Dead exciting

In this remake of George Romero's 1970s B-movie favourite, Sarah Polley stars as a nurse who wakes up one morning to find her husband covered in blood, baring his teeth, and making sharp acrobatic movements about the bedroom. Rather than calling the hospital for the morning off, she gets the hell out of there, and soon discovers that the whole town, the whole of America, and possibly the whole world has been infected with a revolting zombie fever.

The streets throng with dead-ish ghouls. They move fast, filled with rage, their eyes red and fluorescent blue, like people who mistook chlorine for Optrex the night after a drinking binge.

Polley hides at a nearby shopping mall with a handful of survivors, but their chances are not good. One by one, they are picked off by the fever. There are tears, huddles and people being wildly unfriendly as the mall sound system pipes out an orchestrated version of I'm All Outta Love.

The formidable Polley - hardly your average horror-flick popsie - occasionally stands on the roof of the mall, looking out into the bleak distance, like Ozymandias staring across the desert. Then someone shrieks downstairs and it is time to blow a head off. It is ferocious and young and exciting, and rather like the terrific 28 Days Later but without the overwhelming sense of dread or Christopher Eccleston in uniform.

Dawn Of The Dead
Cert: 18