Train to Busan (South Korea 2016: Dir Yeon Sang-ho)

Zombie movies have been around for decades. The genre shows no signs of fading (in fact quite the opposite), so these days to keep things fresh filmmakers often approach such films with a view to exploiting their cross genre potential: so we’ve had the zombie romance movie, the zombie comedy, the zombie war film, the zombie animals attack movie…and now, courtesy of South Korea’s Yeon Sang-ho, we have the zombie disaster movie.

Seok Woo is a misanthropic financial investor with a failed marriage and a daughter, Soo-an, who spends time split between separated parents. You can tell that Seok Woo’s a bit of a meanie – he buys his daughter a present for her birthday that he’d already bought her earlier that year, and his ex-wife is listed on his phone as just that – ‘ex wife.’ He also categorises most of his business contacts on the same phone as ‘lemmings.’

Currently staying with dad but missing mum, Soo-an’s birthday wish is to take the train and visit her mother in Busan, and Seok Woo grudgingly agrees to alter his business schedule to accompany his daughter on the journey. But as the train pulls away from Seoul station, the city’s placed under lockdown following a viral outbreak throughout the country – unfortunately one of the last people to board is an early victim of the infection.

The rest of Train to Busan is a series of incredibly tense set pieces as the numbers of infected on the train rise exponentially, and the uninfected survivors attempt to stay alive until the train reaches Busan.

Director Sang-ho’s background is in animation, which is to the film's advantage as he stages the action really well, filling the screen with incident, and his wide shots of city devastation look stunning. The rise of the infected, pouring between train carriages and smashing through sheets of broken glass like swarms of insects, is both terrifying and relentless. And the infection spreads in seconds, providing that the zombie gets a decent bite in (of course key characters who become infected are only partly chomped, therefore taking much longer to turn, and fulfilling one of the great disaster movie staples, the long death scene). The action is enhanced no end by the zombies being of the very fast and incredibly athletic variety (is there any other type these days?), although they're not so bright, having a problem with door handles and darkness.

And talking of disaster movies, this film is full of steals from that genre. Stick thin characterisation at the beginning of the movie to establish the key players; evil ‘must-survive-at-any-cost’ businessman who’ll step on anyone to stay alive; final reel with major character change triggered by emotional epiphany; they’re all here. I did slightly take exception to little Kim Su-an ( who very convincingly plays Soo-an), not because she isn’t a terrific actress, but more that she spends the last twenty minutes of the film screaming and crying, which to me felt more than a little exploitative and rather unnecessary for a very young girl to be put through.

Critics have praised  this film for its combination of horror and heart tugging moments - personally I felt these elements, combined with the broad humour (also to be found in films like Joon Ho Bong's 2006 movie The Host) didn't quite gel. But really Train to Busan is all about the action. At two hours long it rarely flags, and Sang-ho escapes the limitations of a film set on one train by breaking up the set pieces, allowing the audience to recover themselves before the next slice of undead action. It’s nail biting stuff and, despite my slight concerns, really does breathe new life into the genre.

Blair Witch (US 2016: Dir Adam Wingard)

It's twenty years after the depicted events in 1999's The Blair Witch Project, where a group of filmmakers in search of the legendary Blair Witch went missing in the woods around Burkittsville, Maryland, with the recovery of footage of their exploits the only record of their expedition. James, the brother of Heather, one of the original group, is convinced via some more recently internet uploaded film that his sister may still be in the strange house in the woods which was the final filmed location of the original party. He assembles a new team to go back to Burkittsville, including the owner of the recent footage who knows the filming location, to track down his sister and solve the mystery of the Blair Witch.

One of the main problems with Adam (2011's You're Next, 2014's The Guest) Wingard's irritating and unnecessary film is that it fails both as a sequel and as a movie in its own right. As a follow up to the The Blair Witch Project, it asks the audience to believe that a seemingly sane man is convinced his own sister could survive for twenty years in a house which presumably was subject to a full police investigation after the first events. It also asks that audience to accept that none of the new group of 'Witch hunters' seems to know anything about the legend (in fact they seem pretty clueless all round) despite the notoriety of the events surrounding the original disappearances. Nothing new is added narratively, apart from stressing that 'bad things only happen after dark', and worse, the actions of our new party merely mirror the mistakes of the 1999 group - presumably they didn't study the footage that closely.

