The delicate chemistry of these films is deceptively difficult to achieve. Ideally you want it to star at least three well known faces. First up you need a hunky yet wooden leading man from one of those overly earnest teen dramas they show on E4 in the afternoon, for extra points his character must have a troubled past preferably involving losing his family in a freak accident or mining catastrophe. Next up is the obligatory sexy young lady, once again it helps if she has been plucked from a well known American TV programme, and you know you’re in safe hands if she has been made up to look ‘geeky’ or tomboyish despite being so transcendentally fit that it takes every ounce of your will power not to furiously self abuse from the opening credits onwards.

The final spot is usually filled by a quirky sidekick character that is perhaps well known as one of the bottom feeders on a crap family based sitcom, or alternately a genuine genre legend like Lance Henriksen or Brad Dourif playing a wise old father, woodsman, shopkeeper or sheriff. Again there are definite bonus points if this character comes a cropper near the end when they are impaled on a spike or decapitated with a pair of really sharp garden shears.

Stay Alive somewhat ups the ante on the casting front, packing in enough familiar faces to make you feel like you’re sinking into a warm, cosy, yet slightly creepy bath (imagine the one that girl in the 1980s Cadburys Flake ad used to lie in and you’re getting there). There’s the kid who plays the title role on Malcolm in the Middle as a sideways-sun visor wearing tech-nerd, whilst the babe quota is supplied by Sophia Bush from One Tree Hill and Samaire Armstrong from The OC. There’s a tortured slice of man-cake in the form of Jon Foster, as well as a small role for Friends and Saving Private Ryan star Adam Goldberg. The gravitas is provided by Wendell Pierce playing a tough New Orleans detective that isn’t a million miles away from his character Bunk from HBO’s The Wire, and for good measure Jimmi Simpson from shows like 24 and Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia pops up as a bong smoking generation X cyber freak.

The plot of the movie is pretty simple – a computer game about the infamous Countess Bathory that kills everyone who plays it. This device allows for lots of enjoyable scenes of people dying in the same way as they copped it in the game; hanging, getting run over by a horse and carriage, being bled like a dressed down deer and all manner of other fun. Like a lot of films Stay Alive loses its way somewhat in the final third but still manages to retain its charm and high-falluting premise for its admirably brisk hour and a half running time, with enough blood and creepy digital ghouls wandering about to please fans of horror survival games and movies alike. Don’t get me wrong, it’s about as scary as a particularly bland episode of Countryfile and the chances of it going down in history as a notable addition to the horror genre is as likely as seeing a black face on River Cottage, but not everything can be Suspiria -know what I mean?

Stay Alive is an enjoyable and unchallenging chiller that is best enjoyed with your internal quality filter set to low, several alcoholic beverages of your choice and a family sized bag of Co-Op own brand Bacon Bites. A real recommendation in my book…

I for one literally cheered out loud when Jeffrey Combs appeared and exclaimed to no one in particular, “I can’t believe I’ve inherited a castle!”. I thanked the lord Jesus Christ for the flash back that divulges that he has killed his son and blinded his teenage daughter in a drink driving incident, a mistake for which his wife won’t forgive him. I was frankly ecstatic when Combs falls off the wagon and has some really creepy, pissed up sex with a local prostitute in the castle’s wine cellar. But nothing compares to the scene in which Castle Freak himself captures the brass from a comatose Combs and tries to have sex with her, only for it to be revealed in a sort of reverse Crying Game moment that Castle Freak has no penis! It is a scene that would be oddly touching and poignant if it wasn’t so hilarious, made more so by the fact that he seems to have a fully functioning pair of testicles – talk about adding insult to injury!

Everything about Castle Freak is perfect, from the bad dubbing through to the rushed and crudely edited ending. It also has one of those great, jaunty scores that makes you want to sing the title of the film along to the music #Castle Freak, Castle Freak, Here He Comes, The Castle Freak…#. Yes it’s absolute trash but it’s lovingly made trash that is under no illusions that it is anything but the demented offspring of a bastardised genre. And let’s be honest, who doesn’t enjoy a good old fashioned tale of a cock-less grotesque tormenting a disintegrating family in a gothic chateau?

