D: Ruairí Robinson. S: Clive Dawson. Story “The Animators” by Sidney J. Bounds. P: Michael Kuhn, Andrea Cornwell. Cast: Liev Schreiber, Elias Koteas, Romola Garai, Olivia Williams, Johnny Harris, Tom Cullen, Yusra Warsama. UK dist (Blu-ray/DVD): Universal.

This bleak, low-budget Anglo-Irish-US co-production is essentially not much more than a “zombies on Mars” runaround, with more than a few similarities to a certain Ridley Scott film. The Aurora Mission (comprised of Yanks, Brits and Heinz 57 Eurofodder) has arrived on Mars and, after 6 months of disappointing research, is about to return home empty-handed. Until, that is, one of their number falls into an underground cavern after drilling for samples. The cave, it turns out, is filled with a virulent Martian fungus – and once its spores invade your system, via an open wound (of which there are many), you quickly become a psychotic, flesh-hungry ghoul, with a single overriding instinct: to kill everyone in sight. Soon a tightly-knit band of fungus-free astronauts is holed up inside one of the two survival habitats, forced to defend themselves from marauding zombies inside and out. Who will survive, and what will be left of them?

The unambitious setup invites inevitable comparisons with John Carpenter’s Ghosts of Mars (2001) – a much sillier, but vastly more fun, variation on the theme. The three leads are fine: Liev Schreiber makes an easygoing hero, battling his own personal space-panic demons (as well as the Martian brand), Olivia Williams is on top form as the spikily tactless, no-bullshit boffin (the only member of the crew, incidentally, capable of keeping her head in a crisis), and Romola Garai makes the best of an underwritten role as the fresh-faced, likeable heroine. But the supporting cast is terribly weak (more at home in Eastenders or Hollyoaks, I suspect, than a space suit) – a bunch of shouty, unreliable no-marks, certain to let you down when you most need them. The script is partly to blame for this, painting the crew as ill-matched, volatile and confrontational: surely not a realistic portrait of typical NASA recruits. On the plus side, the close-quarters zombie mayhem is well orchestrated, and the tension is suitably nail-biting. Max Richter’s score does a good job of adding much-needed production value, though it can’t entirely disguise a pervasive sense of cheapness. (Any cash not spent on the cast seems to have gone on the construction of a brace of full-size Mars Rovers – or possibly just the one, digitally-replicated to spare the coffers.) The Mars terrain is a topographically-dull stretch of Jordanian desert, occasionally livened-up by a vast CGI dust storm; no attempt is made to suggest a reduced-gravity environment. Overall, a passable time-waster, though nothing special.