Trick (USA 2019: Dir Patrick Lussier)

Back in 2015, it's Halloween in Benton, NY, a small town close to the river. A group of co-eds are playing 'truth or dare'; one of their number is Patrick Weaver  - whose name is often shortened to  'Trick' (Thom Niemann) - a super intelligent all round nice guy who helps kids with their homework. But when goaded to participate in the game, Trick knifes five of the partygoers to death in a frenzied attack. One of the group manages to stab him, after which he's also shot, falling out of an upper floor window onto the pavement below. He's almost certainly dead, but, Michael Myers style, disappears from the spot where he fell when no-one is looking; it's assumed that he jumped in the river to escape.

Over the next few Halloweens, every year a different town in the area is subject to the same vicious killing sprees. Detective Mike Denver (Omar Epps) suspects that it's Trick every time, returning to seek revenge. He doesn't rule out supernatural forces at work, particularly when attempts to identify him via social media and school photos fail: "He could be anybody," the detective concludes.

Over the years Trick's massacres make him notorious; he even inspires fan websites, an aspect of the story which is touched upon but not developed. The authorities remain unconvinced in Denver's theories that the killer is one person, rather than copycat killings; "The only thing keeping this guy alive is you" he's told. Trick's murder setups become ever more complex: a cop is beheaded by wires attached to heavy weights; and a rookie policeman is crushed to death when a gravestone, suspended from a crane, crashes through a car window. Denver is eventually forced into early retirement through a mistake which costs a fed her life, but his crime busting partner, Sheriff Lisa Jayne (Ellen Adair), brings him back to work: it's 2019 and Halloween is fast approaching.

On the surface, Trick is a slick, fast paced but all over the place thriller with enough WTF moments to last a lifetime. The over the top acting, Saw style impossible death set ups, abundant gore, as well as multiple plot twists that seemed to exist merely to unseat the viewer as to their understanding of what was going on, left me feeling a little underwhelmed.

But wait a minute - Patrick Lussier was the director of 2011's batshit crazy but incredibly enjoyable Drive Angry, wasn't he? This made me re-evaluate what I was watching, and the conclusion? I'm not sure that we're meant to take any of this hugely seriously. And when you approach Trick from that perspective it suddenly becomes massively enjoyable. Granted, I'm not sure that someone told Mr Epps about this, as he seems vaguely uncomfortable throughout with the dialogue he has to utter; House this isn't. But, and I could be wrong here, the references to John Carpenter's Halloween make this feel like a knowing update of the Myers myth, and some scenes - a showing of Night of the Living Dead for example, used in every low budget horror movie because it's public domain and there are no rights costs, screens with an alternative soundtrack - suggest in-jokery; hell, genre stalwart Tom Atkins is in it!

I admit: I'm confused. Actually I can do better: Trick left me feeling whelmed. And you can't say fairer than that.

Trick will be available on Digital download from 30th March.

Vivarium (Ireland/Denmark/Belgium 2019: Dir Lorcan Finnegan)

A 'vivarium' is defined as a structure adapted for keeping animals under semi-natural conditions for observation or study. And the appositeness of that title is gradually revealed in Lorcan Finnegan's sophomore feature, as strange and compelling a film as I've seen for quite some time.

Gemma (Imogen Poots), a teacher, and her gardener boyfriend Tom (Jesse Eisenberg) are looking for a home in which to settle down and eventually raise a family. As we meet them Tom is making a shallow grave for a dead newly hatched chick that has fallen out of a birds nest."Nature is only horrific sometimes," he observes. Against their better judgement Gemma and Tom visit a robotic estate agent (Jonathan Aris), dressed in rather Mormonesque clothes, who is marketing homes on a new estate called Yonder - the model homes on elegant display in the office are reminiscent of the products in a certain mobile phone shop. A sign at the entrance to the development reads "You're home right now" which in its offness is emblematic of the whole movie.

If, like me, you've ever expressed dismay at swathes of identically styled houses springing up across the UK, the endless stretches of Yonder, with street after street of green hued anonymous detached buildings, will leave you open mouthed (Yonder's arid layout was apparently based on a real Irish housing estate). Following the agent to the estate by car, the couple are invited to view the development's show home at Number 9 (an almost certain nod to the TV show, of which Vivarium's plot could be an extended episode), an impersonal affair with the second bedroom decorated as a nursery in blue (for a boy, natch). Before they can make their excuses, the estate agent vanishes, leaving them alone in the house. Their attempts to drive away are futile, as they always end up back where they started, eventually running out of petrol (rather like Mervyn Johns in the 1945 Ealing film Dead of Night, or the young couple endlessly circling the Irish back roads in Jeremy Lovering's In Fear (2013).

Stranded, and with deliveries of food and supplies arriving as if by magic, Gemma and Tom settle into an odd, trapped existence (an imposed isolation which is rather pertinent in these current locked down times). But when a box arrives outside the house containing a baby boy with a tag reading "raise the boy and be released," (a child which grows at a rather fantastic rate, his development measured on a door frame in a bizarre take on the traditional family ritual), the couple begin to think that they're part of a wider plan.

Vivarium's twists and turns cannot be revealed in this review beyond what I've already disclosed, suffice to add that it's a very disquieting film, which conjures up a kind of Buñuelean nightmare, with the mis en scene of Being John Malkowich (1999) and the skewed humour of 1998's The Truman Show or Pleasantville. A lot of Vivarium is about routine and family life, or rather a grotesque parody of it, as Gemma and Tom make the best of things, because they have no other option. But the growing sense of unease between the couple and their new son ratchets up the tension - quite stunning considering the movie's simple set up - and if the conclusion becomes rather expected, it's no less satisfying. Poots and Eisenberg are excellent as the sweet young couple struggling to make sense of a situation which always seems one step ahead of them; this is a quirky, assured but alienating film which you absolutely have to accept on its own terms.

Vivarium will be released in the UK and Ireland on digital 27th March 2020 courtesy of Vertigo Releasing and Wildcard Distribution.

The Wolf Hour (UK/USA 2019: Dir Alistair Banks Griffin)

Self isolation may become the new trend in movies, with art reflecting life. The Wolf Hour was made way in advance of the present pandemic, and the self isolation in this case is psychologically, rather than virus driven.

Naomi Watts is June Leigh, a counterculture novelist whose first book, 'The Patriarch,' brought her fame and notoriety. With its central character a thinly veiled version of her own father, a man investigated by the police for criminal activities, the book caused June to be disowned by her family - a fact we learn from a video taped interview with the author which she re-watches. As a result she's holed up in her late grandmother's apartment in South Bronx, imprisoned within those four walls due to crippling agoraphobia which may or may not have been brought on by the post novel trauma. "After everything that happened, I figured this was a safe place," she reasons.

But just in case you were thinking that the Bronx isn't so bad these days, The Wolf Hour is set in July 1977, during the sweltering heatwave and amidst the panic caused by the the David Berkowitz 'Son of Sam' murders. And it's within this setting of brawls - and eventual looting - on the streets, menacing landlords demanding rent payment, and relentless heat, that we watch June mentally unravel as she desperately tries to overcome her writers' block to deliver a follow up novel to her publisher. 'Safe' is definitely not the word to use.

Not since Catherine Deneuve prowled her Kensington flat in Roman Polanski's 1965 movie Repulsion has there been such an intense study of closeted mania as Watts shows here. June lives surrounded by chaos, her life a pit of inertia. Her friend Margot (Jennifer Ehle) visits and tries to get order in her life - " I keep expecting to find a dead body, " she says of the state of the apartment - and, because of where she lives, also gives her a gun for protection - but June is having none of it, burning a draft of the new book and even snatching out of Margot's bag a first edition of June's novel which she was taking for safe keeping. Apart from occasional calls to people to lend her money or to order groceries, her only contact is Freddie the delivery boy (Kelvin Harrison Jr) and, later in the movie, Billy (Emory Cohen), a 'midnight cowboy' who June pays for sex: interestingly the closest she comes to having a functioning relationship, albeit briefly, is with him.

