As my student loan begins to do its usual disappearing act and the weather outside begins to make York look like some kind of Narnia which lacks both snow and charming mythical creatures, I’m spending a lot more time inside watching late-night Film Four. If nothing else, it’s the channel that puts the most effort into introductions. ITV 2 would probably have some voiceover bloke say “And now some film with zombies and stuff. It’s good”. Film Four introduced Diary Of The Dead as “a horror epic, which tells the story from the point of view of student filmmakers; we see the story through their cameras, bringing a visceral immediacy to the unfolding horror.” To be fair, this is probably an unfair comparison as the average ITV 2 viewer would have trouble understanding difficult words like “visceral”, “unfolding”, or “the”. Either way, I was curious to see exactly how “visceral” this “immediacy” would be.
Diary Of The Dead is not only yet another zombie film, it’s yet another horror-film-from-perspective of handheld cameras. There two problems with this:
1. Zombie films now have to pretend that the characters in the films won’t have seen thousands of zombie films which, in the real world,
they of course would. This is why no zombie films have any of the characters ever say the word “zombie”. This is perfectly reasonable, but it gets tiresome in DotD to watch the student filmmakers sat round a table, scratching their heads, not sure whether they wrong to kill those dead people who were walking towards them, screaming for brains. Shoot them, film nerds! Aim for the head!
2. As with all lame POV handheld-camera films, the questions hangs: why don’t they just put down the camera and leg it? So obvious a question, in fact, that the cameraman has to spend half the film justifying himself; “Oh, this? Yeah, I really like cameras, me. And it’s, like, really important to me to capture all of these horrific events for posterity. Oh, I see a zombie’s starting to munch on your leg. How cinematic. Could you just scream towards the mic a bit for me, please?”
DotD is not only fatally flawed, but occasionally has bits which are completely nonsensical. In a flashback to the start of the zombie-but-don’t-call-it-a-zombie apocalypse, we see a child’s birthday party. “Happy birthday!” says Dad, “Are you ready for your present, Timmy?”, at which point a ZOMBIE CLOWN appears from nowhere and cuts a slice of the birthday boy. In another scene, the protagonists find an Amish man. Being Amish he obviously has no car or modern technology, but apparently the peace-loving God-fearing pacifist Christian has a shed full of handmade grenades. As one does.
The worst thing is that the film tries to have a point. That’s not allowed: you can’t have zombie-but-not-zombie clowns, Amish explosives experts, and a “political” subtext in the same film. It’s not even a point which makes much sense; in-between zombie-but-etc sequences, there are montages of media coverage of traumatic events- floods, wars, and suchlike tragedies- and apparently we’re meant to dislike the media for this. Yeah. Damn media. Always trying to tell us things. It’s a conspiracy, maaaaaaan.
The last line of this film, spoken by the narrator, asks “Are we even worth saving?” The answer, for me is “Not if you made this film.” Shoot them, Film Four viewers. Aim for the head.