Some of you might remember my bitter (if somewhat naive) disappointment with Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus. Far from being the B-movie cheese-fest I wanted, it was just a cheap money spinner that cynically looked to cash in on the surprising popularity of its trailer. After that bitter experience I have been a little more cautious in approaching low-budget genre films, and so it was with relatively low expectations that I revved up the Wasting Away DVD earlier this week. I can tell you now, my faith in low-budget innovation was instantly restored. The film is essentially a gimmicky take on the zombie genre: military experiment to create super-soldiers goes wrong, toxic sludge is irresponsibly disposed of, and ironically ends up in another experiment when it contaminates a beer ice-cream made by a bunch of twenty-somethings. But once they ingest it, the world seems a strange place. Everything moves really quickly and people react to them differently. What can it be? A stranger appears and tells them it's because they, like he, are now super-soldiers and they must save mankind from a nasty virus they've been contaminated with. So, blissfully unaware that it's they that have been mutated into zombies, they set out to save the world. The cuts back and forth between the colourful, sped-up world of these newly zombified kids and the black-and-white, zombie-ridden world of the rest of humanity works brilliantly. With a tiny budget and a bit of imagination creators Matthew and Sean Kohnen have taken the zombie genre to a whole new level. More importantly though, this shooting style makes for some hilarious comedy. Watching the main characters dance around in their colourful world, before cutting to black and white where they, slow and decomposing, stagger awkwardly in a bizarre zombie-dance will have you in stitches, and watching a zombie try and fool a crowded restaurant into believing he's an ordinary Mexican waiter is absurdity par excellence! There's plenty more zaniness packed in too, from the zombie romance (encompassing an uber-silly 'sir can I date your daughter' moment, with shotguns) to the zombie/human job interview. There is, as you might expect, a little mushiness thrown in for good measure. A few standard themes are milked at the end, with some Braveheart style speeches cranked out when the zombies finally face the wrath of the military, but for the most part this is a film that knows its key strengths and unashamedly panders to them. It's up front, in your face, stupid, and it totally works. The only disappointing thing is that, here in the UK at least, there are no DVD extras. I'd have loved to have seen the fun they had on set, and the way the directors went about creating this level of mayhem on their shoestring budget.