Griffin's movie succeeds because it offers no easy answers or handy explanations (a comment equally applicable to his last feature, the langurous Two Gates of Sleep from 2010). Leigh is an extremely damaged person but the nature of that damage is only hinted at in the psychological impact of the publication of her first novel. Her search for herself with the confines of her flat and the pain involved in that - it is, for example, a major feat for her to take out the typewriter she's locked away in her wardrobe and simply put it on the table - mirrors the increasing anxiety of the city, although its concerns are merely a supporting player here unlike, say, Spike Lee's 1999 movie Summer of Sam.

Watts is sensational as June; every drag of her cigarette and twitch of her lips conveys the depth of her condition; visitors to her apartment constantly question why she would choose to live there, and Billy also asks why she needs to pay for sex, but the audience has enough information at this point not to need to ask the same thing; "If I stay in here I won't do any more damage out there," confirms June. There is perhaps a question mark over the rather excitable last reel, coming as it does after the slowburn intrigue of the rest of the film, but it's a powerful and only partly redemptive finale, and Griffin, who also wrote the piece, should be praised for not going for the obvious and deploying the weapon given to June by Margot.

The Wolf Hour won't be for everybody. It's a moody and somewhat coolly observed character study that avoids flashiness at every turn. But I found it gripping and oddly hypnotic, and strongly recommend it.

The Wolf Hour is available on Digital HD from 23rd March.

Dark Eyes Retrovision #21 - Dracula A.D. 1972 (UK 1972: Dir Alan Gibson) plus (sort of) interview with Caroline Munro

You don't get to see films from the Hammer House of Horror on the big screen that often, so a one off showing of the first of the two 'modern' Dracula movies, directed for the company by Alan Gibson, together with a Q&A with the great Caroline Munro, was a no brainer.

As the years roll on I become more and more disposed to this Hammer 'oddity' and its follow up The Satanic Rites of Dracula. For the few of you who may not have seen this, D A.D. 1972 takes place, as the title suggests, in (then) modern day London. Following an 1872 prologue in which Van Helsing (Peter Cushing) and Dracula (Christopher Lee) slug it out in a fight to the death; firstly Dracula's death, courtesy of a carriage wheel spoke in the heart, and then Van Helsing's due to wounds sustained. But handily one of Drac's disciples is there to harvest the ring and the dust for safe keeping and eventual revival.

Forward one hundred years, and the great-grandson of the disciple, Johnny Alucard (Christopher Neame, who was in both roles) encourages a group of trendy young things to take part in a black mass at the nearby church. Among their number are Van Helsing's great great (I think) granddaughter Jessica (Stephanie Beacham) and with-it Laura Bellows (Munro). At the mass Laura is sacrificed and Dracula returns, eventually to square off with Jessica's grandfather Lorrimer (Cushing again) and die at the vampire hunter's hands...again. That's a very rushed synopsis - if you've not seen it, you're better off pausing this read and coming back afterwards.

Caroline was interviewed by Robin Osmani - here's a transcript of excerpts from the interview:

RO: This was your first film for Hammer I think, and you were a model beforehand. How did you get the part in the film?

CM: We shot it in 1971 and I'd just started the Lamb's Navy Rum campaign, and Sir James Carreras used to travel by train between London and Brighton and saw all the posters up. Much to my father's dismay...he worked in the City as a solicitor and the first time he saw a 30 foot poster of his daughter in a very unzipped wetsuit it gave him quite a shock.

RO: So you were spotted through that poster?

CM: I'd done several things before and they'd seen some of my work, so then I went to meet Sir James and Michael Carreras - I think I was screen tested, and got the part, and had a contract with them for a year, which was unusual for the time. I was lucky to do two films for Hammer.

RO: This film is about a group of young people. Now you were a young person at the time, living the swinging London life...did you do much dancing on tabletops in silver hotpants?

CM: Not really. I didn't swing a lot. I was there, and worked with Twiggy etc. I didn't swing at all actually. The lady in the silver hotpants, (Maureen) Flanagan (uncredited in the movie) was a girlfriend of the Krays, or hung around with them, and Glenda Allen (another uncredited girl in the film) was my stand in for several other films after that. They looked splendid in hotpants.

RO: I believe this film was loosely based on a true story that had happened a few years before - the story of the Highgate Vampire?

CM: Do you know what, I didn't know that!

RO: I'm going to throw this open to the audience now.

Audience: The opening scene, where you crash the posh boy's party, looked like a lot of fun. Was it?

CM: It was a lot of fun. I was very nervous to work with all these amazing actors, it was quite overwhelming but they made me feel so welcome, all the young Britpack. That opening scene was down to Alan Gibson, an extraordinary director who left us far too young. He knew exactly what he wanted and he was wonderful to work with. He made that scene very loose and I think it has that feeling - they had the cameras roaming round and it was very much ad libbed. We danced to 'Stoneground' who were playing live and you can get the atmosphere of that. I feel having looked at it again that all that came across. It had a very vital feel to it.

RO: Were 'Stoneground' last minute replacements for 'The Faces'?

CM: When I arrived on set 'Stoneground' were already the band, but I heard quite a bit later that 'The Faces' were meant to do it. It would have been interesting to see 'The Faces' as they had a very different music. But I thought 'Stoneground' looked perfect for the time because that's the way they dressed - it had a rawness.

Caroline Munro (left) and Robin Osmani in conversation

Audience: My name's Sarah Gibson - Alan Gibson was my dad! I saw this event on Facebook at lunchtime today on 'Quirky Days Out,' my workshift was swapped by accident so I was free. I just thought this was amazing and we had to get here and see it (audience applauds). I think my dad worked this whole thing out so I could come  and see his movie!

RO: Didn't he do an amazing job?

SG: Well it's had mixed reviews, both this and SRoD, but Hammer paid my school fees! I've seen it before, but not for a long time and as a daughter you think 'oh it's a bit bad, really' but it was amazing to see it tonight. I was there (on set) at 10 years old, and my big story was that Dracula offered us chewing gum and I was the only one that took it.

Audience: I've got a question about Marsha Hunt (Gaynor in the movie, and ex of Mick Jagger) - did you ever meet Mick Jagger?

CM: Yes I did. I did a film before this called G.G. Passion in the 1960s, shot by David Bailey, his girlfriend at the time was Chrissie Shrimpton who was the lead in the film - I was an extra. He used to come to the set quite a bit with the others. I'm very shy by nature but they were charming. I love their music.

Audience: Could you tell us about what it was like working with Hammer as opposed to, say, Amicus?

CM: Working with Hammer was an extraordinary experience because you only had four weeks to shoot, so not a lot of preparation there, and the budgets were tiny, so you had to get everything on screen, maybe £200,000 for a 4 week shoot? It was not a lot of money, but it was like working with a family, because the director and producers tended to use the same crew, so they were very much in alignment as to how they worked together and got on. It worked like clockwork and they were so friendly. To me filmmaking has always been about teamwork - I'm a team player, and I love the feeling of being on set and your dad (Alan Gibson) was fantastic with that, he worked so hard with the crew. Amicus was different. Again it was small budgets and I worked with Peter (Cushing) in At the Earth's Core and I loved that. Again a small budget but everything was on the screen - you didn't get paid a huge amount - the money was not flowing like people imagine.

Audience: What was it like working with Christopher Lee?

