Forget scenes of terror, mass panic, environmental disaster – the Pastor brothers’ vision of apocalyptic hell is taking a ride with a bunch of tedious American teenagers. In this case, it's a pair of brothers and their girlfriends, who soon begin to turn on each other. The point, clearly, is that the real horror is inside ourselves; but rather than giving us any sense that this is a dark madness unleashed by global cataclysm, the teens just act selfish (and probably no more than usual; if you were on the way to the beach with this lot, you’d find some way to kill them). Carriers is also a paean to the wonderfulness of being brothers, compounding the film's believability problems and giving it an unpleasant anti-women subtext: the girls are either overtly sexual or frigid, gooey and child-loving or icy. And ultimately, utterly dispensable; if the brothers’ bond is broken, the world ceases to have any meaning. The plot is contradictory and illogical and the apocalypse itself, a bird flu-inspired pandemic, is all deserted petrol stations and uncollected bin bags under a bright blue sky. Those blue skies are meant, presumably, to underline the everyday nature of the horrors-lurking-within-ourselves point, but, coupled with the teens’ immaculate appearance and the unscariness of those infected with the virus, it does little to inspire any kind of end of end-times dread. Aside from this bare bones of an apocalypse and the stock characters, the Pastors also parade their lack of imagination in the nostalgic Super 8 clips of the brothers as kids on a beach which bookend the film, and in the terminally clichéd dialogue. On this evidence, they’d do well to lay down the cameras and surf off into the sunset together.