NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD 3D

CONTAINS VERY MAJOR SPOILERS

Well, it's supposed to be in 3D but in practice it just came over as a double exposure - none of my 3D glasses split the image properly so I stopped it after the opening credits and played the 2D version instead. This meant I got a nice crisp image instead of two badly overlaid ones. Sadly it didn't make the movie any better. Because - shock horror - this latest colour remake of George A Romero's gamechanger of a zombie movie is a load of pants: big stretchy ones with questionable stains all over them.

For a start, Night Of The Living Dead 3D (which is the title on screen whichever way you watch it) has been done on a very low budget with extremely cheap zombie effects, but without any of the skill, so it really looks like just another back-garden horror movie that someone's made with their mates over a weekend. Much of the basic plot shadows the original: Barbara and Johnny visit the cemetery; zombies show up out of nowhere; Barbara flees and ends up at the Cooper house where they're besieged by the flesh eating undead. But every so often it throws something new into the mix - mainly Sid Haig as the local undertaker who hasn't been doing his job properly, which doesn't really work as it tries to explain the zombie outbreak origins.

More damagingly, genius-in-charge Jeff Broadstreet has seen fit to incorporate Romero's original into his own narrative, by way of having a bunch of his characters sit around watching it on TV. Hey, it's a respectful homage, and anyway it's in Public Domain so it won't cost anything. Yet not once do any of them remark upon the similarities: the Cooper family home invaded firstly by a bloke called Ben and a woman called Barbara babbling about a zombie attack, and then by the walking dead themselves punching through the windows and doors. Then again, everyone is whacked out on drugs, which not only makes them crashingly unsympathetic but crashingly dull as well. Even hunky heroic type Ben is ultimately revealed as a dealer using his drug money to put himself through college. Once that point is reached, I'm on the side of the zombs.

It's a mess, it's not scary, it's not overly gory (it's only a 15), it doesn't make sense and it's full of imbecilic stoners or drug pushers. And the 3D doesn't work. Just watch the Romero version again, or even the Tom Savini remake from the early 90s. But this is just rubbish.

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