Thursday, October 13, 2011

Diary of the Dead


I wasn't expecting much after how disappointing Land of the Dead was so the bar was set pretty low for this one. Somehow it managed to not be disappointing. Thinking about it I can only name one thing in this movie that stands out as good, the alcoholic English ex-patriot professor who stands like a judgmental god of death over his students. Even that one good thing sounds pretty stupid. But somehow it worked. This film adopts a terrible documentary style which doesn't really work. Half the time someone is always pointing out that the cameraman is filming and telling him to stop. It pokes fun at itself a few times and there's a really annoying callback towards the end that was a real groaner. The zombies are slow but threatening since, like any good zombies, they're very inclined to bite. All our characters are film students, which makes them more hateable than they needed to be yet still kind of relatable. The actors are all fairly good for a change, I suppose that was what I liked about this movie, I was able to lose myself in it a bit without being jarred back to reality every couple of minutes. That's a very rare thing in a zombie film. Visually nothing in this film is particularly interesting, and the documentary style is kind of annoying sometimes. There's no soundtrack to speak of, which was probably a good choice. The story barely exists. This is all about watching competent actors and a little bit of gore here and there. It's not a very exciting movie, or a thinker, or much of anything really. If you want to see competent acting, decent zombie gore and don't care if it really has a point to it this is the movie for you.

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