Take a note, I love zombies.  I love zombie movies, I love zombie literature.  There is something about these apocalyptic tales that grab me.  I love it when the dead come back for no known reason.  I love it when there is a reason, be it a virus, magic, or some demon affiliation.  These zombie vehicles don’t have to make sense for me to enjoy them, they don’t have to be too terribly logical, and if they have no social commentary, that’s fine with me as well.  I’m all for fun.  I’ll only ask that these living dead movies and stories be entertaining.

The very first “diary entry” of The Zombie Diaries, entitled “Outbreak”, had me pumped up and primed.  It actually had me on the edge of my seat, biting my fingernails.  Then it went into the second entry, “Scavengers”, and it was downhill from there.  No tension.  No scary.  No overall good to recommend it.  It was released by Dimension Extreme, and somewhere along the way they also forgot to include the “extreme”.

A virus has spread across Asia, and the good people of good ol’ London, England, think they are safe until New York reports an outbreak of the flu-like virus.  It’s then they know this virus is global, and soon there are confirmed cases in England.  It’s not long before London is under quarantine, and a lot of the small, bucolic, villages are ghost towns.  At least that’s what confronts a documentary crew as they travel for an interview.  Cell phones stop working, and the power is out, and they find themselves trapped in a farmhouse.  Then they discover the farmhouse they thought empty, ain’t so empty.  Plus there are some zombies flocking the fields.  There are two other groups of survivors, each trying to survive the downfall of civilization by scavenging and shooting anything that shambles and shuffles.  By the end of the movie, the three groups’ stories interconnect.  By then, I didn’t care.

That first group, the documentary team, their story felt right.  I wanted to follow that group.  Each group has a video camera to record events, and in this YouTube society of ours it’s not hard to imagine a flood of zombie clips hitting the ‘net if the living dead guts were to ever really hit the fan.  But in this movie it just seems stupid.  To borrow a quick line from Monty Python:  “Silly.”  The acting from the majority of the cast is atrocious, and after a killer opening the rest of the movie is flat and uninspired.  The attempts are made to be shocking, but they go nowhere.  Some (turgid) torture, some allusions to necrophilia.  If you’re a Brian Keene fan, you’ve been there, you’ve done that, and you’ve had a much better time.

On the plus side, other than those first few minutes, the box art for the DVD is nice. Actually it looks like it came from a different movie. Quite possibly a good one. I wish I had seen that one.

1.5 out of 5
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