Bourdain is also refreshingly honest, exclaiming, “I’m so depressed right now I feel like killing myself”, during an episode in which he ate a cheese toastie at an end of the pier diner in his native New Jersey. Even more endearing is his recent confession that he spends the majority of his travels drunk off his ass.

So in between smoking like a chimney, knocking back enough local booze to rival the late great Keith Floyd, and extolling the virtues of The Ramones Bourdain eats. My god he eats; seal eyeballs, dubious pork products, foetal duck eggs, blood soup, gelatinous bean curd stuff – basically if there’s a wild eyed native frying up a batch of something over a bin fire he’ll gladly pull up a chair and tuck in. Not that Tony’s enthusiasm is always rewarded, as in one hilarious episode in Mexico where is forced to stomach some badly cooked iguana tamales, and another in New Zealand where not only does he narrowly avoid death in a dune buggy accident but then has to endure a bunch of ropey looking meat pies in a trucker’s café.

The cable channel Shed is currently showing episodes of No Reservations and Bourdain fans have kindly uploaded quite a few episodes on YouTube for your viewing pleasure. If you have a penchant for travel or cookery programmes with a nice dollop of cynicism and debauchery then I would advise you to dig in immediately and gorge yourself on several helpings of Mr. Bourdain.

The badly dubbed opening scene of two sisters squabbling in a dilapidated hotel room brings to mind the giallo films of the 1970s and 80s but without the visual flair and sense of unbearable tension. Indeed, when a creepy looking ghoul pops through a crack in the wall and tries to snag a sleeping bairn in its crib with a wire coat hanger it becomes glaringly obvious that the viewer is in for a Z-grade, one star treat.

The cast of Lurking Fear is a hotchpotch of soap opera hacks and genuine horror movie royalty, including Hellraiser’s Ashley Laurence (incorrectly credited as Ashley Lauren) and Reanimator’s Jeffrey Combs. Laurence is one of the aforementioned squabbling sisters who upon seeing her sibling killed by the crafty coat hanger fiend turns, seemingly overnight, from a bookish nerd scared of firing a gun into a Lara Croft style kick ass babe in a vest planting dynamite and driving a truck. Combs stars as a bearded, booze swilling doctor who has a fag on the go constantly, even whilst performing medical procedures – (and you thought the NHS was bad!). And to be honest they’re both great and bring some much needed class to the proceedings. Yet sadly they are so weighed down by the appalling script and wooden supporting players that their presence is akin to a deranged homeless wearing a monocle and an Elizabethan ruff.

All the horror movie clichés are present and correct; a lameass priest spouting bollocks in the face of certain death, a heavily pregnant woman who keeps saying “don’t let them take my baby!”, a spooky graveyard in the middle of a rainstorm and a bad guy who sounds like David Bowie doing an impression of Dot Cotton. You can tell he’s bad straight away for several reasons. First of all he’s English, secondly he’s got slicked back hair and thirdly he wears a single dangly earring – the universal symbol for a right nasty bastard.

The plot holes are so massive that any attempt to address them would be an exercise in futility, and although the film attempts to exist within the Lovecraftian universe I am at a loss to remember any of Lovecraft’s stories that involve a tough ex-con and some sleazy Eurotrash scumbags hunting for a corpse stuffed with money.

Yet the most galling thing about this mess of a film is the continuity which goes out the window faster than Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist. We are told that the monsters feed on people but when they finally capture and kill one of the baddies they choose to throw him through a window instead of tucking into his tasty flesh. Furthermore, despite living underground, wearing rags and eating babies most of the ghouls have an admirable grasp of the Queens English.

In fact the continuity supervisor must have been smoking a fat one during the scene in which the under siege villagers spend ages fortifying a knackered church building only for Jeffrey Combs to open the front door and stand casually smoking a fag. But my favourite lapse has to be at the end of the movie when Ashley Laurence runs down a tunnel in a blue vest only to emerge at the other end in a white shirt, simply magnificent.

Like most things I enjoy Lurking Fear left me feeling cheap, ashamed, somewhat emotionally soiled and deeply satisfied. I can think of no higher recommendation.

Great remakes like Zach Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead and Alexandre Aja’s The Hills Have Eyes take the essence and spirit of the original films and drag them kicking and screaming into modernity. On the other hand, the very worst remakes defile their source material, crudely and incongruously incorporating crap CGI or crow-barring in pop culture references and a Linkin Park soundtrack.

