Desperation in the world of the living dead I've seen a lot of horror movies, especially in the mocumentary genre, but I haven't seen a lot of particularly depressive films. Horrors can be cheerful, scary, mysteriously mystical, thrashy, cruel, but try to find depressive ones, those after which you do not want to live. Or, conversely, you want to spit on the shown hopelessness and spite to do other things in order to prove that life goes on. One way or another, the creators of horror stories in the horror industry are primarily engaged in “boo-effects” or suspense: let’s scare the audience with “unexplored” or quickly throw around chopped meat.
The Zombie Diaries left me in a strange state after watching it. In general, some virus of unknown origin, which is transmitted by no one-knows-how, suddenly takes over the planet, and a bunch of survivors are forced to flee from zombies, unaware that, like in another film from the same genre of “Land of Bigfoot”, people are the main danger. Not monsters or corpses. People.
The film is extremely depressing. The weight of despair envelops, there is no way out. Immediately recalls the series “The Walking Dead”, where for how many seasons the characters survive and even build relationships after the apocalypse, they boil life in half with death – and this is quite true. But after The Diaries, I became convinced that not everyone would be as good as the show. Someone's going crazy. Someone will lose hope. Everything will change overnight when the distances affected by the virus begin to walk around the world. Even the weather suddenly, succumbing to the threat of endless pain, will cover the horizon with torrential clouds. How? How was it possible to shoot a low-budget film to completely trample the audience’s attention with rough kicks into the created atmosphere of endless hopelessness?
But it is not for nothing that the picture received a very low rating. With the above-mentioned atmosphere so overdone that it is impossible not to admit: the horror movie (in general, I would call what I saw a heavy drama with elements of a thriller) has a strong hypnotic effect, thanks to which the thread of the narrative is soon lost, giving way to increased drowsiness. Heroes seek salvation where there is none, many bad things happen to them, the ranks of survivors thin out. Unfortunately, it becomes impossible to clearly follow everything: the method of shooting makes the eyelids heavy, and I am not talking about mocumentaries, but about editing, which absorbs an indecent number of scenes that fit together in such a way that the feeling of abnormality of what is happening affects more than before with each new episode. And already in the finale, everything suddenly changes: a zombie movie becomes a thriller with a short hint of snuff. However, it is the final in some sense is not so depressing, even quite good, given the most recent scene.
I don’t know how to describe this strange film. While watching, I fell asleep twice (it happened during the day), in one of which I had an even stranger dream with a similar atmosphere of “sick existence.” Despite the effect, The Zombie Diaries won’t be remembered for long — I’ll probably forget it in a week. This is the impression...
5 out of 10