NEW WAVE OF THE BRITISH FANTASTIC FILM 2025 #2: Reviews of Borley Rectory: The Awakening (UK 2025), Rumpelstiltskin (UK 2025), Manor of Darkness (UK 2025), Snake Creek (UK 2025), Boarhog (UK 2025) and Mundane (UK 2020)

Borley Rectory: The Awakening (UK 2025: Dir Steven M. Smith) This is Smith's third film based around events at Borley Rectory, reputedly 'the most haunted house in England'. His first, 2019's The Haunting of Borley Rectory, was set in 1944 and his second, The Ghosts of Borley Rectory filmed two years later, located the action in 1937.

For his third Borley opus Smith goes back further; initially to 1888 and then, for the majority of the movie, 12 years later. For this is a prequel to the oft told Rectory story of the nun's ghost, which so interested ghost hunter Harry Price when he investigated the haunting many years later.

The Rev Harry Bull (Julian Glover, yes that Julian Glover) lies dying in Borley Rectory. While he reassures his family that there are no ghosts at the Rectory he gifts his son Henry (Corneille Dion Williams) a box which will, he confides mysteriously, keep the family safe.

Twelve years later Henry is now rector, residing at Borley with his mother Constance (Patsy Kensit, yes that...ok I'll stop doing that now) and his four sisters. Constance is stricken with visions of a nun being attacked by a priest and takes to her bed, where she's attended by a nurse (former alt comedian Helen Lederer) and is visited by the ghost of her mother (Vicki 'Allo'Allo, Virgin Witch Michelle). Uncle Somerset (Smith regular Mark Wingett) arrives to provide support; a concerned Henry, fearing supernatural shenanigans and rapidly questioning his faith, summons the Reverend Shaw (Simon Philips) for a second opinion and a solution to the haunting.

BR: TA is co-produced by genre stalwart Louisa Warren, and it's possible that her presence has tempered some of Smith's rough round the edges approach to filmmaking; some care has been expended on this one, including an impressive location (Ingatestone Hall in Essex), a very The Woman in Black feel (all period costumes and candlelight) and some good performances. There are even some impressive jump scares although the spooks are perhaps a little more regularly visible that I'd have liked. I've not been a fan of most of Smith's previous movies, but BR: TA is classy and occasionally scary.

A version of this review was first published on the Bloody Flicks site.

Rumpelstiltskin (UK 2025: Dir Andy Edwards) Edwards is yet another UK contributor to the Twisted Child Universe (TCU) which has, in recent years, seen a plethora of to be honest rather average movies providing a horror twist on popular children's stories.

As one of those stories 'Rumpelstiltskin' is a shoo in for a horror film director; the original story by The Brothers Grimm is already pretty grotesque, and I can do no better than borrow the (AI generated) IMDb plot description to sum it up: "Miller lies about daughter's gold-spinning ability. Imp helps her impress King. She promises imp her future child for continued aid. When payment comes due, imp strikes deal with devil."

Edwards's movie is for the most part a reasonably faithful adaptation of the story with a number of more contemporary adornments. The tale's miller (Mark Cook) peddles his wayward daughter Evalina (Hannah Baxter-Eve) to the nasty king (Colin Malone), a chap prone to mounting the heads of his ex wives on poles. The miller's boast that his daughter can spin gold from straw ("I don't even know how to fucking spin", she concludes once isolated in the tower) comes to pass courtesy of an imp (Joss Carter) who pays her a visit and grants her wish in return for a kiss and, later, a gawk at her naked body.

Evalina's success at straw to gold wins her the hand of the king and, as queen, she gives birth; sadly she's promised her first born to Rumpelstiltskin as her side of the bargain, although had hoped to avoid pregnancy by consuming nettle tea. The imp's request for the infant can be voided if Evalina successfully guesses his name.

Edwards cloaks (pun intended) this low budget but modestly sumptuous yarn in various Game of Thrones stylings, with some dynastic squabbling and Rumpelstiltskin (whose makeup suggests an homage to the 1995 film of the same name) reporting directly to a figure named the Demon King of the Shadow Forest. Evalina is pleasantly feisty, and the script maintains a rather cheeky tone ("So she's a witch", concludes the king at one point, "I've married worse"). Rumpelstiltskin is, much like the director's previous TCU entry Cinderella's Revenge, a lot more fun that the drearier Mickey Mouse/Popeye end of the Universe, with some impressive photography and a wheezing, clunking dungeon synth score from the appropriately named 'Disgusting Cathedral' adding to the movie's quality.