The most striking example of this jumped out at me whilst watching the recent Friday the 13th reboot. Besides the fact that the 1980 original is hugely overrated and spawned a pretty dire and bloated franchise, one scene from the new film really knocked me sideways.

For anyone unfamiliar with the basic conceit of most slasher films, and the Friday the 13th series especially, it’s that a group of horny teenagers get carved up by a maniac in the woods. It’s pretty much that simple. But what really stood out for me in the 2009 flick was a scene at the beginning of the story in which one young lady took her top off to reveal a pair of extremely fake looking breasts. This is probably a trifling matter for some, but for me it totally invaded my suspension of disbelief and screamed, “You’re watching a horror movie remake – and a bad one at that!”. Now maybe I’m a bit provincial, a tad un-hip and not ‘down’ with the kids, but what sixteen or seventeen year old has gigantic breast implants? And even more so, what kid has parents either so irresponsible or high on hillbilly heroin that they think nothing of letting them fuck off to some remote woodland for a week accompanied by a bevy of potential date rapists, with only their questionable judgement and about twelve inches of silicone between them and a good old fashioned stabbing?

Don’t over analyse it, it’s only a horror film is the de rigueur response to such quibbles, but to paraphrase Chris Rock – don’t be such low expectation havin’ motherfuckers! Why when it comes to these kind of genre flicks is the bar placed so terribly low? Interchangeable youths, doggerel dialogue, predictable set ups and formulaic endings are blithely accepted as par for the course. And it is this cynicism and lack of imagination that seems sadly prevalent in the majority of remakes.

When I think back to the films of the 1970s and 80s, the golden age of horror, it is abundantly clear that originality was at a premium. Whether it was adapting existing books like The Shining and The Exorcist, presenting brand new and crazy ideas to the audience in movies like Scanners and Don’t Look Now, innovating with new twists on classic narratives such as in An American Werewolf in London and The Hitcher, or just bending people’s minds with mental shit like Dario Argento’s Suspiria, there is such as huge difference between the majority of modern horror films and their predecessors. There are obvious notable exceptions; the first Saw film, [REC], Cabin Fever, the original Japanese Ring, House of 1000 Corpses and Planet Terror are all enjoyable slices of the genre, although none of them quite rattle the nerves like something as sparse and perfectly formed as the BBC’s production of M.R. James’ Whistle and I’ll Come to You. And when it comes to remakes the disparity in quality between movies is often absurd. One pertinent example is the gaping chasm in calibre between Robert Wise’s slow burning The Haunting, and it’s 90s remake in which the menace and creepiness is replaced by ropey special effects and Catherine Zeta Jones arsing around in a dressing gown.

Rather worryingly there are several horror classics on the slate for reboots at the time of writing. The most intriguing has to be a re-imagining of Clive Barker’s Hellraiser, although the people in charge of adapting this left field masterpiece have a real task ahead of them in attempting to capture the demented brilliance of the original.

For now I’ll be keeping an open mind and hoping that the new Nightmare on Elm Street and Piranha movies kick much batty, and fingers crossed they don’t let McG or Michael Bay anywhere near my beloved Teenwolf.

The aftermath of Modern Warfare 2's 'No Russian' scene.

If you’re into games, you’d be hard pressed to have been able to avoid the super-mega-enormo-release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 this week.  This is the first game ever to have a full-blown premiere event, a la the movies.  It is, according to initial stats, the fastest selling computer game ever. The hype train’s been miraculous. And, as you may know if you’re into this sort of thing, the game contains a level, called ‘No Russian’, in which you murder people in an airport.

Okay, more context than that’s required.  You’re a secret CIA operative infiltrating a known terrorist group.  Doing so, you tag along on an attack on an airport, which… well, I just cannot fathom in my mind at all.  But that’s what happens. “Are you sure you want to play this bit?” the game asks you, twice? It could be disturbing for some players, we’re informed. Yes. You can only hope that was the point.

There’s a big debate about this level, in which the terrorist group fires assault weapons into multiple crowds of unarmed civilians.  You can shoot too, if you want, though it’s never necessary.  The game doesn’t acknowledge whether you do or not, though.  That, depending on your viewpoint, might be a big problem.

