Aja’s decision to dunk as many nipples in the fish tank as piranha tickled my fancies like a feather duster.

After all, if you’re eating sushi, you may as well get wet.

Piranha 3D: Reworking Joe Dante’s original

Aja’s re-working of Joe Dante’s 1978 original delivers exactly what it promises – the best and worst traditions of 70s exploitation cinema.

The Switchblade Romance and Hills Have Eyes alumni tones down his trademark visceral gore and ramps up the cheese factor.

Like a block of mature cheddar, Aja sets sail in his fishing boat and docks at Port Homage to Gimmicky Horror B-Movies. Piranha’s low-budget, eye-popping 3D effects, jump out of the screen in an affectionate Cormanesque throwback.

The premise, of course, is as shaky as an arthritic golfer. When a tremor in Lake Havasu, Ariz, fractures the lake floor, a prehistoric strain of piranha emerge to unleash a reign of terror on the half-naked Spring Break populace.

When all is said and done, though, the movie is a love letter to the excessive horror films which defined the 70s – nothing more, nothing less.

Piranha 3D: Fish Food

Piranha 3D is a gimmicky b-movie with about as much depth as a dried up lake. Luckily, director Aja never takes things too seriously and the tongue-in-cheek sensibilities mean it’s hard to dislike the movie.

If you’re expecting a crisp, effects-driven horror with an obligatory twist, then you’ll probably be sorely disappointed.

But, if like me, you enjoy the finer things in life such as breasts, beer and killer fish, give it a whirl.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

True to form, Resident Evil Afterlife is a blend of good and bad and like a Mars Bar, too many will leave you feeling sick.

Resident Evil Afterlife: WTF Just Happened?

Thirty minutes into Resident Evil Afterlife and I hadn’t a clue what was going on. Like a nudist who accidentally stumbled onto the set of a porn film, things were unclear.

From what I could tell, the action unfolds in a world ravaged by a virus infection where Alice, played by Mila Jovovich, continues her battle against the Umbrella Corporation.

To get a handle on the film, refer to the opening scene where the antagonist is established in unintentionally hilarious fashion. The camera settles on a ominous figure clad head-to-toe in black, a pair of obligatory shades hanging from his angular face – a clear signifier of villainous qualities if ever I’ve seen one.

Prowling an underground command centre with the menace of a lost duck, an insubordinate henchman makes the mistake of questioning his authority. Like any good boss, Mr Black responds in kind by shooting him in the face – ohhh, nasty. Casually turning around, he asks: “Does anybody else have any questions?”

Enough said.

Resident Evil Afterlife: Cliché City

After the confusion of the opening, Resident Evil Afterlife settles down into a half decent zombie-escape movie. With a nod to the claustrophobic settings of Dawn of the Dead and Escape from New York, Alice takes refuge in a ramshackle building.

As it turns out, her current place of residence is in fact a prison. Luckily enough, the guy from Prison Break – Wentworth Miller – turns up to break her out.

What are the odds of that?

If I ever wound up trapped inside a zombie-infested prison, I’d want old Wentworth as my cell mate.

Resident Evil: The film Franchise continues

It’s no spoiler to say the movie’s finale clearly hints that the audience can expect to see Resident Evil back in the cinemas at some point in the future. While the franchise continues to turn a profit, no doubt we’ll be inundated with sequels. Like a fat guy in a sweet shop, it makes perfect economic sense.

While I can’t really recommended Resident Evil Afterlife, I’ll say this: if you choose to watch it, remove your brain and place carefully in the nearest available washing machine because you won’t be needing it any time soon.

In the words of my good mate Ron Seal, Resident Evil Afterlife does “exactly what it says on the tin”.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

So it was that I watched Survival of the Dead only to find zombie maestro, George A Romero, had pipped me to the post.

My dream of mayo-faced zombies was no more.

Survival of the Dead: Romero Gets Things Terribly Wrong

The latest instalment in Romero’s ‘dead man walking’ saga is more amateurish than a Swedish porn film. Survival of the Dead is so bad, it’s bad. There is nothing good to say about it.