Wingard's decision to make the film entirely his own at just past the hour mark (shorthand for bonkers) would be more palatable if he had spent any of the previous sixty minutes investing his two dimensional cast with personalities or motive. As it is they're all scarcely more than cannon fodder being subjected to the director's final reel penchant for noisy abstraction. As the movie revs up for its last scenes when, as in the original film, the remaining cast find themselves in the house in the woods, Blair Witch becomes a shaky (as opposed to steadi) cam rattle around rooms and corridors more effectively and coherently rendered by Sam Raimi in The Evil Dead thirty five years previously. I realise that the point of the last part of the movie was to capture a real sense of disorientation and terror - I just would have liked it to have had more of, well, a point.

Perhaps the best use of Blair Witch is to act as one bookend showing how far the found footage genre has come (or more precisely the cul de sac in which it now finds itself), with the original movie as the other; Wingard has clearly drawn from his own segments in the first two V/H/S films as a template, glitches and everything, for his particular take. One could argue that the sense of naivety present in the original film limited its dramatic value, but it's the subtlety on display in The Blair Witch Project that keeps me coming back to it, year on year. As actor and musician Matt Berry rightly pointed out concerning the 1999 movie in a recent interview, the bizarre sounds generated by the 'witch' in the middle of the night, including the sound of children playing and the breaking of branches, heard by a terrified Josh, Heather and Mike, is a triumph of creepiness. Blair Witch offers the same - sometimes scene-for-scene - but louder, crasser and with more shouting and running. Oh and yes you do see it (fleetingly), which is a decision no more stupid than those in the rest of the film. 

A footnote: although Blair Witch takes great pains to convince us that we're back in the same actual Maryland woods as the first film (similar State locations were also used in the unfairly ill-regarded sequel, 2000's Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2), Wingard's follow-up was in fact shot in British Colombia, Canada. Wow, they really were lost.

The Purge: Election Year (US 2016: Dir James DeMonaco)

While I generally dislike the term 'franchise' the fact that the three (to date) movies in the Purge series have been written and directed by the same person at least allows the audience to see how one man's vision (James DeMonaco) develops and expands his original concept.

2013's original The Purge, set in the year 2022, was essentially a 'home invasion' movie which largely squandered any opportunity to exploit the mayhem inherent in the fictional annual night of violence - where nearly all laws are suspended, including murder - by basing most of the film in one house. The following year's The Purge: Anarchy widened the action by taking it onto the streets and basing it around a couple whose car stalls minutes before the Purge's ominous sirens wail. It also introduced a character - Leo Barnes, out to avenge his son's death - who is pivotal in helping the couple and others to survive the night.

The Purge: Election Year, set in 2040, 21 years after the first Purge, shows a country divided, with the ruling 'New Founding Fathers of America' (NFFA), the devisers and supporters of the event, being challenged by presidential rival Charlie Roan, whose family were killed during one of the first Purges. Roan represents a growing band of anti Purgers who suspect that the liberation of the Purge event is a mask for class cleansing and cuts to welfare. The NFFA take the opportunity of relaxing a Purge rule whereby high government officials are exempted from being attacked during the event. Sensing Roan's life in danger, Leo Barnes, now chief of security to the senator, must keep the candidate alive, allying with various groups during the night.

The latest film in the (ugh) franchise looks to be its biggest budgeted yet. DeMonaco's direction has also grown in confidence. We're far from the tentative steps into Purge-land delivered in the original movie: The Purge: Election Year is a full-on actioner, reminiscent of the straight to video movies of the 1980s (usually dubbed for English audiences) where renegade bands of anti-heroes do battle in cities of the near future. DeMonaco also assumes his audience has seen the other Purge movies, and thankfully doesn't let any needless exposition get in the way of the action.

On the downside this is the longest of the three films and, at getting on for nearly two hours, it does rather sag in the middle. Once the overall theme of the film is established - tight situation, shoot out, new alliance with another group, another tight spot - your enjoyment of the movie is going to depend on how much you loved this type of film the first time round.

Watching The Purge: Election Year I was also struck how much the series is basically a more vicious version of The Hunger Games. The killing of humans in both sets of films is structured as an appeasement or as something with a higher purpose, the populace fooled into thinking that there is a good reason for the killing. Both (gak) franchises have a small but growing group of dissenters recognising the truth, and taking renegade action against dubious political types whose essential evilness contrasts with the good of the rebels, despite the violence they use to achieve their own ends.