Below the jump: the scene in question, and some thoughts.  Is it the most horrible, offensive nonsense in the world of gaming?  Is it a brave step for developers Infinity Ward to take?  Read on to find out what I reckon.

[Er, actually, the video's too wide to embed. Bloody template. It's here.]

Right. Crikey. Let’s discuss.

My initial reaction is to be, well, horrified.  Of course, the video was leaked some time before the game’s release on Tuesday, but I’d not bothered watching it because, well, it seemed like another videogame controversy thing a la Grand Theft Auto.  So when I finally saw this a few days ago, I was pretty shocked.  I mean, man!  It’s vicious, brutal and unpleasant.  I showed it to my girlfriend, who sat down before it and said “I doubt it’s as bad as people are saying. I’ve never felt that shocked at anything in a game before.”  She ended up sitting with her hand over her mouth, finding it deeply disturbing.  That was kinda my reaction too.  It’s fucking horrible, y’know?

My reaction after that has been to sway madly between two points of view.  Because first, I thought it was wonderful.  Really wonderful.  Film, literature, television, whatever – they’ve all been doing unpleasant stuff for decades, attemping to instil a sense of genuine horror into the consumer for an aesthetic effect or otherwise.  Art and entertainment have an amazing ability to evoke emotions and thought-processes that might not crop up otherwise in our day-to-day lives.  As I watched this scene unfold, I felt awful.  Really awful.  I hated that I was having to watch it all unfold.  And I really, really love that.

There are a few problems with it, though.  Friend and game critic Phill Cameron found the whole thing to be so ludicrously out of place in what is otherwise a no-brainer shooter that it came to represent “war porn” rather than anything truly poignant.  Others note the suspicious pre-release leak of the video, and suggest it might be a straight-up marketing campaign.  Another writer-of-games-related-stuff, Quintin “Quinns” Smith, noted that it may have worked to then, as a different character, arrive at the airport too late, and be forced to soak up the bloody atmosphere of the aftermath of what you’ve just done.

I’ve considered all these ideas, and agree to an extent.  To bounce off Quinns’ idea, I found myself thinking it would be nice to play as the CIA operative, barricaded into a room somewhere with a group of civilians, watching on in horror as the scene unfolded, powerless to do anything.  I find the agency troubling in a way: that I have to partake in this, rather than watching from afar.  Yet at the same time, this agency is sort of key to why it works.

Indie game Edmund also features a particularly disturbing sequence. Do the low-res graphics make a difference?

‘No Russian’ makes me feel guilty for even watching it, let alone playing it.  With that gun in hand, whether you shoot or not, you’re forced to be complicit with this terrible massacre.  It does not have to be a statement of intent from the player – this is a scripted event, after all – but it is placing you in the shoes of someone doing something unthinkably horrible.  And the feelings that emerge from this enslaved act are beyond what a great majority of videogames are capable of.

That’s why I think ‘No Russian’ marks an important and significant moment in the history of gaming.  Tuesday 10th November was the date on which a piece of mainstream interactive entertainment had you gun down unarmed, innocent civilians, with no tongue in cheek, with a look of deadly seriousness, and in a way that made you feel utterly horrible.  It is a step towards the unthinkable in videogames, a real boundary of taste demolished, and I can only get behind that.

Do works of art have to be morally sound to stand up?  That’s been a great dillema in a few media.  Consider the Triumph of the Will, a film that glorified the Nazi party, condemned by critics but lauded by cinematographers as one of the most beautifully crafted, intentionally uneasy works of cinema in all of the medium’s history.  I wouldn’t want to hold Modern Warfare 2 on the same pillar as that, but the parallel’s there.  If The Path did it for indie games back in March, asking that you marched young girls into the woods in order for them to be “ravaged” by “wolves”, Modern Warfare 2 is doing it for the mainstream gaming hardcore today.  I’m going to give Infinity Ward the benefit of the doubt, as for this, I really want to praise them for being fantastically brave.

Interestingly, another indie game played with a similarly repugnant act and the agency thing a while back.  It’s called Edmund, and features a scene in which your character rapes a woman at a bus stop.  I’d be interested to hear from people who’ve played both (Edmund is free, incidentally, and will run on everyone’s computers) what they thought of the comparison.  Obviously, Edmund is pixel-art whereas Modern Warfare 2’s animations are almost uncomfortably realistic.  I mean, check out the bit in ‘No Russian’ where the guy sits, obviously panicking, bleeding from the stomach.  I have no doubt that this added to my repulsion.  So is it because of the agency that we aren’t comfortable with this, or is it a realism thing too?  Are we pushing it too far?

