Zumbis: Os Mensageiros do Apocalipse

When I read the description on the back of the movie, it sounded like I would be watching a WWZ-inspired series of interviews, or a news crew following some military forces. Instead, what I ended up with was a confusing and bland set of boring characters in a frankly underwhelming disaster. The most important things I noticed: 1. The film gives you no reason whatsoever to care about any of the characters. None of them are portrayed as anything other than arguing meatbags. 2. I really have no idea why they make a big deal about these zombies, or why there was an outbreak, since they seem to spend most of the movie standing in one spot waiting for their cue to collapse from a gunshot. 3. The movie didn't even use blanks for the film. The gunshots were added in after the shooting, leaving you with quite boring gunfire that didn't even feel like they were killing anything at all. I even heard the pistol sound effect from Killing Floor used for their handgun!

The movie ends abruptly and with little to no real impact, so I guess it stayed pretty level for the whole film. I wouldn't have bought it if I knew what it was, and I wouldn't recommend anything more than a day rent.

I was expecting an action movie, but this is actually one of those stupid "found footage" movies, where producers pretend that there's a reason for some character to be filming every little argument that goes on between them and their friends. That just makes absolutely no sense at all to me. Why the hell would someone randomly film the countryside from a moving vehicle? Why would you choose to hold a camcorder, rather a rifle, when you're facing off against the legions of hell? I'm just completely baffled.

At one point, a character weakly explains, "I'm documenting everything, because this could be important". OK. That makes some minor amount of sense to me. First, this character is part of documentary film crew. Second, the "zombie apocalypse" or whatever has just begun, and any information could actually be somewhat useful. Third, the character seems like a lazy, whiny, useless person who wouldn't be doing anything else, anyway. However, what does he document? He documents his friends bickering. He documents the ground, as he runs. He documents everything *except* useful information.

Eventually, the movie abruptly skips ahead a month, with a different group of survivors. They, too, have a useless person who helpfully documents every argument they have. However, he doesn't have the explanation of being part of a documentary film crew. He's just some guy with a camera, who inexplicably records random crap, while not helping out in any way. At this point, I started to lose interest in the movie.

Finally, we're introduced to a third group of survivors. You're not going to believe this, but they also have a camera-obsessed member. Who are these people, and where are they coming from? Where are they finding all these cameras? Why do their friends tolerate this behavior? Why aren't they kicked out, when it's obvious that they'd rather stand around, documenting everything, rather than helping out? It's a mystery, and not one that the movie makes any attempt to explain. Anyway, the movie takes a rather strange detour in this story, switching subgenres without much warning. The zombies are nearly forgotten, though they do get a bit of lip service here and there. I won't ruin the twist for you, but it's really not much of a twist, if you're a zombie movie fan. Zombie movies have always been primarily about social dynamics (especially the original Night of the Living Dead and its remake), but the whole "zombie apocalypse" thing seems almost incidental to this movie, like some sort of background noise that could easily have been removed, without changing much of anything.

For what it's worth, the zombie effects are pretty tolerable, but almost everything else is terrible. The characters are rock stupid, the dialogue is boring, the acting is generally poor, and the writing is bland. I'm sick of low budget zombie movies where people mindlessly mimic the most basic elements of George Romero's movies, without injecting any creativity or insight of their own. I prefer slow zombies, but does every zombie movie need to have shuffling, mindless undead who chomp on the living? No! Try coming up with your own ideas for once. As much as I dislike the whole "fast zombie" movement, at least they managed to bring some original thinking to their movies. I fail to see why these very fresh zombies would be moving so slowly -- or even why they'd bite the living. It's never explained. It comes across as lazy, unoriginal fanfiction set in the Night of the Living Dead world. That might work for some people, but it doesn't work for me, especially when the rest of the movie is poorly done. I could forgive a bit of unoriginality, if the rest of the movie were worth a damn.

The Zombie Diaries was intriguing in the very early going. It had a low budget realism that actually worked for a little bit. I remember one scene early on where a character had trouble lining up a single close range rifle shot against a lone zombie. There's more realism in that than most movies that feature over-the-shoulder head shots on moving targets from 50 yards away. Unfortunately, that's about the best thing I have to say about this movie.

The Zombie Diaries consists of three separate stories that occur during a zombie epidemic in England. The stories intersect later on in the movie, and that's really about all you can say about it in a review. There are numerous characters in the various stories- so many in fact, that it's hard to identify one from the other after awhile. The virtually non-stop cinema verite shaky camera will drive you mad and makes it impossible to follow the storyline they're trying to set up. This is especially true during the nighttime scenes, and there are several of those. With all apologies to my British friends- the actors in this movie are so British that they're nearly incomprehensible.

So, if you've seen Zombie Diaries, you can scratch it off your list and move on. If you haven't, you're not missing much. With all that being said, I will say that there's a basis here for a much better movie. I would be interested if someone gave it another go with a script rewrite and some improvements in the basic cinematography.

Being a child of the 80's I grew up on horror, everything from Freddy to Pinhead (and of course my favorite, Jason). I remember being 7 years old and watching Dawn of the Dead, it freaked me out, I had nightmares for weeks, even seeing it when I was 25 it still freaked me out. After that I became a zombie freak, Night of the living dead, Dawn of the dead, Day of the dead, Return of the living dead and more recently the 28 films became some of my favorites. Seeing the trailer for this film I thought it looked great, I knew it was a low budget film but this didn't bother me, seeing that some of my favorite films are low budget "b" films. When I saw it in the store I grabbed it and payed $14 (even though i usually buy used films much cheaper) for it seeing that I was already interested in the film and it was attractively packaged. That night I put it in kicked back with a beer and anticipated some awesome zombie fun. Boy was I wrong, this film was simply horrible, the acting was poor the story was non-existent and the quality was straight garbage, seemingly an attempt at a blairwitch type video camera affect and a total copy of the concept off diary of the dead (which wasn't great but is eons better than this), but with no plot. This film is unworthy of even existing, I own over 600 films and and love everything from evil dead to good fellas, night of the comet to American beauty and I can honestly tell you that i feel like destroying this film because it is a disgrace to my collection, avoid it at all cost!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The thing that annoyed me about this film was the shaky camera movements, it was tolerable at first but became a nuisance after a while, the storyline is very confusing, it even at times felt like there was no storyline, because the characters were never really developed enough for me to care about any of them, they actually bugged the living hell out of me, it also never really built up any suspense, at least not for me, because given the fact that I didn't care for any of the characters the film just bored me, plainly put.

I'll admit that I'm not really a fan of the zombie genre, but I have watched a few of them, and a lot of them are ten times better than this film, so for a non fan of the genre I would actually go for Romero's dead films before I'd consider seeing this again.

3 out of 10.