AdamJezard

While those audience members expecting full-blown Gothic horror may be disappointed, older viewers who remember the Hammer studio's psychological thrillers, particularly Fear in the Night, Fanatic, Crescendo and Paranoiac, may feel more well-disposed to this thrilling film.

This film niftily straddles the Gothic horrors of Terence Fisher and the studio's so-called mini-Hitchcocks from the likes of Freddie Francis and Val Guest. The latter films often took place in enclosed setting and have a claustrophobic feel, and either sculptured b/w or highly stylised colour photography, and this film neatly reflects that style, while the music score delivers the required feel.

Izzard gives a great performance that rivals the scenery-chewing performances of the stars of Hammer's previous grands guinols, Bette Davis, Tallulah Bankhead and Margaurite Scott.

Yes, there are a few plot flaws, and yes, the dénoûment is signalled at the start, but unlike the previous attemps to reboot Hammer, this feels right and not like an Amicus spin-off, so let's be thankful for this effort and enjoy it.

Love this undemanding kids' fantasy. The least of the John Dark-Kevin Connor films, it's still a fun reminder of summer holidays spent watching such stuff.

Great to see Lee and Cushing in any film, if not on screen at the same time, and Ken Thorne's score sets the whole thing off nicely.

It's easy to pick holes in this great action flick (are there cars moving in the background, where did the sausages come from, is there a man walking down the post-holocaust street with a package, why are the stunt doubles so obvious?) but these are piffling when taking in the package as a whole.

The whole vampire thing of the original Matheson book was so passé even when it was written that the screen writers' germ-war revamping cleverly suited the Cold War times the film was made in (and got around the now over-done and inaccurate zombie thang -- it's ghouls who come back from the dead and eat people, not zombies, but the whole moronic zombie genre and its fans obviously have never heard of a dictionary, but then this is Generation Y we're talking about here -- why can't they bother looking in a dictionary perhaps?).

Heston and the cast perform well, the action sequences are of a high standard, Ron Grainer's music is superb and Anthony Zerbe is a marvellous mystic leader of the post- apocalyptic, Spanish Inquisition-like Family. There are also overtones of the Nazi era, as the Family destroy everything from books to machines they don't agree with.

The original Vincent Price version, The Last Man on Earth, is closer to the book, but this is miles ahead of the dreadful zombie flicks of recent years, and the unworthy I Am Legend 2007 remake, and is worthy of higher ratings than it's been given here.

And please, someone in Hollywood, look up the difference between zombies and ghouls... Though the quality of the scripts the studios are turning out these days probably means they probably don't know how...