Dead Set - E4's Halloween Treat For The Nation!

Over the five nights of this week, culminating on Halloween, E4 has been running its serialised zombie horror movie, Dead Set, to the delight of zombie fans up and down the country.

As clever, thrilling and horrifying as anything you'll see at the cinema, Dead Set kicked off on Monday with the zompocalypse breaking out during Eviction Night for a fictional series of Big Brother, with the reality TV contestants oblivious to the carnage unfolding in the real world.

Jaimie 'daughter of Ray' Winstone plays Kelly, a production runner on the show, who escapes the slaughter by getting into the Big Brother house while obnoxious producer Patrick (Andy Nyman), who brings most of the laughs to this grim scenario, holes up in the green room with the latest Big Brother evictee.

The story then developed over the following four nights, culminating in the shocking climax on Halloween night as everything finally fell apart for the survivors in their Assault on Precinct 13/Zulu-style final stand.

Apart from the initial set-up and the Big Brother environment, Dead Set doesn't really bring anything new to the zombie genre, but hits all the right keys, by playing on the expected tropes.

Most of the action takes place within the narrow, almost claustrophobic confines of the TV studio as humans are overwhelmed by the speedy undead and the violence is fast cut, with a lot of shaky hand-held camera action so, a lot of the time, the audience isn't actually seeing as much gore as they think.

However, when the camera lingers on the blood and guts, it's as horrific as any decent zombie film I've seen on DVD or at the cinema, with several nice homages to the classics.

Dead Set, written by satirist Charlie Brooker, is a character study of how certain personality types perform under pressure - which is, of course, supposedly the raison d'etre of Big Brother itself... but this is oh so real compared to artificial pressure that the contestants signed up for looking for a shortcut to fame.

If you love zombie cinema but somehow missed the show during the week, E4 is screening it in its entirety this evening at 10pm or you can pick up the DVD, which also includes deleted scenes, behind the scenes features and interviews with the writer and director.