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Redcon-1

7/10

Stars: Oris Erhuero, Carlos Gallardo, Mark Strange, Katarina Leigh Waters, Jasmine Mitchell, Joshua Dickinson, Euan Macnaughton

Director: Chee Keong Cheung

The Living Dead, who been have prowling cinema screens since Victor Halperin’s White Zombie in 1932, have become a horror movie staple as well as being drained of much of their scare factors by the genre being reworked - sanitised for advertising revenue, of course - for television.

Now zombies return in bloody fine form (while not creatively breaking any major genre tropes) in this low-budget, high impact shocker which benefits from having no star names to dilute the impact of the key characters.

The key characters are, of course (as the genre demands) the slavering, murderous, blood-spitting living dead who are infecting South East England, now quarantined after the zombie-creating virus spread from a prison in London to infect the United Kingdom with blood-hungry living dead who, no longer merely murderous shambling creatures who, while lacking compassion, without a soul and minus a heartbeat, are capable of more than simply munching on the luckless living, develop enhanced combat skills.

Which leaves a squad of eight special forces captained by Erhuero being sent on a suicide mission into the quarantined South East to find the scientist whose experiment created the zombies and bring him out alive.

Give director Cheung his due. With a patently low budget he creates a series of shocking gore-horror scenes made all the more effective for lack of unfamiliar faces engaged in battling the zombies and his visions of infested London are genuinely unsettling.

Blood and entrails - and there are plenty on display - are credibly recreated to add to the impact of a low-budget shocker that delivers enough shocks to satisfy genre lovers and - who knows - might even infect non-horror film fans.

Alan Frank

UK 2018. UK Distributor: Intense Productions Ltd. Colour.
117 minutes. Widescreen. UK certificate: 18.

Guidance ratings (out of 3): Sex/nudity 2, Violence/Horror 3, Drugs 2, Swearing 3.

Review date: 29 Sep 2018