CM: Quite extraordinary. I was very nervous and young and I hadn't done a lot, and at my request I didn't want to see Christopher - we'd been chatting and I was doing my knitting, which I used to do between takes - but I hadn't seen him in his full regalia and wanted that surprise, to give that reaction, because that's the way I like to work. I found him wonderful to work with and his stories were extraordinary. They were like chalk and cheese, Peter and Christopher, they were so different as men but it just blended, it really worked when they got together - there was a kind of electricity, a chemistry on screen that was indefinable.

RO: You've worked with Christopher Lee, Vincent Price etc. Of all the people in that genre, horror wise, who did you like working with the most?

CM: It's tricky because they were all so different. I worked with Peter twice but I was also lucky enough to work with Paul Naschy and also Jess Franco. Again they were all different and all masters of their craft. I loved working with Vincent although I would have liked to have actually spoken to him in the film rather than just lie beside him, which was actually very nice - he was just charming. It's very difficult to choose. I suppose I got to know Peter the best, because I spent five weeks with him on AtEC, so I got to know him really well and he was so sweet. If we got a ten minute break between takes we used to sit and have tea - he used to have a little table which he set out, with china cups, and I'd join him for tea - and he'd wear his little white gloves.

Audience: Lee made it no secret that he wasn't very happy about the modernisation of the Dracula character - did you get a sense that he was unhapppy when filming D A.D. 1972?

CM: I didn't get a sense at all and I didn't hear anything about it on the set, because he was a consummate professional. I don't think he would bring that to the set - whether he did to the producer and with the director I don't know, but he just got on with it. He was sweet with me; he told me "Caroline, I think yours are the nicest legs I've ever had to work with." I thought, what a compliment - he probably said that to all the ladies!

Audience: There's a certain amount of revisionism that goes on around Hammer films. Some people think that the youth slang used in the film was rather 'past it' by the time the film was in production. Was there a sense among the cast that that was felt or did you just go with it? (Good question, mainly because it was asked by me. Ed)

CM: Quite honestly we just went with it. I'd never said words in my life like "that'll be a giggle" - we just got on with it and did it the best we could. Obviously it's quite a kitsch film now when you look back on it but having said that it had a vital feel about it - it felt alive, and with Peter and Christopher they added a kind of gravitas, and then we came along (the younger cast) and the music came along and the dialogue was 'wacky.' The film has gained legs in its longevity - I look back on it now with such fondness.

(To Sarah Gibson in the audience) Did your dad ever talk about that?

SG: No not much about it.  I know some people (directors) like to 'forget' because you move on to something else, but I do know the two Dracula films were something he enjoyed. It was the Hammer family. He did Crescendo as well.

CM: Yes, you always looked forward to seeing them again - it was the same crew.

SG: Yes, my mum always said that she knew the (crew) names from the phone messages.

CM: It was of its time - there was such a lot of heart and joy in those films - but I so wish it was here today. Well it (Hammer) is here today but in a very different way.

Audience: Everyone tonight has been talking about the past. What is in the future for you?

CM: I've been quite busy actually. We showed The House of the Gorgon here last year, which also included my daughter (Georgina Dugdale) - that was a small budget film with a lot of heart made by a young director, and we're doing another one at the beginning of July. It's to be set in Whitby, again with Joshua (Kennedy) at the helm. I did another one called The Haunting of Margam Castle (directed by Andrew Jones) and that was shot in Wales with a good crew and Derren Nesbitt and Jane Merrow (and Judy Matheson). That'll be coming out later in the year (probably to a supermarket near you if Jones's past product is anything to go by. Ed). I love working with new young directors.

Audience: Was the scene at the church (in D A.D. 1972) shot in the studio or on location? And secondly did you enjoy the blood soaking scene?

CM: (re the blood soaking scene) Messy! I kind of didn't notice as I was so caught up with doing what I was doing, but I do remember it was Kensington Gore and I remember in the evening I was meant to be hosting a dinner, so I had a bit of a shower, but it's tricky stuff to get off. So I jumped in my Mini, headed out from Pinewood and then (Caroline makes the sound of a police siren) I was being flashed because I was speeding. They pulled me over and they looked at me and they said "What is wrong with you? You've got blood all over you!" I said "I've just been working with Dracula, I'm sorry I'm in a bit of a hurry and have to get home and cook the dinner." After a bit of umming and arring they let me go.

The church was a studio set, but what an amazing set - very spooky.

RO: Caroline, you've had quite a musical string to your bow. You've worked with Steve Howe, Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker, and that's to name just a few. Didn't you used to speed down Pall Mall with Mr Baker?

CM: We only did it once. We'd been in the studio and we were rushing to get to a press conference. We were in his Jag. He said "I'll give you a lift Caroline" to wherever we were going and we didn't have seatbelts in those days - it was the 1960s. So I jumped in the car and we went at 90 miles per hour in his lovely silver blue Jag (Caroline is referring to a single she made in 1967 called 'Tar and Cement' and the backing band on the single comprised Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, Ginger Baker and Steve Howe - you can hear it here). (The singing) was only by default: my dad used to travel up from Rottingdean to London with Sidney Beecher-Stevens, head of Decca. Sidney knew I could sing a bit in the church choir and asked "would Caroline like to come in? I've got a new producer caller Mark Wirtz and a song she might like to do." So I found myself in Abbey Road studio. The B side of the single is interesting. It's called 'This Sporting Life.' So I was a 16 year old girl from a convent and I was singing a raunchy, blues song, and the boys sound great on it.

RO: (back to D A.D. 1972) Did you get on with Stephanie Beacham and Marsha Hunt?

CM: we got on so well. I saw Stephanie fairly recently - just before Christmas. I used to pick Marsha up in my car and give her a lift to the studio.

RO: I believe that the same year the film was made Stephanie Beacham posed for Playboy magazine. For research purposes only I had a look! Were you ever approached by Playboy?

CM: I was actually. It was after Bond (1977 and The Spy Who Loved Me). I was asked if I'd like to do it and I thought about it. I think I met the photographer and they said it would be done very nicely and I told my granny, who would have been almost 90 at that point. I asked her what she thought and she said "Oh yes. How much money are they offering?" I told her that it was quite a lot of money and she said "Oh, definitely do it!" But I said no. I just didn't want to do it.

A Centenary of Fantastic Films - 1920 #1 - The Penalty (USA: Dir Wallace Worsley)

The first of an intermittent series of posts about 'fantastic' films reaching their centenary. DEoL takes a look at The Penalty one hundred years after its original release. There's a link to the movie at the bottom of the page.

Born in 1878 in New York, Wallace Ashley Worsley was a stage turned screen actor, who after appearing in front of the camera in four movies turned his attention to directing. The Penalty was his sixth credit; sadly most of his preceding films, like so many silent movies, are now lost.

Based on a 1913 serialised novel by the US author Gouverneur Morris (the great grandson of the American Founding Father of the same name), The Penalty was adapted - and fundamentally changed - for the screen by Charles Kenyon.

A year previously Leonidis (Lon) Chaney, a former stage actor, had landed the role as a contortionist who passes himself off as a man with a disability, calling himself 'The Frog', in George Loane Tucker's The Miracle Man, a movie now lost save for a few fragments. This was the first time that Chaney had experimented with manipulations of his body for film roles, and was to be a hallmark of his on screen appearances from here on in, but one should not forget that he was an actor first; in fact The Miracle Man was designed as a showcase for its lead actor Thomas Meighan, but it was Chaney that audiences remembered.

Watching Chaney in The Penalty leaves you full of admiration for his sacrifice and astonishment at the depth of his very natural acting (not something many silent movie actors could be accused of). He plays Blizzard, king of the underworld (we later learn that this is a name he gave himself to obliterate the person who he used to be). As a boy, he suffered a terrible medical error when a surgeon, Dr Ferris (Charles Clary) amputated both of his legs following an accident, a mistake for which, shockingly, he was not struck off, because his colleague covered up for him; an interaction which the boy witnesses, and unsuccessfully tries to warn his parents about.