Under the Shadow (Iran/Jordan/Quatar/UK 2016: Dir Babak Anvari)

Iranian born director Babak Anvari has dug deep into his own life story for the setting of his first directorial feature, Under the Shadow. He was born in the middle of the Iran/Iraq war, and his doctor father would regularly be posted to different locations, leaving the anxious Anvari and his brother alone in the house with their mother for long stretches of time.

This scenario forms the basis for a tense and genuinely frightening movie about isolation, the ever present threat of conflict (the film is set in Tehran) and the supernatural. The story introduces us to Shideh, who is mother to a sweet little girl called Dorsa. As the film opens Shideh's request to return to medical school has just been turned down because of her previous record of political activity. Her disappointment at this decision is compounded by her husband Iraj, a qualified doctor, who is dismissive of her aspirations, wanting her to devote more time to being a mother. Tensions in the family, already strained because of money issues, escalate when Iraj is given a military posting to a high-conflict area. Left alone in their flat, Dorsa forms a friendship with a strange orphan boy living in another apartment, and as a result starts talking about the djinn, an evil spirit who may be coming to hurt them. As a progressive woman Shideh is dismissive of this, but events in the flat quickly and terrifyingly escalate, focusing on the now fever-ridden Dorsa, gradually leading her to accept the truth about a demonic presence.

Narges Rashidi as Shideh

Under the Shadow is a film of two halves, which resist accusations of 'oil and water' storytelling as both elements are equally frightening in different ways. In the first section we are exposed not only to the unfairness of Shideh's thwarted ambition, but also the cloud of secrecy she must live under to enjoy a life with some respite from Iranian strictures. It may be unfair for western audiences to pronounce judgement on the ways of 1980s Iran without fully understanding its culture, but its effects on an intelligent woman trying to hold her life together are plain to see. We witness Sideh working out to a Jane Fonda tape, a ritual that is clearly something she holds dear (later once the tape has gone missing she will exercise in front of a blank TV screen, in order to preserve some sense of sanity in her world), played on a VCR that she hides when strangers visit the flat. We also see her trying to keep the household together after Iraj leaves, despite pleas from friends and family to flee the city as the conflict draws nearer to Tehran. Even after an unexploded bomb lands on the flat above, causing a massive crack to appear in her ceiling, she remains.

So when then the supernatural elements start to creep in, just over half way through the film, tension is already at breaking point. The frightening events of the second half of the film are made worse by a creeping realisation that the demonic presence - which reveals itself to Dorsa first in an attempt to drive a wedge between mother and daughter - is possibly here as punishment for Sideh's cultural transgression. Anvari cleverly bases his demon on Iranian belief; as one of the characters says, the djinn, a supernatural creature with roots in Arabic and middle eastern mythology, is frequently mentioned in the Quran. One could argue that this is an attempt to rise above the standard fright flick monster. But fear not, he's quite capable of delivering good old fashioned scares, including a 'jump' moment that caused one person in my screening to scream, a rare event in hardened critic circles.

Avin Manshadi as Dorsa

There is some incredibly impressive acting on display here from the three leads: Bobby Naderi as the stoic and rigid Iraj, a very believable Avin Manshadi in her first role as Dorsa, and Narges Rashidi, already an accomplished actor, who is absolutely first rate as Shideh, balancing frustration and determination as she struggles to keep things together.

A number of people have suggested that Under the Shadow borrows from The Babadook simply because the film features a mother and child's relationship with a creature of darkness, a comparison  I reject as rather lazy. While it's true that the setup is not in itself original (although the context definitely is), I'm far more intrigued by the more subtle genre references at work; the initial smaller disturbances affecting the family, like Dorsa's doll and Sideh's exercise tape going missing, suggests the haunting-by-stealth of the the earlier Paranormal Activity entries; the gradual deterioration of Sideh's nerves and the condition of her flat, in particular the hole in the ceiling which she rather pathetically tries to mend with masking tape (and which will be the location for one of the film's more frightening scares) reminded me of Roman Polanski's 1965 film Repulsion. And finally, and without giving too much away, the film contains the creepiest use of a bedsheet since, and possibly influenced by Jonathan Miller's 1968 BBC TV adaptation of the MR James story Whistle and I'll Come to You.

