Post by slayrrr666 on Oct 29, 2010 10:31:48 GMT -5
"Diary of the Dead" is a seemingly decent-if-unspectacular entry.
**SPOILERS**
Making a student film, Debra Moynihan, (Michelle Morgan) Jason Creed, (Joshua Close) Tony Ravello, (Shawn Roberts) Tracy Thurman, (Amy Ciupak Lalonde) Elliot Stone, (Joe Dinicol) Andrew Maxwell, (Scott Wentworth) Gordo Thorsen, (Chris Violette) and Mary Dexter, (Tatiana Maslany) find that a recent virus outbreak ruins their filming. Attempting to flee back to safety, they manage to run across a never-ending supply of zombies in their path, eventually claiming some of their lives. Realizing that their encounters can lead them into offering a better variety for reporting the truth, as they find the news outlets spinning the events into a positive spin on the whole event, and knowing better than the trust what they're saying, attempt to capture everything to allow others a chance at survival while they also try to out-survive the ravenous, flesh-eating zombies after them.
The Good News: There wasn't a whole lot of good points in this one. The fact that it manages to effectively capture the feeling and sense of dread and the apocalypse is really great. The fact that there's a scant amount of survivors, and almost all of the encounters involve bumping into zombies, which is what's fun about them and also manages, along with the various news-breaks inserted into the whole affair, which give the impression even more and make up those feelings quite effectively. The zombie encounters are also a lot of fun at times, with a couple of nice attack sequences that are a lot of fun and definitely more fun than they should've been. The hospital scene is rather good, with the first examples of what's going to happen later and a couple of great gags. There's also a rather nice encounter within the farmhouse that serves it well, and the big scene in the military safe-house is just all sorts of fun. From the reanimation of friends to some big confrontations at the end with the corpses and a stellar location that gets some nice gags in because of it. That's the best part of it, since the film has a lot of potential places to work in some nice gags and to be able to do so because of a fine location as the house at the end is a good choice. The zombies themselves don't look too bad, with a solid mixture between the just-died look with the dead-for-a-while style, and with their appearance and all, they score nicely in here. The last plus here is the fact that there's some nice gore involved. There's some nice bites, a stomach bitten open, a decapitation, a slew of impressive, messy gunshot wounds and a wicked one where a scythe is impaled through a living head to impale one on the head behind them. It's a lot of fun, and all these here make the film enjoyable.
The Bad News: There was a couple flaws to this one that hold it down somewhat. One of the first is that there's the tendency with the shaking-cam effect to get on the viewers nerves quite easily with the way the footage is presented. The way that nearly everything here was just utterly impossible to tell what was going on, and it's that way through the method of having the entire film, even including the insert shots, through a film camera. It's simply impossible to be able to tell what's going on for the majority of what's happening, because the way it goes about trying to prove it was done through a video camera, well-done as they are, just make it a chore to figure out what the film's trying to show. That, and the severe lack of zombie action for the majority of the running time becomes another flaw. It's hard to be able to really get into the film when it spends a lot more time dealing with inconsequential arguments between the group rather than dealing with the zombie action, which is good when it occurs but is not often enough, leaving a ton of segments to go on for just forever and it barely even gets to the zombies getting any kind of screen-time because of these scenes, which also bring up the last flaw in the film, it's incessant and annoying pushing of it's political agendas. These scenes aren't all that much fun to watch for those who have no interest or don't believe in what it's promoting, which is the main factor against why they're so aggravating, but the fact that there's so much of them in the film is also where it's so wrong, taking up much more time than they should and taking away from the zombies. It's hard to get into these, and they're quite unnecessary to the film. All of these are the film's wrong points.
The Final Verdict: A few moments of decency and not much else manage to hold this one down considerably, and it's the lowest of the series. Really only worth a look if you've enjoyed the others in the series or can appreciate the message, while those looking for more traditional fare should heed caution.
Rated R: Graphic Violence and Graphic Language