Romero has lost the plot.

Survival of the Dead might actually be the worst film I’ve ever seen. At the very least, it’s the worst movie to have passed my eyes in recent years.

To say this about the guy who brought us Night of the Living Dead and The Crazies makes my mind spin faster than an angry washing machine.

Romero Goes Down With the Zombie Ship

There was a time when the name George A Romero meant something. Like Santa, the Pope, Elvis and Richard Branson, he’d done great things.

His best work, Night of the Living Dead, reshaped the zombie genre. Trendsetting cinematography and a biting sociopolitical subtext made for a classic movie.

Survival of the Dead is absent of any of these qualities. The script is ridiculous, acting terrible and direction even worse. I don’t think it would even pass as a student film.

I’d discuss the plot but you already know what happens.

And if you’re making a movie which centres on zombies, at least make them scary. The zombies roaming Survival of the Dead look like a bunch of drunken homeless guys.

Survival of the Dead: Devoid of Thrills and Spills

Survival of the Dead is a marker of how far Romero has fallen. His stock has plummeted faster than a Wall Street broker. It’s his worst film to date and his output seems to be getting progressively worse.

Comparing Night of the Living Dead with Survival of the Dead is like measuring the acting abilities of Robert De Niro with Dolph Lundgren – you just don’t do it.

More disappointing than an empty Christmas stocking, the only thing disturbing about Survival of the Dead is just how bad it is.

Rating: 0.5 out of 5 stars

The British director, famed for tightly constructed, low-budget horror movies, tones down the glamour of films such as 300 and Gladiator in favour of his trademark, gritty approach.

Centurion delivers exactly what you’d expect from a Marshall movie: crunching battles, gallons of blood and frenetic action. For all its promise though, Centurion is a pretty tame affair.

Centurion: Breaking Heads, Not New Ground

Centurion is ostensibly a chase movie which centres on a band of chard Roman soldiers spearheaded by the ambidextrous talent of Michael Fassbender.

And the film follows a tight pattern: a mischievous scallywag slits the throats of credulous characters every other minute. Gallons of blood gush forth with the force of a broken water main.

At first, this is shocking, perhaps even a little exciting. It doesn’t take long till you’ve become desensitised to the violence, though. If you rub mustard on your face for long enough, I suppose it might start to get annoying.

Centurion: A Sword and Sandals Movie for the 21st Century

Centurion is a tightly made film which carries the idiosyncratic stamp we’ve come to expect from Marshall.

It is a decent movie.

Be that as it may, it’s my least favourite in his back-catalogue. Centurion’s ceaseless carnage chomps up the charm and wit of Doomsday, The Descent and Dog Soldiers.

That’s not to say Centurion is without humour. The band of burley Roman conquerors sound like a group of lads down the local on a Saturday night and there are some one-liners, so clunky, that they must have been intentional.

Centurion is average fare but still packs a harder punch than the majority of historical action films to emerge from Hollywood.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

With the odd exception, these re-imaginings melt into nothingness faster than an ice-cube in a cup of coffee.

The Crazies, a reinvention of the George A. Romero classic, is a bit of a loose canon, then, because it’s actually pretty good.

The Crazies: Cooler than the Fonze

Director Breck Eisner handles The Crazies with a level of confidence you wouldn’t expect from the guy who made Sahara. There is little evidence of this Matthew McConaughey misstep in his latest project. Instead, Eisner cobbles together a stylish take on an overused storyline.

The Crazies features Timothy Olyphant as the sheriff of an idyllic small-town in Middle America. One viral outbreak later and all mayhem breaks loose. The sheriff and his wife go on the lam as they vie to outsmart the infected townsfolk and trigger happy US military.

The Crazies taps into the political subtext of Romero’s original and updates it for the modern audience. Eisner substitutes Vietnam undertones with public paranoia, the terror threat and fear of our neighbours, chemical warfare and disease – it’s all very timely.