Manor of Darkness (UK 2025: Dir Blake Ridder) There are two handy approaches for the 'fantastic' filmmaker looking to do something intriguing on a low budget. The first is the 'multiverse' concept, the second is the timeloop plot device; in Shanghai born Ridder's first released feature - also, staggeringly, the prolific director's 72nd film - he's gone for the second option.

Four disparate souls come together with crime on their minds. Brother and sister Chris (Louis James) and Laura (Kim Spearman) are at odds over the care of their mother; meanwhile Chris's girlfriend Lisa (Sarah Alexandra Marks), what with her tough upbringing and visions of herself covered in blood, has her own problems. Oh and there's Andy (Rui Shang), handy with a camera and trying to make some money for a custody battle, who the others have seen in pickpocket action.

Chris hatches a plan for some easy money. Inside a country manor used by a gang of thieves to stash their loot, most of the booty has been recovered following a raid; but not all. And in a freak coincidence the owner of the house has invited Chris and his chums to film inside, providing the perfect opportunity to liberate the remaining swag. But a visit to the basement unveils a large box which, when opened, triggers a sequence of events which lock the group in a perpetual live/die/live cycle.

Quite why all this happens is rather baffling, and there's a point about two thirds through the movie where the repetition starts to grate. What Ridder fails to do is unpick the onion skin layers of the story so that the audience understands what's happening; it's just a confusing mess, not helped by some rather lacklustre performances and misplaced attempts at humour. I can't fault Ridder for trying something that's a little different to most haunted house movies, but overall this is a misfire.

Snake Creek (UK 2025: Dir Charlie Steeds) Charlie's back! Mr Steeds, Bristol's answer to Roger Corman, strikes again, this time choosing something more reptilian than his usual cluster of monsters and werewolves.

Unlike other British directors, who may base their movies in the US but never venture further than a youth hostel in deepest Hampshire, Steeds is the real deal, authentically locating some of his American themed features in the US of A; in this case Georgia.

Snake Creek has four ex schoolmates travelling to a location deep in the Chattahoochee woods for a little R&R time. Headed by the exuberant Patrick (Paul Ogletree), the quartet stock up at a local general store, run by rum old Woody (Scot Scurlock) who issues the usual warnings about taking care in the forest. These would seem to be worth heeding based on the pinned posters highlighting a missing local girl, Willow (Faith McCoy), who we’ve already seen alive, covered in leaves and surrounded by rotting corpses, deep in the forest.

And the source of all this concern? Gwendoline, a 29ft snake, who slithers around the forest looking for human meat, and who just so happens to have discovered the four campers, protected by Woody and his inbred cohort.

Filmed back to back with Southern Nightmare, a slice of gothic that features pretty much the same cast, Steeds is on a one man mission to being the spirit of grindhouse to a new generation of moviegoers. The problem here is that while Snake Creek looks the part (Steeds as cinematographer has a keen eye for the outdoors) and sounds great via Simone Cilio’s strident score, this is basically four grown men being menaced by a snake puppet, albeit one designed by LA based SFX talent Eric Yoder. One does rather wonder why Charlie went all that way to make something so, well, silly?

But then when you consider that director Tom Gormican has just completed a big budget snake movie (Anaconda) there’s clearly some mileage in the slinky reptile as an object of fright, so why shouldn’t Steeds give us his own lower budget version? Snake Creek is big on characterisation and rural detail, but somewhat lighter on scares; it’s still worth a look though.

A version of this review was first published on the Bloody Flicks site.

Boarhog (UK 2025: Dir Craig Quinn) There's something weird going down on the streets of Manchester. Well a version of Manchester named Sounder City, and a fictional district: Villemomble (which is also a real suburb of Paris, but we're definitely not there).

A series of disappearances in the area have got the local population a bit twitchy. At the local hospital, the vaguely despotic Dr Adam Brecknell (Reece Ryan) hides his real self behind a cloak of supportive respectability, seducing the staff and being emotionally (and physically) abusive to his girlfriend Laura (Beverley Rendelle).

The country appears to be in some form of hostility with Russia (although conspiracy theorist tags of 'World War III' are dismissed by the Government). Neverthless a decision has been made to return serving troops back to the UK. One of these is Benji (Quinn) whose PTSD is, bluntly, through the roof; as well as being incredibly antisocial he's also plagued with visions of snout nosed witches.

When Brecknell is caught on site by hospital manager Claire (Nicola Mayers), meting out violence to hospital worker Laura, he's dismissed on the spot. Jobless and angry, he's kidnapped by an odd trio who make him an offer he can't refuse; and before we know it, 'Boarhog' is born.

