While the Zombie genre is fast becoming overloaded, first time helmer Ruben Fleisher has an ace up his sleeve – he couldn’t care less. While writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick have produced a sharp, funny -and most importantly genre-savvy – script, they pull off the clever trick of ramming metadialogue into a post-apocalyptic world that brings absolutely nothing new to the table. There are no knowing nods to the camera, no attempt to make the Zombies unique, they’re your basic, shuffling, brain-munching simpletons, wobbling mindlessly around the Midwest – and latterly, Beverly Hills – and generally annoying our heroes as they casually subvert the romantic comedy road movie for all it’s worth.

Jesse Eisenberg is the first survivor to appear on screen, and he’s in fine form as he relays his nerdy rules for staying alive, including such gems as “cardio- the fatties were the first to go because they were easier to catch”.

Eisenberg comes off like a young Woody Allen for the first act, hooking up with ex-House Bunny Emma Stone and her young sister – an adorably murderous Abigail Breslin – on a quest to California in search of a Zombie-free paradise. While it’s amusing enough in its own right, the nebbishness starts to run out of gas fairly quickly, leaving you unsure where this is heading.

Then Woody Harrelson turns up.

The role of dedicated Zombie killer Tallahassee appears to have been custom written for him, and he revels in it, playing a sort of dim-but-good-natured good ol’ boy – think Woody from Cheers meets The Terminator – a gun toting maniac with a decent helping of common sense; his expression as Stone tells him “There’s no Zombies in California” is worth the admission price alone.

Fleisher shows some fantastic comedy timing as the methods of dispatching the undead become increasingly creative – the piano dropped on head being particularly noteworthy – and the cinematography alternates between some fantastic Evil Dead handheld, transforming one bull in a souvenir shop sequence into a frantic piece of comedy gold, while some truly unsettling desert vistas accomplish everything Resident Evil aspired to in an instant, actually adding some poignant notes to the carnage and laughs.

Overall it’s a great, quick witted hour and a half of comedy violence, not afraid to alternate between puerile and dark, dry humour, it never comes off as unbalanced. A great, shocking ride that’s been done before, but never quite like this.

Let’s face it, no one likes a downbeat ending, which is why we’re all grateful to studios for changing the end of ‘Brazil’ to make it happy, and while there’s a million one-minute movies doing the rounds, this one from Whycantihavespaces gets special kudos for taking a light hearted approach to that most bummer-ist of genres –the zombie movie.

News from Variety this morning involving half-man half-cliché Rob Zombie, and his attempts to “break out of the horror genre”…by remaking seminal horror The Blob…

Now, this doesn’t make much sense, but Rob is probably smoking a lot of Peyote, so we’ll let it slide for now. Having already suffered the ignominy of Frank Darabont’s 80s do-over, the creeping space jelly that launched Steve McQueen’s career is set to get a whole new look.

“My intention is not to have a big red blobby thing – that’s the first thing I want to change,” Sayeth the erstwhile Superbeast. “That gigantic Jello-looking thing might have been scary to audiences in the 1950s, but people would laugh now.”

Having seen ‘House of 1000 Corpses’ STS suggests that laughter may still be on the menu, but expect to see Rob’s wife in the lead sometime in 2011.

Sometimes you can be forgiven for suspecting the movie you’re about to sit through is going to be woeful claptrap. Cemetery Man seems, from the cover, to satisfy every criteria for this kind of low expectation. It stars Rupert Everett, for Christ’s sake. But then, through sheer insanity and stupidity, it three-sixties into one of the most wonderfully over-the-top showcases for madness you’re ever going to see. When a film goes so far out of its way to make you look at the screen aghast, it has to have something going for it. And it’s this kind of care-free idiocy that marks Cemetery Man as a cut above other overlooked zombie flicks. It simply doesn’t seem to care what you think of it. It’s a bloody-minded lunatic of a film.

For starters, this Italian production mentions Berlusconi in a production capacity as the credits roll. And after they’ve rolled, you realise the sound mix is so creakily dubbed that you’re going to be spending the next hour or so watching mouths move just out of synch with what you’re hearing. Add to this Everett’s overpowering voiceover, his usual plummy tones overridden by a strange attempt at a mockney-ish drawl, and you’re in very dodgy territory indeed. But then the premise is explained and, with Everett as resident zombie-killer at a cemetery where the dead suddenly walk again, seven days after burial, the first killing brings the fun to the fore fantastically quickly.

Everett plays Francesco Dellamorte and his comic foil is his chubby gravedigging co-worker, Gnaghi – an irritatingly stupid, semi-mute tit. Gnaghi is responsible for a great deal of the trouble Francesco finds himself in, though most of his woes stem from the libido he’s rumoured not have. He’s an impotent outcast as far as the townsfolk are concerned, and the scenes whenever Francesco leaves the cemetery for town are unintentionally hilarious, with extras who are clearly Italian – with scooters, greased ponytails etc… – speaking in obviously dubbed Dick Van Dyke accents. The dialogue is terrible whenever there are more than two people onscreen, and even then it’s shaky. But your forgive it because you know another glorious set piece is right around the corner. The frantic tone is set from the off.

By the final third, things go from fast to frenetic and it begins to feel like the wilful insanity of Evil Dead II has been reborn in an Italian movie version of The Bold & The Beautiful. With hilarious action juxtaposed with brilliantly bad dialogue and one-liners, it can’t fail to be the an almost completely improbable winner. Who’d have thought it?

Zombie flicks are partially about man’s inhumanity to man and, while Deadgirl does follow this pattern, it has enough of a twist to elevate it above it’s straight-to-DVD roots.

The setup is simple and dispensed with quickly – two high school stoners are fooling around in an abandoned hospital when a huge feral dog attacks them, forcing them to hide in a basement where they discover the girl of the title – naked, beautiful, strapped to a table and seemingly stone-cold dead. So – inform the police, or, as J.T (Shiloh Fernandez) suggests… “Keep her.”

As it turns out (naturally) the girl isn’t just well preserved, she’s an undead. A genuine, unkillable, flesh eating Zombie. But, as long as she’s strapped down and no threat, she’s also a gorgeous naked woman. You can see where this is going.

By turns poignant and depraved, this is also a great exercise in tension-building. There is eventually a full on undead attack but duel Directors Sarmiento and Harel make us wait for it. For most of the movie the girl becomes the least of the boys worries, the group growing as the school bully discovers their very dirty secret. The only external threat being the aforementioned guard dog, the moral battle is where it’s at here. The lust for sex without consequences pits friends against one-other as they struggle to control their baser urges.

Throughout the visuals are kept locked down, allowing things to play out as creepy courtroom drama rather than jokey gore-fest, a kind of ‘Twelve Horny Men’. While the acting is bumpy, there is a good dynamic on screen, with Fernandez in particular conveying his quiet battle with his conscience excellently, especially during moments when he’s tempted to give in, all the strain and bubbling undercurrents appearing in short bursts and ramping the mood up fantastically.

Edge-of-seat tension and some surprisingly clear depictions of sexual depravity, Deadgirl is great little shocker that will please any horror fan. And it’ll hopefully find a wider audience as well – it’s on limited release later this month, so do make an effort to see it. It’s one of the best horror films so far this year.