Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead

Don't be put off by the title - this energetic antipodean spin on the zombie apocalypse has much to recommend it. All the usual undead ingredients are on the menu - hordes of slavering flesh-eaters, lashings of splatter and a brutal battle for survival. But the outback-set tale of an everyman mechanic (Jay Gallagher) on a quest to find his sister (Bianca Bradey) takes some off-the-wall detours, particularly when she's abducted by a troop of masked paramilitaries commanded by a disco-dancing mad scientist with experiments to conduct. Add in dollops of mordant Aussie humour - keeping zombies on ice in the same place as the beers - and the spirit of Mad Max, The Evil Dead and Peter Jackson's Braindead, and you have a tidy little package of tension, terror and tongue-in-cheek fun. It's not in the class of Shaun of the Dead but this labour of love (four years in the making for film-maker brothers Kiah and Tristan Roache-Turner) is inventive DIY horror that harks back to Ozploitation's golden era.