A brood of fire-breathing dragons emerge from the earth, establishing dominance over the planet.<BR>&nbsp;

A brood of fire-breathing dragons emerge from the earth, establishing dominance over the planet.

During extensions to the London Underground, a dragon, asleep for centuries, awakes and among its victims is the mother of Quinn Abercrombie. 20 years later, the dragons - which, we learn, were responsible for killing off the dinosaurs - have taken over the entire world; Quinn, Christian Bale, lives in one small pocket of civilisation in the North of England. This small band of survivors is content just to survive and avoid a confrontation with the monsters; but then a group of Americans, led by Denton, Matthew McConaughey, arrives, and they want to confront and defeat the creatures. Starting off much like the creepy horror film of the mid-60s, Quatermass And The Pit, Reign Of Fire soon turns into a film about end of the world survivors and, as such, it`s a lot better than the most recent example of the genre, Kevin Costner`s The Postman. X Files director Rob Bowman makes his Brits reluctant fighters and his Americans gung ho bullies, aching for battle - are there contemporary parallels here? Not all the characters are well developed, and they shout a lot, but the dragons themselves are wonderfully conceived and genuinely scary and the Irish locations, standing in for Northumberland, are impressively dank.