In interviews Babak Anvari has mentioned that he's not a fan of horror films per se, and audiences shouldn't expect his next film to be Under the Shadow 2 or even a film within the same genre. I think that's probably wise, because it would hard to top this as one of the tensest scariest films I've seen for quite some time. But whatever it is, his next film will be eagerly anticipated.

The Shallows (US 2016: Dir Jaume Collet-Serra)

I'm not ashamed to mention that I've enjoyed all of Jaume Collet-Serra's movies, from the gloopy fun of House of Wax (2005) via the audacious but extremely watchable Orphan (2009) to the pensioner action antics of Liam Neeson in Non Stop (2014) and Run All Night (2015). So yep, I'm a fan. His latest stripped down essay in tension featuring one woman and a shark is a thoroughly diverting not quite hour and a half, slicker than it has the right to be, and quite the thrill ride when it gets going.

Medical student Nancy visits an out-of-the-way beach which holds sentimental value for her as one of her late mother's favourite places. Brought up surfing on the lakes of Texas (!) our heroine soon proves that she's more than a match for the massive ocean waves, impressing fellow surfers who warn her about the sharp corals - so we know they'll come into the equation later on. What they don't tip her off about, largely because they're unaware of its existence (rather odd for seasoned water jockeys), is the presence of a great white shark, in whose feeding ground Nancy is blithely surfing. Trapped on a rock after the shark bites her leg and with only a plucky seagull for company, she must work out a way to get back to the beach before her attacker closes in for the kill.

Blake Lively - going through it for our entertainment

The Shallows delights in putting its heroine through the wringer for most of the film's running time, with a full-on physical performance by Gossip Girl's Blake Lively (apart from the bits where her head is dodgily grafted onto the body of a real surfer via CGI), and in administering some nasty wounds (shark and coral) when it looks like she may just be winning her woman v. beast battle. That Lively has to survive dressed only in a bikini and sometime wet-suit is I suppose a given, although Collet-Serra is gentleman enough to minimise the lascivious body tracking shots you'd expect in a good old exploitation movie.

But how much is this an exploitation movie? The film's rather over-processed look makes the whole thing appear strangely comic book in execution - I think we're in PG-13 territory again. Sure it's tense, but it steers away from the reality of say Chris Kentis's Open Water (2003) or even Andrew Traucki's 2010 The Reef (filmed, like The Shallows, in Australia) to present a danger-lite version of the shark threat movie where even the obligatory self-surgery carried out by Nancy on her leg bite is diminished by virtue of the fact that as a trained nurse she knows what she's doing.

The shark itself is quite an impressive bit of CGI and Collet-Serra's decision to use it sparingly is decidedly in its favour (I surely don't need to mention another shark movie that didn't learn this lesson). It's a testament to Blake Lively's performance that about the only non human she physically gets to work with (ie that wasn't created in post production) is the seagull, appropriately named Steven, whose comic timing is, wait for it, impeccable.

Lights Out (US 2016: Dir David F. Sandberg)

Lights Out conforms to the now established tenets of PG-13 horror film making: ensure that your lead characters are of audience-identifiable age, and give the adults no more than a third of screen time; explain everything to the viewer - they can't have too much information; make sure the scares are largely detached from any violence; avoid swearing where possible, and no sexual swear words; and go for a redemptive ending, as although you want to make sure your audience go on a journey, they need to feel good about themselves afterwards.

Added to to the pressures of these constraints, Swedish director David F. Sandberg has an extra problem; how do you extend to feature length your extremely effective short film of the same name, which pretty much delivered all of the scares of your full length movie in just under three minutes?

Faced with the above it's amazing that Sandberg has been able to offer up anything worth your time, but for the most part Lights Out is a competently made, well-acted, if totally formulaic and unadventurous fright flick.

Young Martin lives with his mother Sophie, and is witness to her increasingly erratic behaviour - she's often found talking to a presence who Martin can't see. His step sister Rebecca takes Martin away from the family home for his own good; Rebecca has experienced the same maternal behaviour when she was a little girl, and doesn't want Martin exposed to it. Rebecca and her boyfriend Bret discover that there is a dark malevolent presence hanging around Sophie, called Diana. Sophie and Diana have a shared history within a mental institution going back to when they were both teenagers, although the records show that Diana died within the facility. So who's talking to Sophie now and what does Diana want with the family?