Yeah, we probably are.  But I’ll defend devs’ right to do so for all time.

FYI, the film is about Arthur and his two children who inherit his Uncle Cyrus’s estate: a glass house that serves as a prison to 12 ghosts, who by the way are TERRIFYING. If that’s not bad enough, the house also happens to be a machine ‘designed by the devil and powered by the dead’ which is the opening to the Eye of Hell – lucky Arthur eh? Some of the hideous creations that the family are hunted by are The Torso, a man with no legs who drags himself along the ground with his bloody hands with his head screaming nearby in cellophane, The Jackal, a rapist in a straightjacket whose head is locked inside a metal cage, and The Juggernaut, the ghost of a serial killer who is seven feet tall and whose body is full of bullet holes. Rather them than me, frankly. And you gotta hand it to ‘em, its pretty original.

Despite some slight lapses in script, and some rambling action towards the end, the acting’s pretty good, especially from Dennis the ghost hunter who makes me laugh and cry during the course of the film. If you want a horror that is guaranteed to gross you out, freak you out, and give you a few genuine scares, then get on your witch’s broom to Blockbusters and rent Thirteen Ghosts.

UP is beautiful in its simplicity in the way that its simplicity is beautiful – and I honestly believe that sentence sums up the film more than the rest of this write up will. You see, for all its complicated and wonderful new technologies that easily make it the prettiest animated film to date, it deals with the most identifiable of human emotion: loss. We all know what it feels like to lose someone (Unless you’re lucky then its just something) and our leading character Carl Fredricksen (Edward Asner – Mary Tyler Moore) begins his film by meeting someone, loving someone and losing someone. It is a stout introduction that simulataniously sets up the plotline and attaches us to the Carl’s character. It sounds like such a simple thing to do on a ground level: make the audience like the main character. But its slightly more tricky when it comes to getting an adult audience to genuinely feel some emotion for an animated character.

After the film grabs your attention with its tear jerking introduction and makes evident its central theme, things really start moving. Town planners want to tear down Carl’s house, but he insist he isn’t going anywhere. We meet Russell, a young Wilderness Explorer (A Scout club) and incidentally Disney/Pixar’s first America-Chinese character and suddenly the pace really accelerates and it becomes more and more difficult to dislike the film.  Carl and his wife always had the same dream as children, to become famous explorers just like their idol, Charles F. Muntz. They wanted to explore South America, but a montage of a penny jar getting filled up and then repeated smashed open to pay for a series of unfortunate accidents (Broken limbs, fell trees, car tyres) explains that they could never afford it. These simple uses of imagery shorten any lengthy explanation, making the story simple and evident for the young, old and stupid whilst not taking up any screen time.  An incident with a builder means that Carl is forced into a retirement home, but he decides to take things into his own hand. He attaches thousands of balloons to his house and flies his house away. His wife placed a picture of their house on top of Paradise Fall’s and Carl intends to make his late wife’s dream come true. Unfortunatley, he accidentally takes Russell with him and all of the elements that are so rapidly put into place collide all at once.

The fact that we spend so little time in one place helps keep you hooked, but no matter which location you find yourself in it is so beautifully realised that you can’t help but just accept it. I can never help but find a sense of irony with 3D animated film. Animation as a medium is meant to be an extension of reality, but the ultimate goal of 3D animation is to try and make things look as real as possible. Well, UP certainly does take 3D visuals to a whole new level and the directors really make the most of these scenes. We are constantly looking over beautiful landscapes, just soaking in the wonderful view. After the gritty, grungy polluted Earth we saw in, Wall-E, its absolutley incredible that the company can just turn on their heel and bring us such an incredible pretty version our Earth, a version so nice infact that I think I would rather live in that world than in this one! But should I be surprised? It is Disney/Pixar and it is their job.

