Devil's Playground

I sat through this bum-fluff at the recent GoreZone Festival in London's West End and almost lost the will to live before the opening credits had rolled. The prologue featuring bargain-basement 'action-man' Craig Fairbrass woodenly spouting even more wooden dialogue at the camera as a prep for the sub '28 Days Later' 'Rollercoaster' to come, made my heart sink faster than 'The Detonator' ride at Thorpe Park, and quickly proved its pedigree as a very bad omen for things to come.

Despite the first half hour containing a few nods to the guilty pleasures of Tobe Hooper's 'Lifeforce', there is little to no fun to be derived from this joyless and dispiritingly derivative Brit-Horror that scrapes the bottom of the 'Zombies-what-can-run' barrel into the dirt.

Accomplished camera-work and Sean Pertwee's hilarious cameo stave off some of the boredom, but a hopeless script and Danny Dyer's pathetic attempt at an emphatic hero put debut director Mark McQueen's puny entry into this exhausted genre deservedly into the dustbin of the underachieving undead.

Another plague has broken out in London, causing normal humans to become growling, flesh-chompiing zombies with cat-like quickness.

A small band of survivors hole up in a mechanic's garage, until they're forced to make a run for it.

DEVIL'S PLAYGROUND is one of the better "runner" or "infected" zombie films. Those still insisting that all such creatures must shamble slowly while moaning politely will be disappointed once more.

These biters are hopped up on goofballs! They're "free runners" like that maniac at the beginning of CASINO ROYALE!

An exhilarating experience...

A very low budget action/horror Brit flick featuring freerunning mutant zombie flesh eaters. Craig (Cliffhanger) Fairbrass and Danny (just about every recent cheapo-diamond-geezer pseudo-Arthur Mullard C-Grade megatrash straight-to-video Brit movie in recent years) Dyer take the leads.

The script and dialogue are pretty darned atrocious and the acting is sub-primary school nativity play standard. But, the pace is frenetic, the action violent and unrelenting, and it is a bit of mildly diverting fun. Plus, considering the budget must have stood at around £7.80 and a bag of chps, the convincing representation of London in the midst of a zombie apocalypse is fairly well rendered and quite suitably atmospheric.

There's plenty of punching, strangling, bludgeoning and shooting of the freerunning mutant zombie flesh eaters, and the very fact that the makers thought a Resident Evil type of virus McGuffin with the side-effect of gracing the stricken with parkour skills was a workable creative advance on the "28 Days Later" formula, makes it quite hilarious to watch at times.

Worth a look if you've nothing better to do. A cheerfully trashy time-waster.

Despite the fast paced action scenes I managed to be bored bored BORED(!) after 40 minutes. The story is so straight lined and clichéd that you can't even be bothered to hope for any twists, and the only character who's slightly believable and sympathetic is Craig Fairbrass (Cole).

Don't get me wrong. I'm a huge zombie(/virus) fan, and I am aware that you don't necessarily need an amazing script nor 100% believable characters to make an entertaining zombie movie. But if you have neither and you don't have a single new interesting idea – well maybe you should just donate the money for charity instead of wasting it on another dull movie. People seem to compare this with 28 days/weeks later which apart from all of them being British and (relatively) low budget is blasphemy in my ears. In my opinion; if you like 28 days/weeks later – go watch them again instead of wasting your time on this one.

Although I imagine this is a straight to DVD affair, I caught this film on the big screen, followed by a Q&A with the director, and other members of cast and crew, who seemed very proud of their work.

During the showing the film got a few unintentional laughs which led a member of the cast to comment afterwards "I didn't know we had made a comedy zombie film" - No you didn't, you made a film which for the most part was extremely dull, with a wafer thin story and unconvincing characters. The laughter in the audience was due to the poor delivery of meagre lines of script and cliché plot developments.

With so many zombie films out there, you need a new angle to stand out from the crowd, and it was the directors belief that this comes from the fact that the zombies are free runners. To be fair, although free running zombies is only one step forward from the speedy zombies of the Dawn of the Dead remake and 28 Days Later, it's not a bad idea and I was fairly enthused with the idea of seeing this slight new twist. However I was soon to be extremely disappointed that although the film was being sold with this as its unique selling point, this wasn't exploited at all. Yes, the zombies (which mostly just looked like young people in hoodies) ran fast, jumped and vaulted over cars and other obstacles in their way a few times, but I was left thinking is that it, could they not jump and twist off a few buildings or do something well a bit more visually exciting?

The fact that this aspect of the film didn't live up to the hype was only compounded by the complete lack of interesting story. I never bought into any of the characters, especially the lead (played by Craig Fairbrass) who for me has no screen presence whatsoever. Within half an hour I couldn't care less whether any of the characters survived, and the zombies were so uninspiring that I couldn't even root for them.

On the plus side, I thought the film was well shot, with some cool images of London just about stopping me nodding off from boredom a couple of times. Plus there was a genuinely funny cameo from Sean Pertwee (the best part of the film). Shame that his character was never to be seen again, his story might have been more interesting!