After a while it gets increasingly difficult to follow events (there's a curse in there somewhere and those witches are back), partly because the sound quality of the film is pretty patchy, and there's a regional mumblecore effect going on dialogue wise too. But it doesn't matter; Boarhog is endlessly inventive, cheap as chips with some very impressive practical FX and a revenge tragedy kill count. Quinn is a witty chap in interview, and there's obviously some intelligence at work here (the script is surprisingly good for this sort of thing). If you can get past the DIY approach there's a lot to like, and honestly I'd rather watch something like this than an empty $10m snoozefest any day.

 

Mundane (UK 2025: Dir Ignacio Maiso) More suburban tension, this time set outside London. Mundane (Astrid Olofsson) is a young woman whose blog on everyday life starts attracting attention. Oh she's also a cyborg, but she tries to keep that fact to herself. Her adoptive mother (Nicola Wright) wishes that Mundane wouldn't call her Kathy, and the cyborg's boyfriend James (David Stock) has left her because he wants children and she can't have any (although she has faked two pregnancies, which ostensibly looks cruel on her part). Mundane's father/inventor Thomas (Paul Dewdney), previously estranged from the cyborg, comes back into her life.

Mundane's single friend appears to be Victoria (Daisy Porter) although this relationship appears to be tested when she admits that she has started going out with James; Mundane remains unphased.

A literary agent, Clare (Christina Ashford) is interested in marketing Mundane's blog, supported by Clare's wealthy manager Mark (Neil Ovenell), but is concerned when the cyborg outs herself online, having previously been happy to hide in plain sight. This disclosure triggers a succession of events that has consequences for all. 

'Consequences' is a pretty strong word to describe the impact of anything in Mundane, directed by Maiso at a snail's pace (I had previously reviewed his 2021 movie Them and didn't get on with that either). Mundane has that drained colour look and 'small head in big picture' framing adored by directors like Roy Andersson; it's beautifully photographed by Pierluigi Rossi, and Fernando Gimeno's score is straight out of a Wes Anderson movie. But despite its elegance and an appealing glacial performance by Olofsson in the title role, this is a rather empty film, initially intriguing but soon feeling like a short stretched to feature length.

A Desert (USA 2024: Dir Joshua Erkman)

I've spent quite a bit of time in the USA over the years, not only in the cities but also the country's less populated regions. One thing that anyone visiting the quieter bits of the place can't help but feel is the sense of isolation, and how easy it could be for a person to just get lost.

Joshua Erkman's debut feature A Desert may not be the first movie to exploit this anxiety, but as a mood piece about broken Americana and the people who live in it, it's kind of hard to beat.

Photographer Alex Clark (Kai Lennox), hoping to reclaim some of his glory days, sets out on a one person road trip to record the abandoned parts of his country; when we first meet him he's scoping out an empty, long closed cinema, whose blank screens will be important later in the film. Back home Alex's long suffering wife Sam (Sarah Lind) supports the couple financially and hopes that her husband has one more book of photographs in him.

But Alex perhaps forgets that, in and around those photogenic broken landscapes, people still live. Which he finds out after booking a motel and complaining to the grungy owner about a violent domestic happening in the next room. The noisy neighbour in question, the initially obsequious but quietly threatening Renny (Zachary Ray Sherman) takes one look at Alex's analogue equipment, whips out some moonshine and suggests that the photographer use he and his 'sister' Susie (Ashley B. Smith) as subject matter. This encounter doesn't end well.

Some days later a quietly distraught Sam, fed up with the local police's efforts to find her now missing husband, engages a dodgy private investigator, Harold (David Yow), to do what the cops can't. Harold ends up retracing Alex's steps, which includes a run in with Renny.

Erkman assembles all the elements you'll have seen before in any one of a number of American indie genre movies; psychopathic loner, grizzled private dick, local characters (Rob Zabrecky's motel owner is quietly effective in his few brief scenes) and a desert landscape breathtakingly beautiful in its emptiness. But the director has something more to say than just playing out the drama suggested by this setup. He's concerned with spectacle; how people view others and their surroundings and, importantly, the image, both moving and still. Yes, that does mean that Erkman strays into that territory staked as 'Lynchian' - the endless highway, the inscrutability of evil - but it's not shameless copying, despite the surreal, borderline supernatural goings on.

A Desert starts and ends with a camera; in between it's a drama about ruined buildings, already ruined people, and those headed in that direction. An enigmatic and impressive debut.

A Desert is on UK and Ireland digital platforms from 24 November

A Mother's Embrace aka Abraço de Mãe (Brazil 2024: Dir Cristian Ponce)

It's 1996. Ana (Marjorie Estiano) is a firefighter in Rio de Janeiro, returning to duty after a period in which she was given a leave of absence following the death of her mother, which affected her performance at work. To put it mildly.