For those not in the know (both of you) the movie's title refers to the fact that Diana can only be seen in darkness. Once the lights are on, she vanishes. This angle is established right from the first scene, where Rebecca and Martin's father is despatched by the creature in an effective pre-credits sequence. After this, the 'kids' in the movie catch on pretty quick to the best way to keep the demon at bay, and there is, as you can imagine, a lot of fun to be had with failing flashlights and empty basements.

While the 'now-you-see-her-now-you-don't' jump scares become very predictable very quickly, the editing is tight and there's a great sound design which emphasises Diana's scratchy movements effectively. This is, however, all very reminiscent of The Babadook (2014) and Sandberg also borrows heavily from Ringu (1998) and its sequel. But the film has the depth of neither of these films (by choice probably) - the mood isn't helped by some very strained dialogue.

There's also a lot of soap-style back story in Lights Out, fulfilling one of the key PG-13 tenets - tell the audience everything. The problem with the approach of leaving nothing unexplained in a fright flick is that, the more you explain the more unexplained and frankly illogical detail is exposed to the audience. This is perhaps most problematic in the history of Sophie and her dark companion; this part of the story is told through the unravelling of facts by Rebecca, leaving the mother's pivotal role in events diminished and pushed to the background. This may have been done to help the audience identify more with the younger cast member, but leaves many other facts about the relationship between Sophie and the thing of the dark up in the air.

Perhaps the most unsettling thing in the film is the treatment of mental illness. bearing in mind the movie's target audience and a lot of work currently being done to highlight issues of depression among young people. The plot of Lights Out makes Sophie's condition frightening simply for dramatic effect, and her final solution for dealing with Diana, which I won't spoil, left a nasty taste in my mouth, if not her children's.

But maybe I'm being oversensitive. After all, I'm clearly not the right target audience for this film. The guy sitting to my left at the screening I attended clearly was - he spent most of the movie with his fingers in front of his eyes, shouting "Don't go in there!" every time they got near a half open door. Ah, youth.
 

Unspoken (Canada 2015: Dir Sheldon Wilson)

It makes a refreshing change to see a low budget spook movie that isn't the output of a director working on his (or her) first film. Indeed Unspoken's Sheldon Wilson has a reasonable CV of small scale horror quickies under his belt, albeit mostly shot for TV.

Unspoken was made in 2014 under the original and far more descriptive title The Haunting of Briar House. By the time it played at the UK's FrightFest Halloween all dayer last year the title had been changed to The Unspoken. For the 2016 DVD release the definite article has been dropped and it's just Unspoken. Huh?

Unspoken focuses on a house in the woods that, in an effective and quite frightening prologue, is shown to be the scene of a mass murder and a family abduction by unknown forces - afterwards the place gets a reputation as 'the Briar House' which no-one will go near. Seventeen years later a young woman, Ruby, and her strange mute son Adrian move into the house, knowing nothing about its history and seeking a secluded country retreat to help get over the death of Adrian's father.

Local teenager Angela, who works in a children's nursery, learns of Ruby's need for someone to help with Adrian and offers her services - she is motherless and the extra cash will come in handy as her father is unemployed. Adrian is a strange and haunted little boy (well played by Sunny Suljic, all furrowed brow and pinched face) and it's not long before Angela experiences weird things in the house; rattling doors and marbles moving of their own accord. Angela's friend Pandy, who seems more than just a friend to our childminder, also runs with the local tearaways, who give her a tough time about her sexual leanings. They rope her in to breaking into the Briar House to take back the stash of drugs and 'other things' they've stored there while the house was empty, using its reputation as a safe hideaway. The break-in unleashes a force within the house which threatens anyone in it - starting with Angela's friend - and when Pandey's wrong-side-of-the-tracks cohorts, realising that she has gone missing, follow her in to recover their booty, the house takes its revenge.

Spooky Adrian (played by Sunny Suljic)

Unspoken seems to throw pretty much everything into the mix in the hope of creating an effective haunted house movie. There's a creepy handyman, strange visions, flying objects and a million jump scares. It also delivers a final reel twist that left me almost speechless - which anyone who knows me will understand is a rare phenomenon. I'll give nothing away except to mention that if you saw, and thought the denouement of Alistair Legrand's The Diabolical hard to swallow (a film which offers an equally off the wall explanation for a haunting), you won't know where to start with this one. It's that odd.