The great thing about UP is that something is always happening and you almost always have a smile on your face. The characters are so fantastically realised, both visually and in personality that you can’t help but find yourself caring for them and as the story unfolds. There isn’t anything particularly new here, its the basic Disney plot of self-discovery, but surely that isn’t the point. Disney/Pixar manage to get you involved in with the characters something that the vast majority of live-action dramas don’t manage to do these days. Here we have characters, that I as an adult know are not real, but yet I find myself caring for them more than I have ever done with say somebody from Hollyoaks or EastEnder. I meet a lot of Disney-bashers being an independent animator myself, but I can never quite grasp why. Yes, they are a huge conglomerate company. Yes, they pioneered the animation industry and pushed other companies into the background. Yes, fine. But maybe people just miss the point. When it comes to Disney films, it about the films, not the company that makes them.

The magic of Disney is that they make me feel like a child again. I see plenty of films, both animated and live-action that make me feel like an adult. But there are very few companies that produce things that make me feel young, that make me want to believe that these bizarre, magical scenarios could actually take place and no other company in the world makes me feel that way.

Get Crucial!

Films that I loved such as The Breakfast Club, Karate Kid and Weird Science seemed so foreign, exciting and romantic that as soon as the credits rolled there would be a gnawing chasm in my stomach at the realisation that my life was so closed, so boring, so utterly provincial and small. But for me there is at least one film from that period that goes some way to portraying the tormented tedium of a suburban adolescence, 1989’s Heathers.

Wallowing in the jet black comedy waters of teenage suicide, Heathers is a skewed morality tale that pitches Christian Slater’s psychotic JD against Winona Ryder’s popular but unhappy Veronica. Driven by a half cocked sense of social responsibility the nefarious pair begin to knock off their classmates, all the while framing the murders to look like suicides. Before long they’ve created a ridiculous media frenzy and committing hara-kiri becomes literally too cool for school.

Slater is the dark heart of the film, effortlessly pulling off the feat of making a serial killer the most likeable character by far. It was this late 80s-early 90s period that really cemented Slater as a big star as he appeared in rebellious teen flicks like Pump Up The Volume and Gleaming The Cube. And so what if he is playing a variation on the character he plays in every film he’s ever been in? He’s great! Just like the one song The Ramones reworked over and over again throughout their twenty two year career, Slater’s presence and Jack Nicholson-esque magnetism livens up any film. Damn, even his appalling English accent in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves is somehow endearing. And let’s not forget Winona Ryder. Ah Winona, she’s just a peach ain’t she? Her performance in Heathers is simultaneously wry, sexy and knowing, more than matching Slater in star quality.

Another element that has no doubt contributed to the films cult notoriety is the abundance of quote worthy dialogue that includes classic zingers like, “Why are you pulling my dick?”, “Get Crucial!”, and the fabulous, “I love my dead gay son”. Add to that a startling array of supporting characters such as Beverly Hills 90210 and Charmed star Shannen Doherty, and Heathers is a pretty enticing property.

The Fox network is apparently touting a Heathers TV show, which could go either way. Buffy the Vampire Slayer and M*A*S*H definitely benefited from the further exploration of themes dealt with in the original films. Although the less said about film spin-offs like Lock, Stock…, Freddy’s Nightmares and F/X: The Series, the better. But for now I for one will reserve judgement and content myself with an ice cold can of Tab Clear, a family sized bag of Opal Fruits and Heathers on DVD.

When it comes to underrated Chinese zombie films from the late nineties in which Lucozade has been tainted by some top-secret military bio-weapon, one of my favourites is Biozombie (1998).

Quirky, funny and lacking in the usual gore and violence of a traditional zombie flick, Biozombie is perhaps Hong Kong’s answer to Romero’s seminal Dawn of the Dead. Set almost entirely in a shopping mall, the film focuses on two video bootleggers who, during the course of the film, mug, scam and screw over as many people as possible. But you end up warming to them; their characters are complex and arresting. Then the zombies come. I’m not going to spoil the story, but with themes of survival, unrequited love and domestic violence all interwoven into the story, you know that it’s going to be interesting viewing.

One word of warning: you need to watch this film in the original Chinese, as I recently had the misfortune of watching a dubbed version. When I realised early on in the film that the names of the characters had been literally translated from the Chinese (a girl called Sushi becomes Rolls, yes, Rolls), it was going to be rough ride. With the two main characters sounding like bad parodies of Bill and Ted, you lose all empathy for them and wish zombie death upon them before the zombies have even turned up. Far from the emotionally gripping film as described above, something is lost in translation.