Still clearly traumatised and experiencing fleeting visions of a mother from which she was estranged (following an abusive incident in her childhood, alluded to in the film's 1973 prologue), Ana is welcomed back into the ranks, but the fire service is too overwhelmed for a slow reintegration. 

The crisis facing the team isn't fire, but its elemental opposite; water. Successive rainy seasons in Rio de Janeiro have killed and displaced thousands. Ana and her fellow firefighters are summoned to a call at a nursing home on the outskirts of town, São Cristóvão, where Ana grew up. When they attend, they find an old, crumbling house full of residents in a poor state of health and hygiene, most almost catatonic. 

Outside a new storm begins to assert itself, necessitating the evacuation of the residents from the already leaking building. But none of the staff, headed up by the wheelchair bound Drika (Ângela Rabello) and younger manager Ulisses (Javier Drolas) seem in any hurry to leave. The team's attempts to rescue the old folk (and a small child, played Maria Volpe) results in their being trapped in the house, while Ana discovers the truth of what's happening, which links back to her mother.

Ponce's stylish and creepy feature, his first since 2020's History of the Occult, is an exercise in confusion and claustrophobia. Estiano's performance is the standout here; convincing in her trauma, her commitment to her job in the face of natural (and supernatural) danger consistent and believable.

There is a refreshing lack of clarity in what's happening, even when events are taking a distinctly Lovecraftian turn towards the end of the movie. It's best to revel in the nightmarish atmosphere of the thing (which reminded me of Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza's 2007 movie REC), particularly the crumbling, waterlogged nursing home set; locating the movie within the very real natural disasters of the Rio de Janiero floods adds a frisson of authenticity. A Mother's Embrace is very much its own film and its own world, and that can only be a good thing. Excellent stuff.

A Mother's Embrace is on UK and Ireland digital platforms from 10 November.

The Session Man (UK 2023/4: Dir Michael Treen)

The 'session man' of this documentary's title is - or rather was - Nicky Hopkins. Born in Sheffield in 1944, Hopkins was a keyboard child prodigy who went on to be a pivotal figure on the 1960s/70s UK music scene, albeit one that you're more likely to have heard than heard of.

Treen's debut feature length movie, planned back in 2021 and originally released to the festival circuit in 2023, traces Hopkins's career from his own band, 'The Savages', to his emergence on the 1960s music scene as the go to session pianist (the piano just starting to be used on the recordings of beat groups). It documents his almost Zelig like appearances with a large number of key 1970s bands, including 'The Who', 'The Kinks', and 'The Beatles', even sharing the stage with 'Jefferson Airplane' at Woodstock (it would have been with Jeff Beck, but apparently Mr Beck got the hump and flew home).

Hopkins, who died at the young age of 50 in 1994 (as a result of complications following a lifelong existence with Crohn's Disease) is therefore not present to offer his side of the story, beyond some archive interviews in which he appears modest and unassuming in conversation. Even rarer here are live performances; it's a distinct limitation to the enjoyment of Session Man, clearly a documentary of limited budget, that very little of the man's work is shown played by Hopkins himself. Indeed even his recorded work is sparse in the movie; we are left to experience Hopkins's mercurial talent via session musicians.

The musician's world is brought to life by a variety of interviews, some archive, some specifically for the documentary, including some insightful contributions from his second wife, Moira (other surviving family members aren't interviewed) ; as you'd expect from a group of talking heads who are mostly in their late 70s and 80s, recollection is not always great (ironically it's 'The Rolling Stones' 81 year old Keith Richards who offers the most impassioned support of Hopkins). Hopkins is made out to be a rather private man (possibly because of the paucity of biographical footage) who didn't know his true talent, which doesn't reconcile with his 1970s excesses, which saw him keeping up with the hard drinking and drugging Hollywood Vampires (to the point where he had to fill in for a 'refreshed' Harry Nilsson during the recording of one of his solo albums) and requiring a spell in rehab.

But it's the revelations of Hopkins's contributions to key bands and albums that is the film's biggest delight. If you've ever marvelled at the piano work on The Stones's 'She's a Rainbow' or 'Sympathy for the Devil', that's Nicky; what isn't disclosed is whether his work, which often transformed such songs from 'ok' to 'classic' status, was truly acknowledged at the time, or whether his status remained as 'session player'. Certainly there's no shortage of musicians queuing up to eulogise the late Hopkins in Treen's patchy but heartfelt documentary, but one can't help feel that if he was recognised as an essential talent back then he may still have been with us today.

