And Now For Something (Almost) Completely Different...

Short film: Zombies and Cigarettes / English subtitle from Rafa Martínez on Vimeo.

Remember the incredibly gorgeous Spanish babe Manuela Velasco who was in the strange Spanish zombie flick REC? Well, she's not in this film - but it is Spanish, it does have zombies and it's a bit strange.

Zombies And Cigarettes is a 17-minute, subtitled vignette of life in a shopping mall during a sudden zombie uprising.

For some reason there's at least one bloke in the mall already with a shotgun and I'm sure I saw a hand grenade on another occasion.

[SPOILERS - if you are about to watch the film, don't read on just yet]

The main story of the piece, set against the mostly off-screen slaughter, is shop worker Xavi (Samuel Viyuela) trying to play the hero in order to romance his friend Carol (Aroa Gimeno).

He stumbles across a solution to the zombie problem, but there's a twist in the tail that someone has beaten him to it and thus the triumph of mankind over the living dead occurs out of sight, leaving Xavi ultimately rather crestfallen.

The zombies are defeated but for our 'hero' it's a bittersweet victory as I think he'd have rather had the girl.

Cigarettes And Zombies brings nothing new to the genre, but it's well made and a shopping mall is a classic setting for zombie carnage - although the film doesn't really make best use of it, restricting most of the action to service corridors and maintenance rooms.

There are also several typos in the subtitles, but not enough to spoil your viewing.

[The film originally came from the excellent post-apocalyptic movie site Quiet Earth]