Zombie Diaries 2

I am a big fan of the genre, however this was a terrible effort. A sequel to a narrowly passable film. Full of poor acting, plot holes and is hard to watch physically and mentally. Shot in night vision for some part (very poorly shot) made the first half and the ending part hard to watch. A group of poor acted thugs, depicting disturbing scenes of rape and murder, this is zombie horror, somehow it begins to border on being a disturbing snuff film. Also the original idea is the hand-held camera is on too keep track of the post apocalyptic world, when under heavy zombie attack, murderous gangs and other peril i doubt there would be a semi steady handed guy filming.

I think if this film had been filmed with conventional movie-making techniques it might have been enjoyable. Those of the cast who are not returning from the first movie are competent actors and there are moments of cleverness every now and again.

The thing that made it literally unwatchable for me is the shaky-cam.

I've never liked it and it is rarely used well. The editor of this movie is Drew Culingham (umbrage the first vampire). He got his money for nothing. The choppy editing combines with the frenetic camera-work to cause something similar to sea sickness. It made the zombie diaries impossible to watch for me.

I switched off before the end because the editing was so distracting that I couldn't bear to watch any more. Fans of shaky cam might enjoy it.

Most of this film is instantly forgettable, acting is so so, story is generic and doesnt hold on any one concept long enough for it to have any real impact. I would have given this a 2/10 except the ending was very good, I really liked that, too little too late really though.

Remember that bit in the Zombie Dead where they let all the zombies into the house because 'maybe its the house they want'? Well, within the first five minutes of this film, during a zombie epidemic, some guy leaves his family to go out and check out a noise, then his wife leaves their kid in the house to look for him (while filming, of course), then runs back into the house and keeps the camera focused on her kid while something climbs the stairs, enters the room, and then kills them both. That's not a good start to any film.

Some army guys (one with a camera of course) have to take to their heels and leave their base after the gates get open. They had for the coast with a view to getting to Holland, and run into zombies and some raping redneck types. Now, I'm all for zombie films, and this film works when the army takes on the dead, either in the base or in a house they end up in, but when these rapist guys show up, the film heads towards Straw Dogs territory where they torture and attempt to rape on of the soldiers. It's not pleasant to watch and puts a dampener on the rest of the film, which wasn't much to begin with.

You'd need to suspend your belief if you want any enjoyment out of this found footage film. In this world, when someone drops the camera, someone else picks it up and immediately starts filming. This film had some good points but it didn't need the rape and torture stuff - that's a genre I tend to avoid.

Also: Do the British army use the phrase 'clicks' when talking about distance?

Having seen the first "The Zombie Diaries", I wanted to watch through part 2 as well. Not because I was overly impressed with the first one, but simply because it is a zombie movie and because I love all things zombie.

It was painfully clear that they had a bigger budget behind them this time in this production, and that really helped the movie along a good deal. Now with that being said, then let me just nail it clear that the whole hand-held camera point of view is not in my liking. So seeing a whole movie through that point of view was a notch down in the enjoyment of the movie for me.

Looking at the DVD cover I think to myself 'what the...?' The cover has two solders on it, yeah they are in the movie. Alright. But then in the background there is a metropolis in ruin and in flames. Right. Well there were no metropolis in the movie. The entire movie took place in a military base, a forest, a small village and a military bunker! Moving on, in front of this crumbling metropolis is a vast army of zombies. Again, what? There weren't that many zombies in the movie. Come on! The DVD cover was a total scam! It had very little to do with the actual movie, and it is a cheap trick to lure people in.

The zombies in "World of the Dead" could have been done more to make them look like zombies. It was basically just people with some wounds here and there. That whole gore and gross decomposition effect was lacking and it made the zombies look more like drunken stumbling buffoons.

Having seen "World of the Dead" now, I can scratch it off the list, and I can say that it is not a zombie movie that I will be watching a second time, because it had no real appeal and it just didn't have enough contents to make it worth a second watching. "World of the Dead" is good if you are a zombie aficionado and just have to watch zombie movies for the heck of it. Other than that, there is little new to be seen in this movie.