Dead Set: Part 5

 "This makes you the winner of this year's Big Brother".

That quote up there... yeah, it's an empty prize, but aren't they always, zombie apocalypse or no? Blimey, this is far more Hobbesian than I remembered. Utterly, splendidly bleak.

The dark catalyst of a character is, of course, Patrick- a toxic boss and an utter wanker, a liability in normal ligfe but absolutely impossible in a situation of base under siege. This isn't a message of conformity or that individualism is bad; the group are diverse, different and act as a democracy. But the Patricks of this world have no time for the collective. Here, his pointless escape will open the gate and risk everyone. He has to die, as decent people must realise. It's horrible.

Worse, we have Joplin- weak, pretentious, not as clever as he thinks, the perfect pause. And so things degenerate into utter hopelessness. Kelly's heroic last stand consists of just an immediate short scream. We end with a landscape of only zombies and cameras. Metaphor much?

Wow. Zombie apocalypse? Thatcher's children stand no chance. Simply superb.

Dead Set: Part 4

 "I mean, don't forget, this place used to be like a church to them."

Things are hotting up. The Big Brother house is under siege by zombies who are quite blatantly lampshaded as cheerfully blatant metaphors for consumers of celebrity culture. This cheerfully winks at us, knowing that it isn't very clever. But so much else here is.

At last Pippa and Patrick get out to the others, and Patrick- surely based on real producers Charlie Brooker may have encountered: he says, after killing zombie Davina, "I hired her. I can do what I want." And his effect on the group is immrediate, profoundly obnoxious, alienating and clearly making no friends, which may not be very clever in the long run. Yet he's ruthless, makes the hard choices, and you can see how he got where he is.

Meanwhile, we have Riq, the decent romantic, and Alex, the hardened cynic who, in the end, sacrifices her life for romance hoped for vicariously. The characterisation, darkly witty humour and encroaching sense of threat are approaching perfection.

Dead Set: Part 3

 "I'm only on the front cover of Heat!"

These episodes following the first are only twenty minutes long and the whole thing isn't obviously structured in an episodic way. Was it originally planned as a TV film? Never mind, this is good stuff, mixing typical zombie tropes with good characterisation and social commentary.

Thus we get to see the scary, pointless, power tripping behaviour of the police once society has collapsed, interesting to see on the day when a scathing report into the Met is published. Concepts like looting are now meaningless. We hear, via the radio, that France is swiftly following the UK to zombie apocalypse.

Yet there's still time for Joplin to show himself a perv and a coward as well as a pseud. For Patrick to poo his pants, yet indeed. And for the pathetic laddishness of Marky to be contrasted with the loving joy of Riq discovering Kelly is alive. Humanity is often pathetiuc, yet there is hope. This is very, very good and, oddly, far less bleak than Brooker's later Black Mirror despite the premise.

Dead Set: Part 2

 "Does this mean we're not on telly any more?"

After all the Big Brother fun of the first episode we were always going to slip into more of a standard zombie story. Hence the characterisatyion as everyone adjusts to the fact civilisation is over... and we have the tension of knowing that Angel will die and become a zombie.

We get more of Riq, and are introduced to the magnificently blunt Alex. I love her. Meanwhile, the gloriously rude Patrick and the delightfully stupoid Pippa keep up the comic relief. They're both doomed. The fun bit is working out who else is, Angel aside. Marky? His sense of guilt for pretty much killing Angel is palpable.

It's the 2000s: zombies were in the zeitgeist. But this is Charlie Brooker and, much though the metaphor of poular telly consumerisn has to break down a bit from now on, this is still brilliant.

Dead Set: Part 1

 "Please do not swear!"

Long before Black Mirror, in 2008, when Charlie Brooker was still giving us his excellent Screen Wipe on BBC4, we had this, what is at first glance a high concept bit of fun about the Big Brother house during the zombie apocapypse. But it's so much more than that and, indeed, so much more fun than that.