27 years later, Blizzard's home is San Francisco, and specifically the Barbary Coast area, a den of iniquity which sprung up during the Californian gold rush of 1849. A prostitute named Barbary Nell (Doris Pawn) has been stabbed by Frisco Pete (James Mason), whom Blizzard protects, having given the order for her death. The police are in Blizzard's pay and therefore don't investigate the death.

Lon Chaney strapping himself in for his
role as 'Blizzard' in The Penalty

Lichtenstein of the Federal Secret Service (Milton Ross), who tracks Blizzard's every move, wants to know why he has pulled all of his working girls off the streets and got them making hats. He suggests that one of his operatives, Rose (Ethel Grey Terry) should go undercover and infiltrate Blizzard's setup. He warns her that she risks a fate worse than death in so doing but she says it's all in a day’s work.

Dr. Ferris now has a daughter, Barbara (Claire Adams) who wants to pursue a career as a sculptress, much to the annoyance of her father and Ferris's colleague Dr Wilmot Allen (Kenneth Harlan) who is in love with her. She is working on a piece called 'After the Fall of Satan' and places an ad in the paper for Satan lookie likies. Guess who applies? Yep, you're right. And guess who uses their henchmen to scare off all the other possibles so that Blizzard gets the gig? Right again. For this is part one of the plan: for Blizzard to seek revenge on Dr Ferris via his daughter whom he plans to marry!

Meanwhile Rose, trusted by Blizzard because she's really good at moving the pedals on his piano while he plays, is left to her own devices in his home while he's off standing in for Satan; she starts snooping around and discovers, behind a secret panel, steps leading down to a fully equipped operating room and a well stocked arsenal. And herein lies the second part of the plan: to mobilise his forces to attack and loot the City (having diverted all of the police to carefully arranged skirmishes in the suburbs) and, while getting rich quick, to con Dr Ferris into grafting Wilmot's legs on to him! "They will be very becoming!" he cackles.

Ultimately none of these things come to pass. Barbara does sort of fall for Blizzard (as does Rose, in a very bad example of Stockholm syndrome at work) - "You've made him what he is" Barbara accuses her father. Our legless fried does manage to blackmail Dr Ferris to operate on him, but the operation is not the expected one. It seems that Ferris finds a contusion on Blizzard's brain - the result of the accident all those years ago - and removes it: this has the effect of removing all traces of evil from him, and making him pledge to undo his evil handiwork. United in love, Rose and Blizzard sit at the piano, only to have one of Blizzard's henchmen shoot him through an open window for fear he will betray them. And the finished sculpture is observed to have a face which combines "an evil mask of a great soul."

Worsley uses different techniques to tell this story; there's flashbacks to Blizzard's past, future dreams (the looting of the City), cross cutting and tracking shots on vehicles. Kenyon's adaptation wisely discards many characters from the source material and concentrates on Blizzard.

There are some big themes at work in The Penalty, not least of which is the capacity for people to choose whether they direct all their energies into being a force for good or evil; the Satan sculpture represents this, and Blizzard's love of music, which at one point is the only thing that stops him killing with his bare hands - his playing is the only time in the film when he needs the assistance of another person. Blizzard's obsession with regaining his legs to restore his place as a fully functioning human is also fascinating, on one occasion referring to himself as a "cripple." His dialogue is littered with his need to be whole again: "And I shall walk a new walk," he declares at one point, "and for my mangled years the City shall pay me with the pleasures of a Nero and the powers of a Caesar!" Also; "What an adorable pair of legs. I gave mine to science!"

Chaney’s performance is nothing short of astonishing, combining nuance with physical abnormality and sometimes almost superhuman strength (as in the scene where he uses his hands to climb some rungs in the wall in order to spy on people unobserved). For the role Chaney's legs were bent completely back and tied in place: his knees were covered with buckets and leather straps, and adjustments were made to the size of his costume to compensate for the arrangement of his limbs. It's an amazing piece of acting, his intensity surely heightened by the pain endured - by all accounts he could only act for ten minutes at a time in the position, and sustained permanent injuries to his knees as a result.

Although now lost, the original release of the film included footage of Chaney without makeup, walking around, to remind the audience that Blizzard was not real. What a great testament to an actor, and what a great film, which would act as Chaney's calling card for bigger and better roles, including The Hunchback of Notre Dame in 1923 (which Worsley also directed, and Rupert Julian's The Phantom of the Opera (1925).

You can watch The Penalty here!

Supermarket Sweep #14 - Reviews of The Haunting of Alcatraz (UK 2020) NEW WAVE OF THE BRITISH FANTASTIC FILM 2020, Bigfoot aka Hoax (USA 2019), The Appearance (USA 2018), The Intruder (USA/Canada 2019), PandaMonium (UK 2020) NEW WAVE OF THE BRITISH FANTASTIC FILM 2020 and Countdown (USA 2019)

The Haunting of Alcatraz (UK 2020: Dir Steve Lawson) Lawson's last two movies, Pentagram (2019) and The Exorcism of Karen Walker (2018) were made jointly with Jonathan Sothcott and I criticised both for being far too ambitious for a director of slender means. Fortunately The Haunting of Alcatraz finds Lawson back under his own steam, and is all the better for a simpler approach.

Set in Alcatraz prison in the 1940s (although actually partly filmed on location at the now abandoned Gloucester Prison, as well as his own Creativ Studios, which from the size of the sets is probably his living room), young, privileged Charlie Schmidt (Tom Hendryk) hopes to secure daddy's trust fund by gainful employment, and signing on as a guard at the infamous Alcatraz prison is an obvious career choice.

Some years previously the deranged killer Ed Wutz (Beau Fowler) killed himself in Cell 13 of the prison and vowed revenge from beyond the grave. Al Bradbury (Chris Lines) and Gerry Rebane (Marcus Langford), the guards who witnessed Wutz's suicide, are still on the payroll; Cell 13 forms part of D-Block - the solitary confinement wing  - and there's been a pattern of deaths when prisoners are transferred into the haunted cell. Schmidt slowly puts the pieces together, aided by prison nurse Sherry Vallens (Helen Crevel), but both of their lives are put in danger when their investigations reveal just how involved are Bradbury and Rebane.

I wasn't expecting Lawson's latest to be quite so stately - it moves at a glacial pace, and the supernatural elements are very slight. This is pretty much a straightforward prison thriller and, despite the fact that it's cobbled together from stock shots, ill matched exteriors and Lawson's usual budget-dictated close shots in lieu of any real sets, it's actually a pretty good film. Hendryk and Crevel, the latter a Lawson regular, make a good couple and Chris Lines is disturbingly nasty as the evil guard Bradbury. The boast of the story being based on 'actual events' seems to emanate from stories that persist about D-Block in Alcatraz actually being haunted. So now you know.

Bigfoot aka Hoax (USA 2019: Dir Matt Allen) The retitling of Allen's debut feature (as director) from Hoax to Bigfoot handily disguises a signposting of some plot twists which throw this rather tepid creature in the woods movie off course into some darker territory.

After a group of students are killed by person or persons unknown in the Colorado woods, slightly past it pushy TV producer Rick Paxton (Ben Browder) convinces the head honcho at the local network to let him put together a team, with a view to making a documentary about the so called 'Bigfoot' that inhabits the forest and is suspected of offing the kids.The crew he assembles are fairly standard B movie types: down on her luck simian-studying scientist Dr Ellen Freese (Cheryl Texiera) who could do with the $10K sweetener offered to her; the father of one of the missing students who knows the hills like the back of his hand (Max Decker); a new-agey cryptozoologist (Schuyler Denham) and a celeb news anchor with a drink problem (Shoshana Bush).

