By Nigel Powlson

DOGHOUSE is a British film that desperately wants to be like Shaun of the Dead but ends up being another Lesbian Vampire Killers.

Jake West's zombie horror comedy falls flat on its face most of the time and has the misfortune to star Danny Dyer – whose presence in any homegrown film is now almost an assurance of awfulness (Outlaw, Straightheads).

Dyer plays Neil, the laddish leader of a group of drinking buddies who head to the compulsory "lonely village in the woods" for a weekend of booze and camaraderie to cheer up newly-divorced Vince (Stephen Graham).

They discover that a virus unleashed by the military has turned the entire female population into zombies who are eating their way through the male residents.

West has a copycat visual style that might have worked with better material but the jokes fall horribly flat and although the film can be gruesome, it's never scary.

Doghouse also has an alarming streak of misogyny going beyond lads' mag attitudes to come across as some kind of revenge mission for the mistreatment of blokes by their other halves.

It is to be hoped that it's meant as joke. If so, it doesn't work.