The Horde

Fusing zombie apocalypse with gangster violence, French co-directors Yannick Dahan and Benjamin Rocher trap a hit squad of four corrupt, vengeful white cops and a vicious, multi-racial drug gang in a deserted Parisian tower block surrounded by thousands of hungry, undead ghouls. The police were planning to take revenge for the murder of their colleague, but are forced to form a volatile alliance with their enemies, and bury the hatchet in some zombie flesh.

More of a relentless, action-packed thriller than a horror movie as such, ‘La Horde’ nevertheless features copious amounts of gruesome violence. A scantily-clad Claude Perron is chilling as the morally blank female cop Aurore, and there’s a darkly comic cameo by Alain Figlarz, as the building’s eccentric, ex-army caretaker. Whether the film does enough to earn its nihilistic ending is open to debate, but if we see the zombies as President Sarkozy’s dispossessed ‘scum’, rising up to take over the streets, this latest example of the French new wave of horror does at least have the Romero-like guts to address a topical social problem.