Go on, admit it. How many times has one of your favourite films been remade? How many times have you cried 'No, you can't!'? Yet you've needed to see it, just so you can sit back smugly on your sofa and say, 'Well, it's rubbish. You never mess with the classics.' If you're a horror fan especially, this will be commonplace nowadays, given the glut of horror remakes of late.

Upon receiving the disc (£3.99 from an online retailer!), I must confess my heart sank a little when I saw that both Heat and Nuts magazine had given the film a four-star review. No offence to readers of those magazines, but I'd have preferred to have seen their four-star awards left off the cover - Nuts in particular. Fortunately, balancing those out were favourable four-starrers from the Times, Empire and Total Film. However, I digress.

Let me start my review of the 2004 version of DotD by saying this film really is as good as the press have made out (sorry Heat and Nuts readers). I'd go so far as to say a four-star review isn't quite enough, though a five-starrer a bridge too far.

Wonderful simplicity, and with this change alone, the whole dynamic of the film shifts in an instant, allowing the film to be reviewed in its own right as a quality stand alone movie. Yet this change alone would not make the movie great. No, backed up by superlative direction from Zack Snyder who ekes out great perfomances from a relatively unknown cast (though you'll all know of the ever reliable Ving Rhames), the film powers along. Where the original's pace occasionally flagged, this one rattles along for a new generation of horror fans brought up on PalyStation survival horror games. The first five minutes in particular will leave you breathless, in which a superb Sarah Polley has to flee from her infected daughter who attacks Polley and her partner. The race is then on, as Polley has to flee from her infected and crazed partner. Check out a glorious little homage to The Shining here too (I know, it's been done to death already), as Polley battles to escape the horrors inhabiting her own house.

Polley escapes it (naturally) and ends up meeting her mall co-inhabitants along the way. By the way, in another superb homage, check out an aerial shot of a city in ruin into which a helicopter bursts in - the helicopter from Romero's original. Great touch.

**

Incidentally, check out the lorry scene in the mall car park; if you can see the join with actor and dummy/CGI as the lorry hits the zombies (or the early scene involving the ambulance), then you're a better man than I. I've played it on slow speed, paused it, rewound it and still can't see it - great stuff.