With The Descent, Geordie director Neil Marshall spine-shatteringly reinvented the genre to produce one of the best British horror pictures in years. It was a milestone.

This is more like a tombstone.

A meandering mess, it's as if a committee of spotty sixth-formers bereft of ideas plundered a back catalogue including Mad Max, Resident Evil, 28 Days Later. Lord of the Rings and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.

In 2008 the nasty "Reaper Virus" spreads like, er, a virus through the lochs and glens of Bonnie Scotland, cursing the locals with open sores, unstaunchable bleeding and the liquefaction of their internal organs.

If fried Mars Bars and pints of heavy didn't do for you with a coronary then this would.

After turning the whole country into a "Hot Zone" thanks to a 21st century Hadrian's Wall replete with steel ramparts, the Government is confident that the disease has been contained.

However, an outbreak in London a quarter of a century later comes as a nasty surprise. In fact, security chief Bob Hoskins opines: "This town is going to go t*ts up in no short order." So there you have it.

With satellite intelligence suggesting some hardy Scots have managed to beat the bug, Rhona Mitra and her team of special operatives are despatched to Glasgow to try to find a cure.

Sure enough, the hardier locals - resembling a unattractive collision between Sigue Sigue Sputnik and The Prodigy - are virus-free, but have developed a weakness for piercings and tattoos as well as a taste for human flesh.

Top of the menu is Sean Pertwee's unfortunate doctor, whose roasted flesh is sliced and served in a sequence that will win no fans at the Vegetarian Society Film Club.

It's also ironic - because this is a movie that shows no shame in cannibalising a whole raft of recent horror-thrillers.

With The Descent, Marshall was handed the sort of budget that could provide first-class special effects but also required the director to work at it, forcing him to be creative with lean, mean results.

Here he's been given the keys to the kingdom: if he wants to write off a Bentley then he can. If he fancies rebuilding Hadrian's Wall in reinforced steel it's his call. Shoot a whole sequence in a medieval castle for no particular reason? It's up to him.

However, the result never hangs together. Both indulgent and incoherent, it resembles a series of trailers from different action movies gaffer-taped together with the wish-fulfilment fantasies of teenage boys foremost in the marketing department's mind.

Characterisation is risible. Mitra's character makes Resident Evil's Alice (played by Milla Jovovich) assume the emotional depth of Lady Macbeth while the potty-mouthed dialogue sounds like the sort of thing Roy "Chubby" Brown has knocked off.

Of minority interest to gore-hungry adolescents with a hankering for lethal hardware and severed heads, it's a colossal let-down.

Tim Evans