I first watched this as it aired. Watching it today reveals starkly how long ago 2008 feels- the "edgy" vibe, the toxic workplaces and bad bosses, the pre-#MeToo mores, Heat magazine, the phones, trashy pop culture on mass market telly as opposed to the online ghettos to which it is now rightly consigned. Reality TV is well made, and there's an art to it, but in the same way that there's an art to Sun journalists managing to present the news in words of one syllable. It's genuine talent, wasted.

And the zombies are the most bleeding obvious of metaphors. They first attack the screaming crowd after a Big Brother eviction. Are the ensuing ravenous zombie hordes really much different from what they replaced? There's a glorious shot of a dead eyed zombie watching the feed from the Big Brother house. It says it all.

The script is wonderful. Charlie Brooker gives us a fun and real-seeming set of housemates and, in Jaime Winstone's Kelly, a star we can identify with: a runner, probably an unpaid, exploited intern, The satire of the TV industry and its working is splendid too, from a writer who knows his stuff. And, of course, zombie Davina McCall. Need I say more?

First class stuff.

Black Death (2010)

“I believe hunting necromancers and demons serves men more than it serves God."

This film seems appropriate right now, does it not? Personally I'm not scared for my own safety, really, nor that of either Mrs Llamastrangler or Little Miss Llamastrangler. We are all young and healthy. I'm more worried about my retired parents, the likelihood that at least someone I know is probably going to die when our current plague washes over us properly. And, given our circumstances, I've no idea what the Hell we're going to do for childcare if... when the schools close.

Anyway, this is an oddly redolent film and it's an act of defiant black humour to blog it. I suspect that, within weeks or days, it will become tasteless. Some readers, I fear, will already find it so, but let us not be too quick to cast aside the consolations of black humour.

I fear also that this film is rubbish. Oh, it's well-made in its impressive German locations and the cast- led splendidly by Carice van Houten, a very young Eddie Redmayne and the ever-doomed Sean Bean, is magnificent. The plot rattles on nicely with a nice twist at the end with Langiva only having drugged Averill, with Osmund the one who killed her. But it's rubbish nonetheless. I don't mind historical inaccuracies, especially in the name of artistic licence, but this film makes no attempt to research or approximate the England of 1348. The opening narration refers anachronistically to a "germ". All the characters have cod-Anglo-Saxon personal names which would be centuries out of use. And, of course, while mediaeval people lived in a world of superstition, they were not barbaric enough to burn women as witches until at least a century after this. And we may get an amusing tour of the tropes of plague- the obligatory flagellants and plague doctors, but the latter belong to the seventeenth century.

Worst of all, while I love the scene in which the encroaching Christian part is drugged and seized like Vortigern at the Night of the Long Knives, the idea of a whole village renouncing Christianity in favour not even of paganism but what seems to be atheism is not even slightly plausible. A pity; change the details and set the film in a fantasy world and it would be a nicely told and splendidly violent tale. But when historical inaccuracies are this fundamental they are not a small detail but a major flaw. Sadly, this is rubbish.

Severance (2006)

"Foursome?"

My, this is brilliant. A superb script from James Moran and excellent direction from Christopher Smith of Creep fame give us a hugely entertaining comedy slasher- which is, of course, always the best kind of slasher.

Danny Dyer is, well, Danny Dyer. But it's a shock for this fairly regular EastEnders viewer to see him looking so bloody young. The film is really carried, though, by character actor stalwarts such as Andy Nyman and the superb Tim McInnerny.

The film oozes confidence and fun, beginning in media res with some unfortunate Hungarian employees of the same weapons company  employing our mainly British cast getting a foretaste of what we will soon be seeing. We also get enough time to get to know our engaging and well-scripted characters before the carnage begins, and I mean it entirely in a good way when I note that this film dates from a time when The Office was firmly part of the zeitgeist. Noughties office humour and the slasher genre mix very well indeed. This is a bloody good film and more people should see it.

The best bit, of course, involves a decapitation and the few seconds thereafter...