Salvage

Making clever use of the former ‘Brookside’ set in Liverpool, and extracting maximum value from a modest £250,000 budget, Lawrence Gough’s ‘suburban apocalypse’ movie generates taut suspense and brutal horror out of an everyday situation. On Christmas Eve, remorseful single mother Beth (Neve McIntosh), her hungover one-night stand, Kieran (Shaun Dooley), and her estranged daughter, Jodie (Linzey Cocker), are trapped in a cul de sac by an military lock-down. Masked special ops soldiers have shot dead a knife-waving Pakistani man, quarantined the area and forced the residents to stay in their homes. Paranoia breeds fear, as the panicky locals jump to the conclusion that the shot man was an Al Qaeda-style terrorist. An injured soldier, Lance Corporal Akede (Kevin Harvey), hints that the curfew was sparked by a container ship that shed its load on a nearby beach. But what was inside? There are shades here of George Romero’s ‘The Crazies’ – recently remade, to little effect – as the draconian military response rapidly transforms into a ‘kill or cure’ solution.