From the cupboard marked 'distinctly low budget British horror movies' comes S.N.U.B!, an...interesting little effort made on a shoestring but with bags of enthusiasm and displaying some genuine potential. A S.N.U.B, in case you didn't know (and there's no reason why you should) is a Secret Nuclear Underground Bunker and in this cheap'n'cheerful effort starring no-one you'll ever have heard of (apart from Gary Mavers of 'Peak Practice' and Tom Cotcher, once a crime-fighting denizen of Sun Hill in 'The Bill') a disparate group of refugees hide in a recommissioned SNUB after a terrorist attack on London sees the city devastated by a dirty nuclear bomb (nearly deactivated by Joseph Milson from 'The Sarah Jane Adventures') and a radioactive firestorm raging across the countryside. Unbeknownst to the hapless survivors in the SNUB, the inmates of a nearby high security prison have escaped and, horribly scarred, are trying to break into the SNUB. Perhaps not surprisingly, that's exactly what they do and bloodshed ensues.
That's yer lot really. S.N.U.B! is an odd one; it's desperately derivative, the acting's dodgy at best, some of the action sequences are extremely laboured and yet it's hard to dislike a film which is a) so short (70 minutes top to bottom) and b) clearly made with so much love for this sort of guerilla film-making. Sold as an homage to 1950s B-movies it really comes across like an underfunded episode of 'Spooks' but with added zombies. Visual effects are basic but endearing - the explosion of the bomb and its immediate consequences are surprisingly well done - and the gore quota's pretty low considering the number of rather faceless teens and girls who get offed in the last reel. No marks for believability though as, prEsumably out of narrative desperation, the survivors of the survivors flee the SNUB in the middle of the firestorm, ignoring the risk of radiation poisoning, and fly away in a convenient helicopter as a handful of zombie inmates chow down on the unfortunate policitian who got them all into this sorry mess in the first place.
Zombie films are ten a dozen these days - just pop down to the movie racks of your local Asda and you'll find loads of cheap straight-to-DVD titles cluttering up the racks. S.N.U.B! is no better than most of them and probably, technically, quite a bit worse. But if you're a fan of zombie movies, vaguely post-apocalyptic stuff or even just watching films which...well, aren't really very good...you might want to spend a few quid on S.N.U.B! and just leave your brain at the door.
S.N.U.B! is released on DVD in the UK on 26th April 2010
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