The Crazies: The American Dream Gone Wrong

As with so many movies, the crumbling of the American Dream is at the heart of The Crazies. It was also at the heart of Romero’s version.

It’s a testament to the zombie-tsar’s prophetic filmmaking abilities that the themes infused in his back-catalogue are still relevant today.

Perhaps Romero had a crystal ball? With that silky white beard he could quite easily pass for a wizard.

It’s more likely though that he simply knows what we all do: that as long as humans walk Planet Earth, strife will never be more than a few steps behind.

Some things, after all, never change.

The Crazies: A Remake Which Works

The Crazies is a competent enough genre film with enough blood flow to quench the thirst of ardent horror fans.

Well shot, paced and full of effective music cues, The Crazies is a welcome entry in the raft of substandard remakes to have emerged from Hollywood in recent years.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Hollywood continues to suck every inch of life out of the vampire genre. The market is awash with movies about blood sucking fiends – and I’m not talking about Michael Bay.

It’s always refreshing then to see a movie like Daybreakers challenge the accepted formula.

Despite its best efforts though, Daybreakers never really lives up to its intriguing premise.

Daybreakers: A Vampire movie with a Difference

Daybreakers kicks things off by turning the vampire genre on its head. The world looks different upside down. Vampires are the dominant race, the dwindling human population reduced to mere paupers.

With the blood supply drying up, the Vampire mainstream faces a race against time to secure their survival.

Cut straight from the dystopian cloth of George Orwell’s 1984, Daybreakers presents an interesting exposé on life in the vampire kingdom. And the socio-political subtext is rather timely. Daybreakers subtly explores issues of immigration, the class divide and the financial crisis.

The Gothic Aesthetic in the 21^st Century

Michael and Peter Spierig, the writing/directing duo behind this near-future vampire thriller, seamlessly blend the Gothic aesthetic with the film’s 2017 timestamp.

The beautifully rendered set design echoes the gothic landscapes of Tim Burton’s Batman.

I’m not sure why, but this reminds me of a story:

A few days back I bumped into pop-star Cliff Richard at a health food store. Cliff was rummaging through the dried foods section when I got to telling him about an old school friend of mine – also named Richard – who had the misfortune of falling off a cliff many years earlier.

He plummeted 50 foot onto a cluster of jagged rocks below. Doctors said it was a miracle that he walked away with little more than cuts and bruises.

Kids being kids though, he quickly earned the title of Cliff Richard. A name, I might add, which stands till this day. My pop-star buddy looked back at me with disbelief as I assured him of the story’s veracity.

Daybreakers: Now Where Was I?

…Oh yeah, the set and lighting design is superb.

Michael and Peter Spierig create immersive environments the likes of which can be seen in classics such as Children of Men, Dark City and Blade Runner.

But as the saying goes: looks aren’t everything.

After the 40 minute mark, the intriguing premise ends as so many movies do these days. It goes all Transformers. Fight scenes aplenty explode off the screen as the fate of the world rests in the hands of a group of characters. Throw in an army of machine gun-toting vampires and the rest is history.

To its credit , Daybreakers resists the temptation of engaging in Matrix-style fighting. Slow-mo kung-fu has become the lazy man’s answer to action nowadays. So it’s interesting that our heroes in Daybreakers are about as handy with their fists as Ghandi.

It’s always boggled my mind how, in many vampire films, the living dead emerge from their muddy graves with the skill set of Bruce Lee. If my childhood taught me anything, it’s that you can’t learn the ways of the ninja simply by watching Karate Kid.

Daybreakers: Time for the Sun to Come Up

Daybreakers is a promising work that falls down under the weight of its own limitations.

In the end it simply bites off more than it can chew – and I tried so hard to avoid vampire puns in this review!

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars – available on Blu-ray and DVD

This isn’t perhaps the greatest endorsement of a film which centres on the fear of slumber.

A Nightmare on Elm Street: Helps You Sleep Easier

Mr Bay’s production company is in the process of remaking every classic horror it can lay its hands on. With the odd exception, I’ve been largely under whelmed by the output.

