I'll spare you the final details. Let's just say that no one wins in the end.

Overall, this is a poor film, hardly among "the best in the genre" unless one completely fails to understand the zombie genre in the first place (which The Guardian's reviewer apparently did). It is badly-scripted, horribly acted, shabbily shot, and has a plot line so inconceivably imagined it boggles the mind how it ever managed to make it to DVD though, luckily, it was never shown in US theaters as near as I can tell. Oh, and the DVD cover shot which shows zombies wandering through London near Big Ben? It's never even seen in the movie. Even the movie Lifeforce had the decency to show us a few London locations being overrun by the alien vampires.

Two big thumb's down on The Zombie Diaries. At $7.50 that's 3 less beers I could have had this week (hmmm, a rating system based on the number of beers the movie cost me? That might just work... - a 3 beer movie (meaning you'd better have 3 beers in you before watching it)?).

More On Horror Writing

I went over and read the blog post that the AW poster referred to yesterday and, quite frankly, I don't know precisely what the guy (Robert Dunbar) is bitching about. Maybe I'm outing him here, but he seems to be saying that horror writing should aspire to more literary traditions, but he makes a point of stating that his last book "ate" his life with TV and radio show interviews, readings, and more.

He does make a point of stating that he believes many horror writers are aiming at the gutter, what he calls "vampire bodice rippers, torture porn, and zombie sitcoms" and that he believes the critics of his book probably thought they were picking up a more traditional sort of horror novel and then found something completely different.

Now, I haven't read Dunbar's book, but it sounds interesting, being based on the legends of the Jersey Devil, but if he's being successful, and he obviously is, I don't see the need for him to bitch overly much. It's a little like the pot calling the kettle black. His main point seems to be that the vampire bodice rippers, torture porn, and zombie sitcoms are bringing literate works like his own and the entire genre down into a "gutter" level where he gets no respect.

Dude, stop being so full of yourself.

Horror should be fun, first and foremost. People like to be scared. Yeah, some authors have gotten rich writing at a particular level (Dunbar sees it as YA at best), but so what? They're not taking food from your plate or money out of your pocket so far as I can see. Who really cares if a lot of people out there are trying to write like Stephanie Meyers, Laurell Hamilton, or Max Brooks? Those people, by and large, are going to fall by the wayside with the next wave of whatever that occurs when someone produces a really good horror novel that finally gets published (I'd bet it's going to be someone here, eventually).

The real beef seems to be that of "literate" horror vs "YA" horror.

Well, to be honest, that's a false argument. All horror is, to some extent, YA by its very nature. People love to be scared. They love to feel like the little kid scared of what's under the bed or hiding in the closet or opening the attic door. It does not require great "literatary" ability to write a horror novel. That's been well-proven by the current wave of popularity of "vampire bodice rippers". Nobody's going to say that Stephanie Meyers is a great writer, but guess what - she sells books! Nobody's going to say that World War Z is the Frankenstein of its day, but guess what - I liked it!

It's not about literature, it's about entertainment.

Entertainment sells books and that's the bottom line with publishers and authors. That's the way publishers make their living and that's the way authors get paid.

It's not about literature, it's about entertainment.

My books aren't going to receive any awards for their literary contributions to society, but I hope, one day, to sell a few books and get paid. That's my bottom line. Getting paid means I have to entertain and in order to entertain I have to tell a ripping good story that not only catches a reader's imagination, it must first go through a whole series of agents, editors, and publishers before those readers will ever even see it.

So, if you don't like a particular book or a series or even a particular author, it seems to me that rather than bitching about the genre you write in and despairing about its literary value you might try upholding and motivating new authors in the genre to do the best they can and get themselves published. Nobody's holding anyone hostage to any genre. If you don't like the genre you're writing in, get out. Stop writing or try telling a different type of story.

As I said yesterday, it is within the capability of anyone writing today to produce a work that has the potential to change an entire genre.

All you have to do is stop bitching about everybody else and do it.