Slightly above average of its type, John Carpenter's onrush of horrors is a quite successful grafting together of several genres - the youngsters-in-peril film, the AntiChrist film and the 10 Little Indians thriller. Carpenter's own, doomy, basso profundo music sets the tone for the story of a group of scientists and graduate students who gather together in an abandoned church surrounded by zombie-like tramps, to learn the secret of a mysterious, centuries-old canister whose whirling green contents seem to be generating new life from within. Not a pretty can of worms (creatures which, along with others, swarm across the screen from time to time) but quite well realised, with an unusually understated performance from Donald Pleasence. The graduates aren't much on the whole, but then most of them are turned into zombies anyway.

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