The Session Man will be released to cinemas from 21 November.

Remember, Remember, the 5th of November etc etc.

So this morning I woke up and thought ‘Ah, another day of podcast writing, checking I have ingredients for dinner and…’ Hang on. It’s November 5th! How did this become just another day? The slow erosion of bonfire night, or fireworks night, or – more specifically – Guy Fawkes’ night, in the memory and public consciousness has entirely happened during my time on earth; actually more accurately the first fifty or so years of that span.

I can only write from personal experience – and I was a bit of an odd boy – but as a child this date was the second in the ‘holy trinity’ of autumn/winter excitement. First was 31st October – Halloween – and the third was of course 25th December. 5th November marked a sort of mid-point; a date I looked forward to for weeks. 

While the deregulation of the fireworks industry in the early 1980s (thank you, Mrs Thatch) really opened the field of choice for the firework hunter, back in the 1960s there were five firework companies all offering pretty much the same thing: Brock’s, Pain's, Wessex, Astra and Standard. Fireworks were sold individually or in different sized, affordable mixed boxes. You could gaze at the goods via glass fronted wooden display cabinets in most toy shops (although my own local shop, Holloway’s in Hounslow, chose not to stock them).

My parents didn’t have much money at the time, so we would only have been able to afford a small box of fireworks, which was fine. Once bought – sometime in advance of bonfire night – it would be stored under the sofa in the ‘best room’ of the house (ie the front room, only used for guests/parties and closed off at all other times to avoid having to heat it, via the creaky back boiler behind the main fireplace).

I would sneak into the front room pretty much nightly in the days leading up to 5th November, open the box and smell the gunpowder which stuffed each of the fireworks; sometimes there was a powdery residue in the box, and I wondered what mischief I could cause with that. There was always a roman candle, a jumping jack, a catherine wheel (which, when nailed to a fence post, hardly ever seemed to rotate), and a rocket. Touching these talismans was arguably as much, if not more fun than setting them off; there was always something a bit sad about the brief life of a firework, as if the potential of the thing was never matched by its momentary kinetic release. Rockets were slightly different. Fired from a milk bottle, half submerged in earth for stability (the bottle always smelled pretty disgusting the morning after) each one rose skyward to join its friends, as if being alone was not a natural state.

And then there was the now extinct practice of ‘penny for the guy’. My mother came from the poorer side of a rather well to do family in north London and always felt more connected to them than her own mother. I realised, some years after her death, that mum had retained some of the snobbery from that side of the family too, which rubbed off on me; this was probably why I looked on the ‘penny for the guy’ merchants as a bit common. Certainly I never undertook, or was asked to undertake, the custom of wheeling a badly made ‘guy’ to a street corner and begging for money. But in the late 1960s such groups were common. When did this die out?

I learned the origins of Guy Fawkes quite early. I attended a Church of England primary school, and on one particular November 5th, when we were all excited and raring to leave school for our respective back gardens (this would have been sometime towards the end of the 1960s) our headmaster called a kind of impromptu end of school assembly, giving us a very Protestant skewed account of evil Guy Fawkes and his treasonous acts, seeking to instill in us the reason we were celebrating and, arguably, warning of the perceived dangers of popery; how very 17th Century (although until relatively recently shops sold Guy Fawkes masks too, a tradition dating back  - in different forms - to the early 1600s). At the time this account seemed to conflict with the often jolly figure of Mr Fawkes found on the front of the fireworks boxes. But even then it cast a slight pall of gloom over bonfire night. How many of the households in Hounslow, all setting off fireworks at the same time in their back gardens, associated what they were doing with the slice of history imparted to us? Who knows.

Obviously we still have fireworks now; their use is no longer restricted to one day of the year (Diwali celebrations and bonfire night are often very close to each other date wise, not to mention the now firmly enshrined New Year's spectacle), and fireworks outlets can be found on high streets all year round. What’s missing, I suppose, is Guy himself. One look at the Wiki page for the event reminds the reader that for nearly four hundred years after the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot the 5th November was one of the most important, and significant, dates in the UK calendar (enshrined in law to ensure its continued observance), only to be largely snuffed out as the 20th century drew to a close. Even the famous Lewes and Sussex bonfires, which take place on or around November 5 annually, have moved the focus of their fiery celebrations from religious martyrs to prominent unpopular political figures. 

As an adult, and owner of two vulnerable rescue cats, I confess to maintaining a slight dread at the cacophony experienced at this time of year; but only on their behalf. Inside, I’m still that child, excited, anticipating the first of the night’s showers of sparks. Now where’s my Guy Fawkes mask?