As you would probably expect, the next 45 minutes or so features a lot of walking around in the dark as the crew attempt to secure Bigfoot footage, some PG gore as they're picked off one by one by the shadowy thing, and a lot of chat as Allen, who also scripted the movie, tries to establish character: the only thing we really pick up on is that Rick is one mean mofo who'll stop at nothing to get his show in the can.

While Bigfoot has the decency to leave the old 'guy-caught-in-a-bear-trap' cliche until the 1 hour 18 minute mark, just when you're expecting this rather sorry mess to end - presumably with lots more screaming and running - final girl Freese discovers a house in the woods, containing a (on the surface) kindly French lady, who turns out to be the head of the house of a family of cannibals who've been dressing up as Bigfoot to obtain human main courses! And they have plans for Ellen that involve, well, the continuation of the species. I really didn't see this gory The Texas Chain Saw Massacre style final reel coming, so different is it to the rest of the movie. Doesn't make it good though, just surprising, and leaves the movie feeling like a bit of a mess. And they stole the final shot from the 1961 Adam Faith fake Loch Ness Monster vehicle What a Whopper! 

The Appearance (USA 2018: Dir Kurt Knight) Knight's second feature after his equally languid 2016 post apocalypse movie We All Fall Down is the story of an inquisitor, Mateho (Jake Stormoen) who is called to an abbey, somewhere in Europe in the Middle Ages, at the time of the great plague. He has been summoned to investigate the suicide - or murder - of one of the monks; a young girl, Isabel (Baylee Self) has been held for the crime and is accused of witchcraft. Mateho and his faithful assistant Johnny (the mountainous Kristian Game of Thrones Nairn) are concerned that the girl is to be executed without a fair trial, and set out to establish the facts of the case to reach an independent verdict. But all the time the strange goings on keep occurring, despite Isabel's incarceration, and the monks' attention increasingly turn to Mateho as the culprit.

If you're thinking at this point "hang on, isn't this plot a revisit of Umberto Eco's book 'The Name of the Rose', turned into a successful 1986 movie by Jean-Jacques Annaud?" then you'd be right: hidden symbols; a cabal of furtive monks trying to protect a secret; lots of shadowy goings on with a backdrop of chants emanating from the mouths of invisible singers. Unlike that movie however, there's a less prosaic solution to the mystery facing Mateho, although it becomes difficult towards the end to work out what is supernatural and how much is conjured up by the inquisitor's mind in dealing with his murky guilt-ridden past, in that - we learn by flashback - it's not the first time in his life that he has visited the abbey.

The Appearance, at just under two hours, seriously outstays its welcome in terms of the paucity of content. The movie is all about atmosphere, and to be fair Knight does a good job of convincing to the audience that we are not in Utah, where, like his previous feature, the movie was shot - this plays more like a UK or European feature. He's helped here by the cast, many of whom were also in the Utah located TV series The Outcast (of which Knight directed a number of episodes), so are used to wandering around in robes and speaking in hushed tones. It's a frustrating movie and I wanted to like it more - there are some impressive scenes towards the end bearing in mind the film's low budget - but it could really do with some tightening up and losing a few pounds off the running time.

The Intruder (USA/Canada 2019: Dir Deon Taylor) Every few years someone makes one of those 'nice-guy-goes-loco-and-may-be-hiding-in-the-house' movies: more recent films like Neil LaBute's Lakeview Terrace (2008) play on the audience's fears about security and who your neighbours might be behind the curtains, but there's whole slew of  'em from the 1980s and 90s.

This one, described by the LA Times on the cover as "a reverse Get Out" (whatever that means) has a thirtysomething couple moving out of San Francisco to a big pile in the Napa Valley, in search of solitude and a place to raise a family: he is Scott (Michael Ealy), a successful marketing executive, and she is Annie (Meagan Good), a writer for women's magazines - although we never see her write anything.

The house, which has been on the market for a while (1st alert) is being sold by Charlie Peck (Randy Quaid). When the couple first meet Charlie he's waving a gun in their face after shooting a deer (2nd alert). He shows them around, telling them "you're going to love my home" (3rd alert). For it seems that Charlie, despite selling the house to them for just over $3m and with plans to move to Florida, isn't actually thinking of going anywhere. He's converted the basement into a den, has intentions on Annie and a real need to reclaim the homestead.

This is well made but really stupid, a movie for the Friday night cinema crowd except I'm pretty sure it went straight to VoD and DVD. The basic dumb premise is that Scott smells a rat almost immediately, but Annie is far more accommodating, even when Charlie lets himself into the house unannounced. You can tick the cliched scenes off quite happily: Charlie spying on Annie in the shower - check; disposable support actor not noticing that Charlie has an axe when they're taking a late night walk together - check; people walking around after being stabbed in the back (literally not metaphorically) - check.

The Intruder is pretty poor stuff and about three decades out of date. The only thing to remark is that, although both Ealy and Good are actors of colour, the whole story isn't predicated on a racist motive.

PandaMonium (UK 2020: Dir M.J. Dixon) Someone - well maybe me if I continue to be confined to the house due to Coronavirus fears - should attempt a Pete Frame-style family tree of the cottage industry of UK filmmakers and actors who have been populating each others' films for a few years now. Let's do a little unpicking: PandaMonium's director, MJ Dixon, has made over 50 features, shorts and TV pieces, as well as acting in many of his own movies. Most of the cast have been in other Dixon films, or indeed features by the prolific but deadly dull Welsh director Andrew Jones. Other actors in the movie, like Martin Payne and Pablo Raybould, are also directors in their own right, Raybould most recently with The Snarling.

The hallmark of all of these offerings, as readers of my website will be aware, is that they're shot cheaply, are usually quite irreverent and go for broad laughs. They're not all successful, but I'm pleased that they exist.

PandaMonium (and honestly if ever there was a title thought up in a pub before one shot of the movie was considered, this is it) introduces us to Arielle Walters (Oriana Charles), ex 'entertainer' now wanting a proper job; she's applied to Killmore and Percival solicitors, and lead slimeball Damian Hook (James Hamer-Morton) has decided to hire her based on the quality of her legs. Hook, along with his colleagues on the 6th floor, is in the running to fill the place of his senior partner, vacated following present incumbent Philip Tanterton (Payne) who, in a prologue, is seen killed at the hands of a man wearing a large panda head. Once in her job, Arielle is disgusted at the treatment of women in the firm ("it feels like they've been hired off the sex offenders register," she remarks of her colleagues), who only seem to number her and pervy Carole from HR (Charlie Clarke); newly promoted Daniel Prince (Will Jones) seems about the only other decent soul in the place. Hook decides to hold one of the 6th floor's impromptu after work parties, but, as the booze and cocaine flows and the strippers arrive (one of whom, Jasmine - genre regular Dani Thompson - recognises Arielle from her former line of work), the panda headed killer turns up and starts offing the legal team and anyone else who gets in his way.

Apparently said killer - Jacob Jakushi (David Hon Ma Chu) - returns in Slasher House 2, which confusingly was released in 2016: the references to the same year in PandaMonium suggest that this one was made earlier than suggested, but that could just be Dixon pulling the audience's collective chain (even more confusingly the end of the movie also announces a movie called Slaypril Fools 82 - a short which was made last year); if so there's a real sense of Dixon and his chums creating a kind of home county slasher universe with these things. Whether you like PandaMonium or not will rather depend on how broad you like your humour - not much in my case, although there's a funny 'Talking Heads' gag which made me laugh. The cast clearly had a lot of fun making it, and I'd rather see stuff like this than some portentous turgid supernatural nonsense (mentioning no titles of course). Oh and it's good to see a film that had not one but two post credits sequences.

