After a long-overdue break your weekly trip to the dark side is back with a vengeance, with fire in the eyes, blood-stained teeth and a heart of solid ice.
Movies From Beyond is coming over the hill like a monster! Actually we went on holiday, it was a lovely house in a delightful place called Amytiville. We enjoyed it, shame about the flies and horrible mind-altering haunting and stuff.
This week: Air Guitar Nation and The Zombie Diaries…
We love to rock out with our cock out to Guitar Hero 3 on the Xbox 360 so we were well pleased to see that Air Guitar Nation was just released on DVD.
The flick follows the American heats and the final of the Air Guitar world championships in Finland. Yeah we were surprised it was there too – but once you get over the fact that it isn’t a total pisstake it is one of the best documentaries we have seen for ages, and is genuinely funny in places. It's actually a bit inspiring that people can love something so much that they're willing to create an alter-ego, wear a customer and jump around on stage to Ace Of Spades by Motorhead.
Some of them are fantastically named with the two main players C-Diddy and Bjorn Turoque backed up by crazies like Krye Tuff and The Red Plectrum. All in all this movie showed that you can be good at pretty much anything and people will cheer you for it. The funniest thing to us was the ethos of the Air Guitar World Championship movement, which reckons it is a route to world peace – after all, if you are holding an air guitar you can’t pick up a gun !
We ventured out to the cinema earlier in the month and caught the outstanding Diary Of The Dead by the zombie master George Romero. It was a real return to form after the horrendous Land Of The Dead, and followed the start of an undead outbreak through camcorder footage made by film students. We highly recommend you see it as soon as possible – we did and it inspired us to dig up the DVD of The Zombie Diaries – a 2006 indie movie from good old blighty.
It is similarly made to Cloverfield and The Blair Witch Project with very shaky and patchy camcorders following three groups of survivors during the early stages of a zombie outbreak in a sort of anthology format. We really wanted this to be great, but unfortunately it misses that mark fairly badly, thanks to the way it is made (it is fairly frustrating to watch) and the fact that most of the characters were improved by being eaten by shuffling undead. The ending left us looking at each other with mouths open in confusion.
If you are a horror geek, this is one for you. If not ,then swerve it. By the way, watch out for Doctor Legg from EastEnders who pops up near the beginning.
[story by Simon Woodley]
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
The funniest thing about The Zombie Diaries is the flame-fest over on Amazon.co.uk about it. There are dozens and dozens of five-star reviews, clearly by the muppets who put the piece of toss movie together, complemented by an almost equal number of one-star reviews attempting to redress the balance. It’s really sad, because if whoever is so feverishly trying to bump their film up the ratings could apply the same time and energy to oh, I don’t know… making a good film, I’m sure we could all forget about this piece of crap and take that small step closer to world peace and enlightenment.
Oh, and Diary of the Dead was a good film? Get out of town.
I don’t get anyone who did not rate diary of the dead !
Thanks Movies From Beyond, i was going to get Zombie Diaries, but as usual you have steered me away from certain crapness.
O.K, I must be going The Shining levels of crazy, I recently saw both Rambo and Diary at my local cinema. I really enjoyed both. alright Rambo was not the best film i have ever seen and for me it was missing the much needed “Stalk and Kill” section,a big part of which makes Rambo appear so hard, but it was pretty cool none the less.
Diary was great ! The opening has Romero sauce all over it, It had the feel of vitage George. I don’t get why people didn’t like it, please someone explain to me how a Zombie exploding deaf Amish farmer is not fantastic. I’m with you Movies From Beyond.
Fight The Power !
Unfortunately, I’ve had the ‘why Diary of the Dead is so shit’ conversation many a time since I was subjected to it at the cinema, so I won’t regurgitate the whole thing again.
In short, though, it was meant to be a group of trained thesps pretending to be a group of amateur thesps. What we ended up with was a hamfest even hammier than Hampton J Pig’s family reunion. The supposedly biting social satire was more like blunt force trauma performed by a man with no depth perception whatsoever. The point you mentioned about the Amish farmer nicely encapsulates another gripe I have with the film, namely that it tries and more often than not, fails to keep the audience captivated with cringe-worthy set pieces that would have been more at home during the infinitely superior Shaun of the Dead.
It was predictable, the characters were almost universally worthless and overall, Diary of the Dead accomplished the tricky feat of making Land of the Dead positively stellar by comparison.
OK, so I went on a bit but so did the bloody film.
Diary of the Dead was absolutely terrible. Zombie Diaries pissed all over this movie. Far more realistic and even the zombie make up was better!