Juan of the Dead, Seven magazine review Dir: Alejandro Brugues, Stars: Jorge Molina, Andrea Duro, Alexis Dias de Villegas The unleashing of horror is rather playful in Alejandro Brugues's Juan of the Dead, a Cuban film which fuses a zombie attack in Havana with hectic social satire. The Juan of the title is a cheerful slacker played by Alexis Dias de Villegas, whose face combines handsomeness with a touch of nonsense, like Rufus Sewell crossed with the young Ken Dodd. He has a dirty-minded but loyal friend Lorenzo (Jorge Molina), the pot-bellied Sancho Panza to his Don Quixote, and the pair join forces with a group of like-minded citizens to spend an energetic few days dispatching zombies in brutal fashion. There is also a slender, sentimental sub-plot whereby Juan proves his moral worth to his sceptical daughter (Andrea Duro). The zombies we have seen before, although perhaps not doing their distinctively jerky Thriller walk across Havana - and there is still fun to be wrung from the Cuban take on it. The plot is full of sly jokes about unreliable electricity, Russian-made cars that won't start, paid-for sex, and a government that monotonously blames even the most flamboyant social meltdown on "dissident activity." It may frequently be crass, bloody, and undeniably silly, but there's a kind of reckless freshness to Juan of the Dead that is hard to dismiss. It appears no coincidence that Brugues has made a film about an atrophying system that somehow keeps lurching forward: the zombies have formed a background to a film about modern-day Cuba rather than the other way round.