Comedy thug old bloke René (Yves Pignot) turns up alive, breaks out a machine gun and reminisces about the good old days in Dien Bien Phu as he guns down his former neighbours blithely.

Most of the rest of the film is bloody zombie-killing inside the tower block, with only a few character touches. However, the cops botch their initial strike against brothers Ade (Eriq Ebouaney) and Bola (Doudou Masta) and Jimenez gets blasted – but the survivors of both factions are forced into an uneasy alliance when (of course) the dead rise as flesh-eating, infectious creatures. At the graveside of a flic lately tortured to death by hoodlums, the dead man’s unit – including his girlfriend Aurore (Claude Perron), best mate Ouessem (Jean-Pierre Martins) and tagalong Tony (Antoine Oppenheim) - are persuaded by their hard man commander (Aurelien Recoing) to launch a revenge raid against the city-edge tower block where the cop-killer gang hole up.

My notes on La Horde (2009) Though it has that grim, relentless, grimy hard bastard tone of many recent French crime and horror films, this isn’t that much more substantial an addition to the ever-expanding zombie apocalypse sub-genre than the average Resident Evil sequel.

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