The Zombie Diaries is set as widespread panic hits England, there's a pandemic sweeping across Asia similar to Bird Flu & the Government is being urged to take action to prevent an outbreak over here. A team of four documentary filmmakers head outside London to a remote farm to hold an interview about the possible pandemic but find themselves trapped & isolated as large parts of London are evacuated because the virus hits & hits hard, the virus appears to turn the infected into mindless flesh eating zombies. Soon there are more zombies than humans & it becomes an everyday struggle to survive & find food while not get eaten or bitten which infects the victim with the virus & turns them into a zombie. All the while this outbreak is going on & civilization begins to collapse it is being filmed & documented by the filmmakers...<br /><br />This British production was written, produced & directed by Michael Bartlett & Kevin Gates & is a sort of wretched cross between The Blair Witch Project (1999) & The Night of the Living Dead (1968) with a little 28 Days later... (2002) thrown in there to, what it boils down to is that I didn't like The Zombie Diaries at all. The film only lasts about 80 minutes but it's a fairly torturous experience with an amateur feel as the camera shakes around all over the place & the entire narrative is told through little snippets of footage that some cameraman or other has shot, the character's are very thin with no sort of background & various character's just disappear without trace or word of what has happened to them & it's hard to point to a single leading character that stays the distance since there isn't one. The plot was obviously written during the Asian Bird Flu scare & reflects people's nervousness & even has a little dig at the Government as the script accuses them of not doing enough. The patchy narrative told through little bits of footage means there's a slightly fractured feel about The Zombie Diaries & it feels that large chunks of exposition is missing as certain aspects don't make sense or just seem to happen at random (that woman zombie found in a barn for example along with scenes bookending the film featuring soldiers).<br /><br />The whole look of The Zombie Diaries reeks of a home film shot on a camcorder with some awful shaky hand-held cinematography, there are times when it is literally impossible to see what's going on as the camera is pointed at the floor it it cuts peoples heads off the top of the screen or it just misses the action as it jerks around. This is a real eyesore to watch, the sound isn't much better either with constant muffles or ambient sounds heard that shouldn't be. There's not much gore here, there's some blood & a couple of scenes of zombies eating guts but little else.<br /><br />With a supposed budget of about £500,000 this was a low budget film & it show's, I just hate films generally that look like they were shot on a camcorder with no real visual aesthetics or competence. The acting is bad, really bad & I'll just leave it at that.<br /><br />The Zombie Diaries is a rubbishy low budget zombie film that tries to copy the style of The Blair Witch Project but just comes across as a total mess that is pretty hard to watch. Watch George A. Romero's zombie flick Diary of the Dead (2007) instead since it's much, much better.