Patient Zero  ★★½

STANLEY Tucci is one of the last actors I would associate with a zombie movie.

The versatile American has previously turned his hand on stage and screen to everything from song and dance to drama .

Every now and then he’ll appear in just a straight money-maker, such as Transformers, but generally it’s more high-brow fare.

But here he is in a low-budget English horror flick called Patient Zero, running around chewing on peoples’ necks and spraying blood from his snarling mouth.

Actually, there’s a little more to his character than that.

This is one of those movies where the victims aren’t actually zombies in the strictest sense because they haven’t actually died and come back to life. Rather, they have been infected with a disease that turns them rabid, passed on by the bite from a fellow victim.

The infected roam the countryside while a military base below ground houses a team of scientists and soldiers seeking to find a cure.

All sounds very familiar, right? And unfortunately the only new aspect that Patient Zero brings to zombie filmdom lacks interest because it is poorly presented.

In this film we have a lead examiner who was bitten but hasn’t turned and has been inexplicably left with the ability to speak the zombies’ language and therefore be able to interrogate them.

He’s played by Matt Smith, best known as the 11th incarnaton of television’s Time Lord. So, we have Dr Who becoming a twisted version of Dr Doolittle.

What makes this premise a failure is that the discussions between zombie and interrogator are presented in standard English language and delivery. I guess the other option, a series of guttural noises with sub-titles, may have looked and sounded even more ridiculous, but we’ll never know.

So when Stanley Tucci appears as The Professor, an apparently well-known intelligent zombie, we have scenes more akin to Clarice Starling chatting to Hannibal Lecter which completely takes you out of this film.

It’s all confusing and a little boring, although zombie film fans will be mostly satisfied. Even though there are scenes of graphic violence, we’ve seen them all done better before.

A single location film is fine for atmosphere, but it makes heightening tension vital as the audience tends to focus more on the smaller design aspects of the film being regularly repeated in their line of sight.

Rounding out the cast are a trio of television performers – Game of Thrones alumni Natalie Dormer and John Bradley and Clive Stanley from Vikings – none of whom make a lasting impression within the script limitations.

For die-hard zombie fans only.