THE WALKING DEAD, ON AMC TELEVISION, HAS RETURNED FOR ANOTHER SEASON. THE STORY REMAINS 'CUTTING EDGE INTENSE'.
If it is at all possible, the show is even more popular than ever before !!!
The following MOVIE review was posted here, in or near 2006 by yours truly. By sheer luck a copy was saved on hard disc.
From ~ A Journal Of The Plague Year, written by Daniel Defoe:
I must go back again to the beginning of this surprising time.
While the fears of the people were young, they were increased strangely by several odd accidents which, put altogether, it was really a wonder the whole body of the people did not rise as one man and abandon their dwellings, leaving the place as a space of ground designed by Heaven for an Akeldama, doomed to be destroyed from the face of the earth, and that all that would be found in it would perish with it. I shall name but a few of these things; but sure they were so many, and so many wizards and cunning people propagating them, that I have often wondered there was any ( women especially ) left behind.
In the first place, a blazing star or comet appeared for several months before the plague, as there did the year after another, a little before the fire.
Daniel Defoe's commentary was published in 1722, well after the events of the several plagues which hit London in the years of 1664 and '65 -- and it remains a riveting story after 340 years.
First released at the end of October in 2006, the writing and the directing credits for "The Zombie Diaries" belong jointly to Michael Bartlett and Kevin Gates.
They are two talented film makers and their zombie-fest in the "Diaries" starts out very well and that is because they start out modestly.
In many ways their film begins to tell its tale in a manner that is somewhat similar to Daniel Defoe's Journal. Something has happened, it's not here yet, but somewhere else: it seems to be putting others in danger, but it's not here.
Maybe not here.
What the two directors do to advance their story, set in the very modern year of 2006, is to create an atmosphere of low-grade dread. "The Zombie Diaries" starts off as a fascinating film in the 'horror genre,' and the opening brings forward the concept of this all-new, controversial and post-modern plague:
but as the crew learns from their first interview, the new illness has no name, no identity, and a variety of symptoms.
With such an excellent opening sequence, crafted by the two directors in the form of a TV news item, the menu for the film appears to be printed like a telegram, but it's not.
The news crew gets sent out on a second assignment, regarding a possible link between the new 'flu,' and the known Avian flu, but the London traffic is heavy and they are hours late when they finally reach their destination, well outside of London proper.
At that moment the "Diaries" does not yet reveal precisely what is happening or what might be coming, but only just what is certain, which is the feeling of uncertainty ....
It must not be forgot here that the city and suburbs were prodigiously full of people at the time of this visitation, I mean at the time that it began;
for though I have lived to see a further increase, and mighty throngs of people settling in London more than ever, yet we had always a notion that the numbers of people which, the wars being over, the armies disbanded, and the royal family and the monarchy being restored, had flocked to London to settle in business, or to depend upon and attend the Court for rewards of services, preferments, and the like, was such that the town was computed to have in it above a hundred thousand people more than ever it held before;
nay, some took upon them to say it had twice as many, because all the ruined families of the royal party flocked hither.
All the old soldiers set up trades here, and [ an ] abundance of families settled here. Again, the Court brought with them a great flux of pride, and new fashions.
All people were grown gay and luxurious, and the joy of the Restoration had brought a vast many families to London.
from Daniel Defoe's Journal ( 1722 )
When the "Diaries" begins, there are rumors galore and there are unconfirmed reports of illness elsewhere, as in everywhere else but London or Britain. And yet in the course of a single day, the very fabric of civilization seems to dissolve into shreds. This is a serious challenge in the film's story line.
But the setting is modern London, and as the young protagonists set out, being these members of a television news crew, the film shows us regular people who are actually post-modern "kidults."
In a few scenes the film shows us who these people are not, which is that they are not real adults.
They are young, they're ambitious, even so, they're still young enough to lack a sense of dread or even the ability to abandon that young sense of disbelief in their own mortality. All of this is constructed very well by the directors/writers.
The problems with "The Zombie Diaries" begin when the normalcy of the fiction ceases ( as it must inevitably ), and that is when the electrical power seems to fail all over England. And it seems to all fail at once, in a black-out not a brown-out.
What happens next in the plot contains the most biting social commentary, and moves the "Diaries" out of the first episode of the three long segments which comprise the film as a whole. Soon enough we begin to see what happens to these "kidults," as they travel around England in cars running low on gasoline and with nothing more than snack-food for their meals. When they come upon a farm, these kidults know they will find almost no food, because of a previous governmental order to destroy the poultry flocks ( on the theory that the new zombie flu was not really new at all, but a form of Avian flu ). And so it goes.
What they do begin to find, in seemingly growing numbers, are the animate dead, the previously dead, who are now zombies !!
So, no, the answer is that the zombies do not keep 'diaries,' at all, this film is about the people who are not dead who are still living and trying to keep on living and who [ naturally ] are so ego-driven that they have to keep video diaries of their trekking and scavenging and fighting off of zombies.
And the bitter social commentary revolves around the middle part of the film, as a second group of young refugees encounter some of the members from the news production crew. The new group has an advantage, which is a long rifle and some ammunition.
In the midst of avoiding a field of zombies, one fellow says to his comrades, looking at the scattered ranks of the undead, "makes you wish you lived in a more gun-friendly country, doesn't it ?"
Even though "Diaries" was made on a relatively small budget, these two writer/director fellows manage to wring a whole lot of 'scary stuff' out of it all, beginning with the first rather matter-of-fact interview and lurching back and forth between scenes of fighting zombies and scenes of looking for food.
It's all done in cinema-verite' style and so it is even more chilling and spookier to watch, as some of it looks like it was captured on a rickety old 8 mm film camera.
REPOSTED FOR OUR RMN READERS. NEW AND OLD.
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