Exactly as the title suggests, The Quick and the Undead is a crossbreed between a George A. Romero zombie film, of which we have seen numerous remakes, imitators and knockoffs in recent years following the remake of Dawn of the Dead (2004), and a Spaghetti Western. The Romero connection is obvious, right down to shooting the zombies in the head as their only means of despatch. Gerald Nott gets right into the cod-Spaghetti Western poses – happily borrowing directorial shots from Sergio Leone, substituting motorcycles in lieu of horses and with the hero smoking a cheroot and outfitted in a telescope crown hat just like Clint Eastwood. The great surprise about The Quick and the Undead is that Nott plays it surprisingly seriously and doesn’t take the opportunity to send any of it up a la Shaun of the Dead (2004) or go completely gonzo a la other generic crosshatches such as Six-String Samurai (1998).

There is no particular ambition to the film beyond its melding of genres and no greater depth to it than what we see on the screen. Nevertheless, The Quick and the Undead achieves everything reasonably well. It moves with a fast pace. There is an enterprising level of low-budget gore – notably a sequence where a zombie is carved up on a table. One would have liked to have seen more detail given to the background of the future the film sketches out for itself – you could easily imagine The Quick and the Undead being expanded out into a series.

Director/writer/producer Gerald Nott and his star/co-writer/co-producer Clint Glenn subsequently went onto make the Backwoods Brutality film The Flesh Keeper (2007).