I wasn't expecting this to be up to much, to be honest. I had a lethargy hanging off me like some thick arterial spray when I sat down to watch it. Yeah, it's alright, I was thinking. Above average so far, but there's only five minutes gone, so it's got plenty of time to suck like Divine Brown on the set of Notting Hill.

Then the credits roll, and they go for a Mondo-esque montage of CCTV footage and so on that shows these zombies going about the place and chewing folks arms off and screaming and so on, kind of like the credits to 28 Days Later, except here they perform the masterstroke of having Johnny Cash sing The Man Comes Around over it all, by way of suggesting that this is some kind of Armageddon carry on, except the proper Armageddon what was in the Bible, and not the one with Mr. Pink and Bruce Willis drilling holes in rocks.

Unfortunately, the film shoots itself in the foot by even bothering with all this, admittedly very effective, non-zombified set-up. There is no sense that this is truly an apocalyptic disaster, rather it just feels like some hilarious escapade that has no bearing on anything whatsoever. And this is a shame, because they've gone to great lengths to convince us of the catastrophe afoot. There are hundreds, thousands of zombies prancing around the streets. There are cool aerial shots of cars crashing into one another and exploding and so on, all those things that movie cars do when they collide. But it feels trivial, somehow.

Romero never granted us that sense of normality at any point in his film. He opened on a television studio populated with a few survivors, and there was every sense that hell had truly spat out the dead, and there was no escape. It was claustrophobic, unsettling as a bad case of haemorrhoids, and totally credible.

This here, this just feels like an episode of Buffy or some such, just one more escapade that'll all be alright in the morning.

But aside from that, this is some enjoyable carnage right here. The zombies, surprisingly, aren't really the focus of the shenanigans; rather, the few characters hauled up in the mall get most of the screen time. When the undead do arrive however, they provide much entertainment. The make-up is terrific, with the shuffling denizens awash with boils and burns and all sorts of unpleasant facades. And the gore, for those of us who enjoy a bit of the old ultraviolence, is more than adequate. It hardly ascends to Fulci-esque levels of Face-Eating-Tarantula splendour, but it's incredibly messy nonetheless. Spikes through skulls, shotgun blasts to the face, all of this and more awaits the voyager of the multiplex.