Billy Elliott makes the leap from Swan Lake to supernatural trenches in this World War One-set chiller.

Jamie Bell, who played the pirhouetting prodigy, now finds himself with his feet firmly on the ground on the Western Front in 1917.

His character, Charlie Shakespeare, is frozen with fear and after a particularly brutal advance suddenly finds himself and his comrades in a foggy wood.

When the mist clears, the bedraggled remnants of Y-company discover a maze of German trenches which they take after shooting a couple of Huns and taking one prisoner.

Pretty soon, you realise this is not as other trenches (the fact that they seep blood should be a bit of a pointer) and the menacing atmosphere begins to affect them.

There's the usual rag-tag array of characters from the upper crust captain (a doolally Prince Charles type) to the sympathetic medic (Rhys).

Serkis is nicely cast as the evil Quinn, a cudgel-swinging thug with the look of a psychotic Fred Flintstone played by the late Ian Dury.

Before long they are being picked off or pitted against one another by an unseen enemy they initially think are the Germans and then learn is much nastier.

Bassett's horror yarn obeys all the classic rules of the stalker movie - keeping just one step ahead of the audience's awareness of what is happening.

However, the real star is the splendid set - a rat-infested warren of trenches soaked with the blood of the fallen which belies the fact this is a low-budget first feature.

This shares a lot of similarities with this year's The Bunker - a group of troops getting picked off - but is far superior fare.

Compared with the formulaic horror remakes pouring out of America, it's nice to see a genre where Britain is quietly showing how it's done.

Tim Evans