Britain. Now, give or take a few years. A mysterious virus begins to spread around the world. Though very little is known about the symptoms of the virus or its origins, various governments issue quarantines and proclamations about the seriousness of the epidemic. The 24-hour news channels take to the streets of England, asking the average citizen: is the government doing enough to protect its citizens? What will you do when the virus comes to Britain? And what exactly does the virus do?
Of course the virus causes the dead to shuffle about the countryside, feasting on the flesh of the living. This is a movie with the word “zombie” in the title, after all. And if the setup seems a tad familiar, it should — this “scientific” spin on the zombie story has been the standard since 28 Days Later came on the scene. Previously zombies were resurrected by means of voodoo magic or demonic possession or even radioactive comet dust, but those things have been supplanted by the terrifyingly invisible and real-life-parallel-having threat of the viral infection. Personally I prefer the wild-eyed warning shrieks of a voodoo priestess to the fast-cut reveals of white linen surgical face masks worn on city streets, but I’m an old-fashioned zombie fan. What can I say?
The Zombie Diaries is told in three related segments, each from the perspective of a different hardy soul who, from behind the lens of a handheld camera, documents a world (or rather, an English countryside) overrun by the undead. The first segment follows a roving news crew during its investigation of the spread of the virus. The following two segments have even more doubtful excuses for the presence of a camera during this de facto apocalypse, but without these rationalizations there would be no movie — and the audience might have been better off. The opening segment takes its time in laying the groundwork for a thoughtful and gritty piece of social paranoia, but the subsequent bloodbath — while full of the lusty chomping and staccato gun battles that zombie aficionados crave — does little to fulfill the early promise of a thinking man’s zombie movie.
The film’s central premise — that three different people embroiled in a zombie cataclysm would spend time documenting it with video cameras — doesn’t help matters. While it may have seemed to the film’s producers like a clever workaround to some of the typical weaknesses of a low-budget production (limited access to equipment and actors), it ends up feeling like just that — a workaround that hinders the narrative instead of helping it. (We’ll just set aside the fact that any sane person would be too busy running like hell to be bothered with a camera.)
That the three segments intertwine at points is mildly intriguing, but Pulp Fiction this ain’t. A more straightforward three-act script with the same set of characters might technically have been harder to produce, but from a storytelling point of view it would probably have been easier to pull off. That I haven’t bothered to include more of a plot synopsis should be some indication of just how muddled things get when you ask your audience to jump between sets of characters every half-hour. Hiding one of the characters behind the lens of the camera doesn’t help either. I kept asking myself, “whose eyes am I looking through now?” The action and dialogue should have given me some clues, but I was repeatedly frustrated and eventually gave myself over to the idea that a bit of post-apocalyptic navel-gazing and some brutal zombie carnage was about the best I could expect from this picture.
Luckily for me, brutal zombie carnage is where The Zombie Diaries really shines. As murky as that handycam video footage may be, it does an excellent job of transforming low-budget gore effects into believable horror flick butchery. The zombies are plentiful and the producers are attuned to the reason that people flock to zombie flicks — to see little bits of indistinct flesh go sploot! as the undead take repeated shots to the noggin.
This review is a rather belated entry in the 2007 B-Masters Cabal Month of the Living Dead Roundtable.
