Dawn of the dead meets La Haine as the living dead attack those with a killer instinct in a rough district of Paris.

Albeit atmospherically shot, fast and creepy, La Horde adds nothing new to the continuing zombie genre except for relocating the familiar ‘cottage under siege’ scenario to gangland Paris, an increasingly familiar location for modern French cinema via Mathieu Kassovitz’ groundbreaking La Haine (1995) and Luc Besson’s pair of dystopian parkour movies, Banlieue (District) 13 (2004) and B:13 – Ultimatum (2009).

Rodriguez and Tarantino’s From Dusk till Dawn (1996) also gets a nod, as this is a film that changes genres part of the way through (it’s more like a 1/3 into the film than halfway, here) from a crime movie to a zombie film – as a sting by undercover police goes badly wrong and they end up hostages of a bunch of homicidal gangsters in a tower block, before the place is suddenly surrounded by the cannibalistic undead.

The gangsters and cops have to temporarily put their grudges aside to fight the hordes of the living dead as their number is gradually whittled down by zombie repast, a crumbling building and their own incompetence. There are a handful of memorable moments on offer – the racist veteran who still thinks he’s fighting in Vietnam is quite amusing as is the size of his artillery – but other than the relocation of the plot and subtitles, there’s nothing to distinguish this from a dozen other zombie films in recent years and the ultra-violent, energetic fight scenes in corridors only make you notice that Park Chan Wook got there first with Oldboy in 2005 and is a very hard act to follow.

Eriq Ebouaney, best known for Claire Denis’ 35 Shots of Rum (2008), is the most engaging actor in La Horde, continuing George Romero’s tradition of having the black character in a zombie film as the most memorable, and the presence of 4 script writers (+ a script consultant!) and the composer of other filmic gems such as Vampires Suck (2010) and Meet the Spartans (2008) result in a script and score that is above rather than below average, which shows this film was blessed on some level.

If you have the particular urge to watch another anthropophagus horror film in the cinema this weekend, you’ve got a choice between ‘Night of the Gallic Dead’ and the remake of Night of the demons. The later does star Eddie Furlong – who after his terrific run of films in the 1990s which included Terminator 2, American History X, Pecker and Animal Factory – has made nothing of any value in a decade, so it does have a certain curiosity value but scores 5/10 on the IMDb rather than the somewhat generous 6 awarded to La Horde, so out of the two films (although I haven’t seen …demons) I have to recommend the French one.

That said you can always watch Paris by Night of the living dead on YouTube, a fun little film which has a running time 74 mins shorter than La Horde and costs the price of a cinema ticket less to watch…