Countdown (USA 2019: Dir Justin Dec) Move over Final Destination movies, there's a new kid in town. When a group of young students all download an app called 'Countdown' they're kind of thrilled that the software tells them how long they've got until they die. Those who are due to live into their 80s or 90s look relieved but one girl is given three hours. Offered a lift home by her drunk boyfriend, she prefers to walk but gets a message that her user agreement has been broken; she was destined to die in the car, which ends up wrecked, with the seat she would have occupied completely mangled. Back home, a mysterious force finishes the job and her body lies lifeless on the bathroom floor at the exact time the app said she would die.

And so begins this rather tepid but not unappealing update of the FD franchise, which also manages to draw in strained family relationships, a bit of #metoo and a whole load of demonology (basically the force behind the app is a demon who stalks people who have cheated death).

The focus of the movie is on Emily Blunt-a-like Quinn Harris (Elizabeth Lail), a student nurse who when we meet her has just qualified. Treating the boyfriend of the recently deceased girl for injuries sustained in the car crash, Quinn downloads the app and isn't amused to find that she only has 2 days and 22 hours to live. Teaming up with all round nice guy Matt Monroe (Jordan Calloway), who also has a limited existence, she enlists the help of an excitable but knowledgeable priest, Father John (P.J.Byrne), who tells her the origin of the countdown myth and of the demon who tracks down those who seek to escape their designated fate. It seems that the only way to stop the thing is for someone who has accessed the app to die in advance of the allotted time. But who will it be?

Unlike the FD movies, which took more time in unfolding the story behind the events, the characters in Countdown are downloading (and dying) just minutes into the movie. While this sets up the film pretty well it also means that there isn't anywhere to go with the story for much of its running time. Nevertheless it's a fun if totally unoriginal ride, and Lail is good as the troubled nurse having to deal with mythical and real demons, the latter in the shape of the 'rapey' Dr Sullivan (Peter Facinelli). There are a couple of fx moments, include a 'foot' scene in a toilet, that are genuinely weird, plus the old 'whose-hand-am-I-touching?' trick which works really well; and the demon, once glimpsed, is pleasingly old school. There's not much new in Countdown, but part of the fun in watching is the familiar given a slightly new slant.

Ravers (UK 2018: Dir Bernhard Pucher)

Aciiiiiiid! Gaspar Noé must have been taking notes on this one, as Pucher's 2018 movie touches on a lot of the same plot points as the French enfant terrible's film Climax from the same year.

An accident in a factory that makes energy drinks causes the chemical makeup of a batch of 'Renergize' - the brand name for the product - to be messed up, but the company's about to be closed down, so the contaminated bottles go unchecked.

The empty factory becomes the scene for an illegal rave (remember them?) attended by at least twenty clubbers - ok it's a low budget film - keen on getting their rocks off. Among the clubbers is the reluctant Becky (Georgia Hirst), a cleanliness freak who would have given Howard Hughes a run for his money. Becky's a journalist trying to get a break, recovering after her last partner Charlotte (Eve Connolly) left her over said cleanliness obsession; she's persuaded to attend the rave by her friend Ozzy (Danny Kirrane), so named because of his parents' love of the band 'Black Sabbath.' Things pick up a little when Becky meets Hannah (Manpreet Bambra) on the dancefloor, who is a) sympathetic to the germophobe's little quirks and b) a possible replacement for Charlotte.

But when one of the people behind the scenes at the gathering discovers the abandoned cases of 'Renergize' and doles it out to an already drugged up crowd, chaos reigns - the poisoned batch turns the clubbers into, well, what exactly? "They're not zombies...they're more like mutant ravers" explains Ozzy, as he, Charlotte, undercover cop Jen (Maria Volk), a few other clubbers who haven't imbibed plus a newly mutant Hannah, must evade the raving hordes and make it to safety.

The main issue I had with Pucher's exuberant and often witty horror comedy is the insistence on making it look and sound inauthentically American - my understanding is that rave culture was a largely UK phenomenon anyway. With Wales standing in for the US, nearly all the cast, apart from Kamal Angelo Bolden (an American actor of colour playing Vince, the drug dealer - nice) and a blink and you'll miss it performance from Natasha Henstridge, affect (generally poor) Yank accents - I was particularly amused that Ms Hirst seemed to model hers on Mischa Barton.

But that aside Ravers is a fun, resourceful flick which keeps the attention despite the limitations of its story. The mutants, who all develop an odd googly eye look once they neck some 'Renergize', are a bit more interesting than your average zombie, and they're less intent on chowing down than waving glowsticks and succumbing to repetitive beats, only turning nasty when the music stops. Pucher handles his action sequences really well, making a small cast seem a lot more populous, and the whole thing has the feel of a slightly more polite version of a Troma movie. Fun while it lasts, but I'd have been happier if it had dropped the pretence and located itself this side of the 'pond.'

Ravers is available on digital download from 16 March

The Hunt (USA 2020: Dir Craig Zobel)

Films about the increasing polarisation of the right and the left in America have been gaining traction recently; movies as diverse as Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman (2018), Jordan Peele's Us (2019) and The Purge movies have all taken slightly different approaches to the same subject. A number of 'state of the nation' movies have also emanated from Jason Blum's prolific Blumhouse company, an organisation generally associated with a reliable if un-revolutionary roster of projects; The Hunt's dark satire, also a Blumhouse production, is in another league.

Part The Hunger Games and Battle Royale (2000) nihilism, part The Most Dangerous Game (1932) and one part The Cabin in the Woods (2011), The Hunt's tricksy story resists lengthy narrative re-telling, but its premise is simple: a group of twelve disparate souls wake up in the middle of dense forestland - ostensibly Arkansas - and are picked off, one by one, by unseen assailants. This seems to be a planned exercise rather than random slayage, as a group text conversation at the beginning of the movie reveals. The victims are Trump's underclass, termed 'deplorables' (taken from 'crooked' Hillary Clinton's reference to Trump supporters in a 2016 speech) who hail from places like Wyoming and Orlando, and the attackers are drawn from the liberal elite. Broad brush strokes apply to the characterisation of both sides; it is naturally assumed that the 'deplorables' all know how to fire guns, assuming their collective right to bear arms, and the elite spend their time correcting each other's gender and race assumptions and ragging on about keeping healthy (there's a great gag when one of them drinks a bottle of soda, and is told that it's poison, by which is meant it contains lots of sugar - seriously, it's much funnier in context).

Out of all this class-based carnage emerges one working class woman, Crystal (an astonishing performance by Betty (Glow) Gilpin), who as an ex soldier is as skilled - if not more so - than her attackers in holding her own. Crystal works out what's really going on, and eventually tracks down the person at the top of the pile responsible for everything that's happened - Athena (Hilary Swank).

If I haven't already made this clear, The Hunt ain't subtle, although its blurring of who the real bad guys are is interesting. "This isn't a country, it's a business" comments one of the elite; "war is war" says another, and between those two quotes is the ruthlessness of the thing. But despite the broadness I had a good time with this, and enjoyed being wrongfooted along the way: I looked at my watch and at the 20 minute point a significant percentage of the cast were already dead, but that was merely Act 1, and for this reason until the emergence of Crystal there's no one character that you can hold onto, which, with the story's shifting perspective, makes it a hard movie to like. But of course that awkwardness is emblematic of the position America finds itself in today, and scriptwriters Damon Lindelof and Nick Cuse have mined a similarly zetgeisty vein to the conspiracy thrillers of the late 1960s/early 1970s; interestingly Zobel's 2012 feature Compliance dwelt in very similar morally ambiguous territory.

But the real prize here is Gilpin, whose character rises from the turmoil of the film's first half, a natural leader with a smirk and some lethal chop socky moves, who sees her way through all the bullshit - just listen to her southern take on the 'Tortoise and the Hare' story in which the Hare gets his own back, and you kind of know where you stand.