True to form, this contemporary re-imagining looks as though it’s been dragged backwards through a petrol station. Each frame of the movie drips with oily colours.

Through the squint of strained eyes, I could just about make out what was going on and I can tell you, there wasn’t much.

A Nightmare on Elm Street: A Nightmare of a Movie

A Nightmare on Elm Street stays true to the majority of horror remakes, turning up the gore factor to 11. That’s not to say that the 1984 version was without bloody jolts. But director, Samuel Bayer, soaks his re-imagining in so much tomato sauce that it washes away the subtle subtext of the original.

The story borrows heavily from the Wes Craven version. A band of teenagers – yes they are attractive – all suffer from the same recurring nightmare. Deep within the surreal world of their dreams they are stalked by Freddy Krueger – a disfigured killer wielding a knife-fingered glove.

Riding the Surrealistic Horror Wave of the 80’s

Along with Hellraiser maestro Clive Barker, Craven reinvented the horror genre during the 80s. A Nightmare on Elm Street explored surrealism through an architecture of dreams.

Cast your mind back to the scene of a demented tongue bursting through the phone, or the long-armed menace of Freddy Krueger stalking his prey down a darkened alleyway.

Bayer’s remake restages a number of key moments from the first film, but the fantastical is quickly consumed by an overflowing blood bath.

A Nightmare on Elm Street is nastier than the original, but in all the wrong ways.

Freddy Krueger: Advertising Throat Lozenges

Jackie Earle Haley’s Freddy Krueger bears little resemblance to Robert Englund’s suitably over-the-top portrayal. Englund delivered an array of witty one-liners before making a porkpie out of his victims.

Haley, on the other hand, has little to play with. Consequently, the Bogey Man is dead.

And what’s with Haley’s vocal choices? He sounds like Christian Bail’s Batman, crossed with Barry White after smoking a 20 pack. His baritone is deeper than the Atlantic Ocean.

A Nightmare on Elm Street: Time to go Sleepies

The remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street was more disappointing than an empty Christmas stocking.

While it has a few jolts, it fails to pack the punch and invention of the original.

One thing’s for sure though: if you’re having trouble sleeping, A Nightmare on Elm Street will knock you out faster than a piano to the head.

Time to sleep…..zzzzzzzzzzzz

Rating: 1 out of 5 stars – available on Blu-ray and DVD

Removing the disc 125 minutes later, I asked the same question.

Final Destination 4: Death Comes Knocking at your Door

The first instalment of the franchise was a guilty pleasure, an array of original death scenes adding to the rewatch value. From memory, the second and third were just about acceptable. The fourth, however, nailed shut any interest I had in the series.

Final Destination 4 would be better titled, Final Desperation 4. Mirroring the formula of its predecessors, a group of attractive teens fight a losing battle against Death. Let’s face it: if you can’t see your enemy, you’re left dancing in the dark.

When your time’s up, your time’s up

It’s probably unfair to cast a critical net over Final Destination 4 – it’s hardly Citizen Kane.

Final Destination 4 is what it is.

Even so, the film was about as enjoyable as a conference on quantitative easing. Where’s the fun? Where’s the laughs. Where’s the splatter?

A creaking script is delivered with the charisma of a dead squirrel by a group of forgettable characters. The boredom is punctuated every five minutes or so as one uninventive death sequence unfolds after another.

I don’t have a problem with CG – used correctly filmmakers can create believable worlds in which viewers lose themselves. Final Destination 4, on the other hand, is a perfect example of when CG goes wrong.

If the death scenes weren’t bad enough, the poorly conceived CG effects took me right out of the film. Computer animated torsos and heads flew across the screen every other minute. But what did I care, I was in the kitchen making coffee.

Film School for the Horror Junkie

Final Destination 4 violates all the codes of good stomach-churning horror. There are a few staples of the genre which are a must.

