The Zombie Diaries (2006)

Here's an excerpt from The Zombie Diaries:

"Dear Diary: yesterday, as I was munching on some corpses with Edward, he gave me a look that sent a shiver down my collapsed spine.  I don't know if he had just bitten too hard into a femur bone or what, but I can't get that look out of my barely functioning cerebral cortex.  What would be the appropriate moan for a situation like that?  I thought maybe I could end high, like: "UuuuuhhhhAH?" but I thought that it would sound more like a question, like, "can I have a bite of that leg?" and that's  NOT what I want to say to him.  Oh, Diary, what am I going to do?"

Ok, so The Zombie Diaries is not a film about a teenage zombie treading adolescent waters (though I do hold the copyright to that idea), but it's also not a British rip-off of Diary of the Dead, as some may try to label it. They do share some similarities, in particular the word "diary" and the en vogue, subjective video camera style used to record a "real-life situation", however The Zombie Diaries has a documentary team making a deliberate film about the outbreak, while Diary of the Dead has a student filmmaker suddenly decide to make a documentary once faced with zombies.  Another similarity is that both films were released onto DVD by Dimension Extreme, now the de facto home for subjective-style zombie films.

However, there are differences between the two. Writer/director/editors Michael Bartlett and Kevin Gates shot The Zombie Diaries before Diary of the Dead, striking first blood, so to speak.  Diaries also has the distinction of not being a shit effort from a master of the horror genre (no offense, George) and therefore doesn't have to live up to a catalogue of past brilliance, and Diaries uses its low budget more imaginatively while keeping the story to a quick pace. The pace is so quick, in fact, you do need to pay close attention as the film cuts between its three stories, or "diaries", and a fourth "present day" bookend of a military unit.

Each diary — the first being a documentary crew shooting at the start of the British outbreak, the second being a married couple and a another man recording their searches for supplies as they travel through towns by car, and the third being a group of survivors holed up in a farmhouse as a former med student documents their attempts to make the area safe — are told with utter realism, with the survivors forced to kill friends or strangers while dealing with loss, uncertainty, and the reality that not all the danger comes from the zombies that surround them. Aiding each scenario is solid, realistic dialogue bereft of contrived character mannerisms, the opposite of Diary of the Dead.

OK, go pick up the apple and we'll go again!

The camerawork is well done, and, as a bonus, won't make you want to throw up.  Instead, the subjective camera work does what's supposed to - make it look like real footage and not move up and down and left and right in a falsely random way - and therefore doesn't have to look wonderfully planned and composed.  In fact, the subjective camera is used so well, that when they break to planned shots, as they do when the married couple is attacked and the third member of their party drops the camera to beat up on a zombie, it's surprising to see a cut to a close-up of the zombie being beaten.  Is another zombie picking up the camera?  Did they go back and shoot it after the fact and then cut it in?

Hey, could you cheat out?  Your shoulder's blocking the shot!

But these moments are rare and few, and ultimately, The Zombie Diaries is an effective zombie film whose intentions are pure: show what it might really be like to try and survive a zombie outbreak.  The result may not be exactly "dark, uncompromising, and frighteningly real" as the poster claims, but it's damn close.