Has The Hunt set a new bar for post Trump movies? Possibly, but it has certainly set one for Blumhouse films (and it's temporary ban in the US last year can't have hurt), fast becoming the most interesting movie company working in the genre at the moment.

The Hunt opens in UK cinemas on 11 March 2020

VFW (USA 2019: Dir Joe Begos)

Hot on the heels of Begos's other 2019 movie Bliss comes this note perfect homage to low budget 1980s gang based exploitationers with a side swipe at modern America.

A group of ex Vietnam/Korean vets hang out at a run down bar, managed by ex staff sergeant Freddy (Stephen Lang, excellent). The VFW of the title, also the name of the bar, stands for 'Veterans of Foreign Wars'; and the location is a real one, post 2494 in Irving, Texas.

As the guys shoot the breeze, and plan a birthday treat for Freddy after hours at a nearby 'titty bar,' just across the car park on the site of an equally decrepit cinema a different war is taking place; America's Opioid crisis has deepened, triggered by a new lethally addictive drug called Hype. Drug baron Boz (Travis Hammer), who as the film opens has casually caused the death of one of his entourage, Lucy (Linnea Wilson), while looking for a Hype fix, looks set to do a deal to sell his stash and skip town. But Lucy's sister Elizabeth aka Lizard (Sierra McCormick) steals the drugs as revenge for the killing, and hides out in...guess where? Yep, the VFW bar.

And so the stage is set for a battle of the generations as Boz's team of reprobates lays siege to VFW, while the vets - accompanied by new soldier Shawn (Tom Williamson), who picked the wrong day to pop into a soldier friendly establishment for a quiet beer - gallantly protect Lizard with a combination of American grit and lethal home made weapons.

Now I wasn't as enamoured as many by Bliss, and on the surface Begos's follow up stylistically treads the same ground; shot on 16mm with lots of saturated neon, oodles of murky but impressive gore and Steve Moore's pounding, authentic recreation of those well loved slightly wonky synth soundtracks of 80s genre movies.

But this is so much more than a pallid homage to the action films of yesteryear, although its debt to films like John Carpenter's 1976 movie Assault on Precinct 13 is considerable. One of the first things that strikes is the location: in a lengthy tracking shot which is actually pretty shocking because what is photographed seems totally undressed, the Texan urban wasteland unfolds, all graffiti, burnt out shops and broken wire fences. As Freddy drives to the bar, swigging from a hip flask, he and passenger Abe (Fred Williamson) bemoan the state of the streets, ironically pretty much unchanged from the same streets we've been used to seeing in 'urban' films from the 80s. "In this neighbourhood, gunshots are like crickets," someone remarks; clearly not much has changed in three decades.

And the casting of 80s exploitation regulars in the vet roles is both inspiring and referential - those exploitation movies that Begos loves did exactly the same thing. So we have: Stephen Lang, as seen in Michael Mann and George P. Cosmatos films; 80s action regular Fred Williamson; Martin (The Karate Kid I, II and III, plus a whole heap of others) Kove as sleazy used car salesman Lou; and best of all William Sadler, as the rheumy, sozzled Walter Reed, who rediscovers his inner solider at the appropriate time. These guys get all the best lines - "We leave at 23:00 or whenever I finish urinating" says Reed at one point - in contrast to the younger gang members who in the credits are mostly denied names (although Dora Madison, who memorably played Dezzy in Bliss, gets a little more character definition as the brutal Gutter).

Any American movie made today which touches on the haves and the have nots could be called 'Trumpean', but the extra angle here is Begos's thinly veiled criticism of America's treatment of its war veterans, and despite all the choreographed mayhem, chopped limbs and thundering soundtrack, this remains a very human story about not writing off older people in society. Excellent.


VFW is available on Digital Download now

Supermarket Sweep #13 - Unlucky for some! Reviews of Mermaid's Curse (Canada 2015), The Curse of La Llorona (USA 2019), Snatchers (USA 2019), The Gallows Act II (USA 2019), Mayday (USA 2019) and The Jack in the Box (UK 2019) NEW WAVE OF THE BRITISH FANTASTIC FILM

Mermaid's Curse (Canada 2015: Dir Nicholas Humphries) We start our 13th SS post in fine style - well in terms of titling anyhow. Mermaid's Curse started off life as 'Charlotte's Song' then became 'Mermaid's Song': the 'Curse' was obviously added to make it sound way scarier.

A loose adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's 'The Little Mermaid', set in a 1930s Oklahoma dustbowl community, Humphries' film centres on a sort of bawdy house with an aquatic theme. Run by father of four daughters George (Brendan Taylor), the family put on shows for the local lads, keeping it clean but gently suggestive. As the movie opens the show's star, mum Serena (Natasha Quirke), takes her own life, leaving a distraught family including favourite daughter Charlotte (Katelyn Mager) who possesses something of the siren voiced qualities that her mother used to captivate audiences. As the shows dip in quality and the takings dry up, visiting 'businessman', the hissably evil Randall (Iwan Rheon) bails out the show in return for bawdier content and a requirement to pimp out the girls to both the audience and his henchmen.

But Charlotte, like her mother, has a secret. As well as her siren like voice she is a mermaid who has taken human form, a fact which mum - and a strange grandma character too - kept from her. And in her mer-form she's a whole lot more lethal than the popular image of the half-woman, half-fish creature. Sadly all this action only takes place in the last few minutes, rendered almost entirely in shaky CGI. So for most of Mermaid's Curse we get a lot of budget period detail, some ripe chat which borders on the amateur dramatics at times, and, well, not a lot else.

The show's songs are probably the highlight of the movie: although they're a little too contemporary for the 19th century setting, they're convincingly delivered by the showgirls and the overall seediness of the flophouse boardtreading feels authentic. Which is a good job as we spend an awful lot of time in that room, waiting for something to happen. And apart from a few brief bloody sequences Mermaid's Curse remains a tastefully told tale of rather distasteful goings on. It's not terrible, just not terribly needed, and the inclusion of Game of Thrones' Rheon in the cast seems the only reason it's sitting on supermarket shelves five years after it was made.

The Curse of La Llorona (USA 2019: Dir Michael Chaves) We all know the 'infinite monkey' theorem - which concludes that a primate hitting keys at random on a typewriter for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type recognisable text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare. Well I have a feeling those monkeys have been employed on this minimum opus, which is a bit unfair to the actual writers, Mikki Daughtry and Tobias Iaconis, but, well, you try sitting through it.

Ostensibly part of The Conjuring 'puniverse' (sic) in that the priest trying to assist the afflicted family, Father Perez (Tony Amendola) was in Annabelle - and references the doll in this film - it's a rather wretched spook movie that revolves around a woman who, back in the day, drowned both her kids after discovering her husband with another woman, becoming a restless soul hunting down other children as a result.

It's 1973: single mum Anna is struggling to balance the requirements of bringing up two kids with a job at child welfare. She's assigned to deal with a suspected abuse case and, visiting the home, finds the kids hiding in a cupboard, the door to which is daubed with mystical symbols. The suspected mum, who of course isn't really guilty of inflicting the burn type marks that appear on the kids' wrists, warns of the spirit of La Llarona and before you know it Anna's being spooked by the spook and also under investigation for abuse in her own family,

This totally by the numbers movie has jump moments you can time your watch by and centres Anna's two kids as the main people in peril to target a PG13 audience, while the rest of us sit there failing to identify or sympathise with anything that's going on. Everyone has already queued up to give this one short shrift so I'll not labour the point, except to say that a small handful of atmospheric moments couldn't save this anodyne and uninvolving feature. 

Snatchers (USA 2019: Dir Stephen Cedars, Benji Kleiman) The love affair with 1980s creature features continues with this movie, developed from both a 2015 short and a 16 part TV series, and employing many of the same cast.