Firstly, make us care about the characters. That way, when they lose their heads, it might actually carry some dramatic weight. Secondly, get the horror right. Think outside the box and get inventive. Why not decapitate a young heroine with a can opener? Just a thought.

It’s not rocket science, it’s simple mathematics.

Rating: 0.5 out of 5 stars – available on Blu-ray and DVD

Ok, so riddle me this: how is it that a film so good in the first half ends up sinking lower than a leaky fishing vessel in the second?

This is a question only House of the Devil director Ti West can truly answer. But given that Mr West is unavailable for comment, it seems only fair I give it a go.

A game of two halves…

Do you want the good news or the bad news first?

Let’s start with the good…

Mainstream Hollywood is presently preoccupied with remaking every film it can get its grubby hands on, so it’s always refreshing to see an original entry into the horror genre.

To Ti West’s credit, he brilliantly builds tension and audience expectation within the opening hour of House of the Devil.

College student Sam, played by Jocelin Donahue, is lured to a Victorian mansion deep in the woods in search of work. Desperate to earn cash to pay the rent on her new apartment, Sam reluctantly accepts a babysitting job despite sensing something is amiss.

And as the name of the movie suggests, the night ends in a bloody mess.

It’s not called House of the Devil for nothing…

The crackle and pop of the opening hour is infused with a fantastic 70s/80s grind house aesthetic. Unlike Tarantino’s Death Proof which reneges on its gritty cinematography half way through, House of the Dead remains true to its roots throughout.

So convincing were the stylistics that on a number of occasions I found myself scanning the sleeve of the DVD just to make sure that the movie wasn’t actually made during the 80s.

House of the Dead is of course a 2009 production, but the soundtrack and credit sequence channels the nostalgic joy of classics such as Halloween.

Fruity hair cuts, walkmans, dour clothing and a lead actress who looks as though she walked straight off the set of Starsky and Hutch, all add to the film’s evocative aesthetics.

Purring like a kitten at a milk factory, the build up is an exercise in pure cinematic class.

Where the movie falls down is in its cack-handed reveal.

As the mystery finally unfolds, what emerges is a clichéd ending that’s almost amateur in its execution.

Without giving too much away, the inevitable blood bath is one of the weakest payoffs I’ve seen of late.

It may be that the ending benefits from repeat viewings and I’m sure the final third is deliberate in its implementation.

But as the saying goes, sometimes you’ve just got to take the bad with the good.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars – available on Blu-ray and DVD

Single-minded entities with a taste for human flesh have long caused a collective shudder up the spine of cinema-going audiences.

But first-time director Ruben Fleischer had something different in mind when he set about filming last year’s unlikely hit, Zombieland.

When hell is full, the dead will walk the earth…

The aptly named Fleischer shows unnerving skill in his debut outing which veers away from the George A Romero-school of socio-political allegory.

What we get with Zombieland is a blend of horror and comedy that rivals the early works of horror maestro Sam Rami.

The movie is narrated by a character played by Jesse Eisenberg, named after his hometown of Columbus, Ohio. On his travels across post apocalyptic America, he encounters the gung-ho Tallahassee, played with aplomb by multi-talented Woody Harrelson.

An unlikely relationship ensues as Eisenberg’s cautiously introverted self clashes with Harrelson’s shoot first, ask questions later, mentality.

Geek sheik versus Last Action Hero…

The binary opposition between Eisenberg and Harrelson plays out like a boxing match between Judd Apatow and Wez Craven.

While this central pairing loses some of its punch when a romantic interest is introduced courtesy of Emma Stone’s Wichita, Fleischer’s clever direction and script never gives up on the laughs and splatter.

Zombieland fits neatly alongside Edgar Wright’s Shawn of the Dead, but ramps up the action set pieces in true Hollywood style.

Throw in a Ghostbusters related cameo and all-action amusement park ending, and the fun is all but guaranteed.

Inventive, funny and stomach-churning all in one, Zombieland is a must for any horror-comedy connoisseur.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars – available on Blu-ray and DVD