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Reviews
The Zombie Diaries (2006)
Worst movie ever made
Calling this a movie is being kind. I can't remember seeing a worse movie. It's just some guys who got a cheap video camera (didn't even get a good camera, just some camcorder at Target), got their friends and made a "movie" (can't call it a film since it's not one).
Little tip for you folks out there who think you can make a movie that people will want to see: Get real actors. When you shoot it on video and get really bad wannabe actors, it looks like a porno (without the actual porn).
How anyone in their right mind could have been entertained by this terrible garbage is a mystery.
Stay away from this one. It's easily the worst movie ever made.
Neighbor (2009)
An Amateur Misfire
I have read probably thousands of scripts over the years – and hundreds of thousands of pitches. I've seen it all. The most common pitch from fanboy-wannabe-scriptwriters is "this script is Tarantino meets (some other director)" It's literally a cliché in the entertainment biz when you see scripts where a character in the script makes a reference to an old movie and the writer considers himself another Tarantino because of it. It's also something to avoid. I and most of my colleagues see a pitch with someone comparing himself to Tarantino and we stay away from the script. Making a reference to an old movie does not make one Tarantino but this is a common occurrence among many amateur writers who've seen Pulp Fiction and think they can do it too – 99% of the time they can't.
I was reading the reviews here and there are so many bad ones, then I came across a couple of these reviews that praise this movie to high heaven, peculiarly, a complete odd turn in contrast to the mostly terrible reviews this movie is getting – in fact, the positive reviews are a little too "praisy" and this one actually says "Tarantino meets Hitchcock" which I've seen similar claims before in pitches. So I watched this movie.
This was no different than the awful scripts I've read with that pitch in the query letter, except this one was produced. With independent cinema in its heyday at the moment, bad scripts can get made (because no prodco would ever make this movie). It's clearly a low budget production, so someone with $80,000 can put together something like this, get it into a film festival and get a DVD distribution deal. There are pointless time-shifts in this and references to other movies which are not entertaining if your movie has no plot and cheap production values. Every character is completely unlikable and not developed. There are a couple long steadicam shots which are kind of laughable when the person directing this is not really a good director and is working with terrible material.
"The Girl" tortures people in her neighborhood (for some reason, it's never really explained and I'd expect no less from whatever first time writer spat this out on his new version of Final Draft over some weekend) and one man in particular but after numerous cringe-worthy torture scenes, you're still left with no actual story. This is why the three-act structure is so important. Movies like Hostel also have cringe-worth torture scenes but there is a clear cut story and the movie builds up to its conclusion. This movie just gets monotonous. At the minimum, it could have used some rewrites but like a lot of the fanboy wannabe scriptwriters I come across, they write a script and that's that – let's get it out there (and not worry if it's ready). When will these people learn "writing is rewriting?" Clearly the "Tarantino meets Hitchcock" review was written by the writer of this movie. This movie is nothing like a Tarantino or even more insulting, a Hitchcock movie in any sense. If this script was on my desk, I'm sure after ten pages I would have just stopped like I do with other bad scripts. This is one of those movies where you better go with the common public's comments and if you read those, you'll see this is not a good movie. It kind of reminds me when I was talking to a college kid whose script I read and I tried to convince him it was pretty bad and not ready to be made but he assured me it would be great once it was filmed. It wasn't. It was awful. I wonder if that guy was related to the guy who made this mess?