Sara Steinberg (played exuberantly by the wide eyed Mary Nepi) loses her virginity to athletic co-student Skyler (Austin Fryberger) who promises to pull out at the crucial moment in lieu of possessing a condom - guess what, he doesn't. Within 24 hours Sara not only falls pregnant, but nine months size pregnant and gives birth to...an alien. But there's worse - it's twins! And the next little bundle of joy is even clawier and scalier than its brother/sister/whatever.

From the brief description above you'll have guessed that Snatchers is a horror comedy that's full of young people with smart mouths speaking lines that are more often than not only passably funny. The alien, who latches itself to the back of a victim's head then controls the body, is straight out of Robert Heinlein's 'The Puppet Masters' but with anything sinister cast aside in favour of more laffs. The reason for this alien activity is traced back to Skyler, who was infected with an extraterrestrial virus while on holiday in Mexico with his folks, which would be a nice idea if it wasn't shoehorned in at the last minute to explain everything.

Nepi is very good as the innocent (gormless?) Sara, and she makes a good double act with her estranged then reconciled best friend Hayley (Gabrielle Elyse). While I could see what Cedars and Kleiman were trying to do with the material, and were very sure in their execution (they'd had enough practise!) the whole thing looked good but came off as really inconsequential. And, sadly, not that funny.

The Gallows Act II (USA 2019: Dir Travis Cluff, Chris Lofing) I bet you were all really keen to see more of the supernatural adventures of the late Charlie Grimille, who we first saw stalking high school students in Cluff and Lofing's 2015 rather grim found footage movie The Gallows? Thought not, but you've got it, as the guys return for more haunted hi-jinx after the first instalment netted a tidy $43 million in box office receipts.

OK so let's recap: in 1993 during a performance of the play 'The Gallows' one of the cast - Mr Grimille - tragically died in a hanging scene that went wrong. Twenty years later the school mounted a restaging of the play in honour of Mr G's death, but revenge arrives from beyond the grave, placing the teen actors in peril.

A couple of years later, Auna Rue and older sister Lisa (Ema Horvath and Brittany Falardeau respectively) move to California. Lisa is a clothes designer and Auna, who has her own YouTube channel, has enrolled at drama school. Throughout her life Auna has harboured acting ambitions but her family have not been supportive, and watching her first monologue in front of a class, you can understand why. But when she happens on a copy of the 'The Gallows' in the library, things change: her first class speech from the play has them eating out of her hand, and her on line followers increase exponentially when she films herself reading the same passage from the play on webcam. But there's something odd in the background of the footage, and very soon Auna is enmeshed in the activities of the social media 'Charlie Challenge' community, and realises that the curse of Charlie may be upon her.

The sequel to The Gallows adopts a kind of meta Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows approach to the original material, focusing on the viral possibilities of the story and the anonymous 'Charlie Challenge' contributors, headed by the mysterious 'AlmostFamous99' who seems to be able to track Auna's every move. But it fails at almost every point, a PG-13 lite film that, even for a Blumhouse production, is so lacking in incident, plot and narrative coherence, that you almost wish you were watching the original movie (and as if to answer that, it actually throws in some scenes from The Gallows which make you realise you were wrong on that count too). Ema Horvath is rather too sickly sweet as our social media heroine - and is it just me or is the whole YouTube referencing in films getting really tired? - and while Act II does at least deliver a downer ending, it's hard to feel sorry for the victim or remember any of the cast's character names. This is bland, tedious filmmaking of the lowest order: it was apparently made directly after the first film and shelved until last year. What a surprise.

Mayday (USA 2019: Dir Massimiliano Cerchi) There were a couple of internet rumours that actors either failed to get paid or were paid late on Cerchi's last movie, 2017's The House of Evil, which may or may not have been officially released. Certainly his previous releases have him marked as a kind of Uwe Boll figure, and on the basis of Mayday they'd not be wrong.

On a plane bound for London from New York, a motley assembly of passengers presents like characters from a B disaster movie. There's newly married couple Mark and Penny who can't keep their hands off each other, sleazy music video producer Smokey (who gets a final reel personality shift into a caring soul), Doctor Singh, a Sikh guy who comes in for a bit of casual racism, Nero, a strange dude with an unnatural attachment to his attache case, psychologist Rochelle and lantern jawed air marshal Adam Anderson (Michael Paré, an actor whose z movie credit list is quite something to behold). Keeping the passengers in check are hostesses Lynn and Aeryn, who handily detest each other, and a couple of on the make pilots.

Mid flight the cabin lights flicker and lusty Mark vanishes, shortly followed by other passengers. What's going on? Uber cool Rochelle (stuntwoman Crystal Santos) has an explanation, drawing on a parallel story from history of the figure of death playfully picking off sailors, one by one, from a boat that was already destined to sink. Is, as Rochelle muses, an evil spirit abroad on the plane, or maybe a demonic presence...or death itself? She's right, and it's the last option if you're still paying attention. Luckily the contents of the strange guy's attache case include an ancient grimoire and a ritual dagger, both of which can be used to exorcise the on board presence.

Watching this laughable but oddly curious movie, it's difficult to know how seriously to take it. I'm guessing that the crew got hold of a cabin simulator as nearly all the 'action' takes place in one location. There are a couple of line fluffs left in and I'm assuming the external shots of the plane in flight have been borrowed as the tail fin logo has been digitally obscured. Ripe dialogue abounds: "I'm not being rude," says Adam, poring over the ancient book, "I'm trying to read Old English!" and stewardess Lynn, who spends most of the movie melting down and repeating things that others say, screams, in the middle of one of her freak outs, "Freaking out is not going to solve anything!"

Garbage yes, but at an hour and 10 minutes, it's very watchable garbage, and in what other film can you see two exorcisms on a plane, one conducted in ancient English and the other in Urdu?

The Jack in the Box (UK 2019: Dir Lawrence Fowler) Fowler's second feature, while by no means a masterpiece, is considerably better than his first offering, 2018's Curse of the Witch's Doll. Casey Reynolds (Ethan Taylor) is an American working at the fictional Hawthorn Museum, a National Trust style setup in the English countryside (actually it's Abington Park in Northamptonshire). Reynolds has come to the UK to escape the guilt of failing to respond to a call from his girlfriend who was phoning shortly before being attacked and killed.

While doing some clearance work at the museum he finds a square container, a kind of larger Lament Configuration contraption which, when activated, unveils a jack in the box. But the device has a history: the 'jack' is actually a demonic clown figure who rises from the box every now and then to feast on six victims. Staff and museum visitors start to go missing, and Reynolds is very much in the frame for the disappearances. But with the aid of local demonology author Maurice Ainsworth (Tom Carter) Casey learns about the demon and, more importantly, how it can be returned to the place from where it emerged. His only other aide is fellow museum worker Lisa (Lucy-Jane Quinlan) who, initially unbelieving of the supernatural explanation for the disappearances, quickly changes her mind when she claps eyes on the thing.

So far so low budget shot on digital fare then. But The Jack in the Box has some advantages over its DTV competitors. Firstly the full sized figure of Jack is actually quite unnerving, a combination of some impressive costume design (the responsibility of one of the many Fowler clan behind the scenes in this film) and the movements of the creature himself, played by Robert Nairne (who was, among other credits, the monster in 2017's Marrowbone and a werewolf in 2015's Howl). Another plus is an astonishingly well written score which for once eschews the string synthesiser and is played on proper old school instruments; ok so the drama of the soundtrack can on occasion rather run away with itself in relation to what's actually happening on screen - which is often not much - but it still sounds impressive. The cast are also a notch above the usual players found in this sort of thing, and their skills stop the rather leisurely first half of the movie from getting too irritating. The Jack in the Box has a satisfying downbeat ending and, predictably, a way in to a sequel. Not bad at all.