More positively I really liked the first half of this film. It's a pleasing slow burner with a promising atmospheric prologue. The camera creeps around uneasily and the cast are genuinely backwoods in look and behaviour. Things go off the rails with some random gore, which upsets the tone and remains unexplained. After which, and before that payoff, Unspoken turns into a spook movie farce, with various characters running in and out of the seemingly endless numbers of cabin doors. Thankfully trousers stay up.

Wilson's CV shows that he's not about making Oscar nominated movies, which is fine by me. However quite how this one will be remembered when the Canadian director's work is reviewed in the future I'm not so sure. A step forward from his twin 2011 disaster-movies-on-a-dollar offerings Killer Mountain and Snowmageddon? Or a step back from his 2004 movie Shallow Ground which at least made sense, and secured enough interest to manage a UK and US theatrical release, a fate unlikely to befall Unspoken.

The Neon Demon (US 2016: Dir Nicolas Winding Refn)

Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn's spellbinding new film is a movie in love with its own reference points, in thrall to the image and cinema's ability to deliver a fantasy with one foot in the real world. Arguably more abstract than his previous movies (and certainly more focused than 2012's Only God Forgives), strangely despite all of the cinematic touch points presented to us throughout the movie (of which more later) it was the novels and short stories of Bret Easton Ellis that I was reminded of most strongly. With his cast of burnt out vapid young people standing in for the author's pessimistic outlook on the culture of celebrity and facile surface glamour, watching the cast of The Neon Demon was like seeing Easton Ellis's more extreme characters come to life.

Jesse (played sensitively and carefully by Elle Fanning) is a 16 year old who moves to LA to get into modelling. She is clearly different to the glacial, and rather more jaded girls with whom she works, but because of her fresh facedness is seen as something new and different - the 'vampire' motif is used again and again in this film as we see artists and agents feeding off each other. Jesse's rundown LA accommodation (complete with scuzzy landlord convincingly played by Keanu Reeves) couldn't be more different from the hallucinatory world of the models, where on photo shoots and in clubs the girls are illuminated by neons and primary colours. And it's into this world that Jesse gets pulled, gaining in self confidence as her model colleagues become less and less tolerant of her artlessness and the attention she generates, and finally resolving to do something about this ingenue in their midst.

This is a rather simplistic summary of the plot, whose nuances run much deeper than my description. But hey, you can read about the plot anywhere - I also need to tell you that it's a horror film without in any way being a horror film, just to confuse things further.

The Neon Demon uses a glacial directorial gaze to dissect, fetishise and ultimately indict the contemporary fashion industry (a theme deployed in Easton Ellis's 1999 novel Glamorama). It's an artificial world and Winding Refn glorifies in showing this - he has been quoted on more than one occasion that this is a film about 'the insanity of beauty'. There's an intriguing scene, set in an office with a cameo from Christina Hendricks as an agent, who with her fuller figure seems oddly grotesque next to the pallid, wan forms of the other girls, but quite natural next to Jesse. As she explains to her young star to be that Jesse will make a great model, a street scene with slowly moving traffic is shown in the background through the office windows, which I'm fairly certain is either animated or the result of some skillful model work. In a similarly jarring moment, later in the movie one of the cast members removes her sunglasses and it's impossible to tell whether she's real or a model (rather than a catwalk model, if you see what I mean), so vacant are her eyes.

The style-over-substance subtext deploys for many of its visual reference points films from the 1970s and 1980s; the youthful beauty and violence mix recalls Brian de Palma's Carrie (1976), the shots of the models together has the unreality of the dancers in Dario Argento's Suspiria (1977). I was also reminded of the detached style of the early films of Peter Greenaway (specifically 1985's A Zed and Two Noughts), and in the photographing of LA, the Zoetrope movies of Francis Ford Coppola, such as One From the Heart (1981). Artifice is at the heart of The Neon Demon, and the opening shot is rather typical. A girl (Jesse) lies immobile, possibly dead, on a sofa in a decorated room, covered in blood. The camera draws slowly back and we realise this isn't a murder scene but a set, and when it moves further still the whole living room effect is encased in black framed in vivid red neon - it's as if one level of unreality isn't enough; apparently Winding Refn is colour blind, so the lack of contrasts in the movie's colour scheme comes straight from the eye of the director. His use of mirrors, geometric shapes and even arcane symbolism occludes reality further.

The 'NWR' stamp at the beginning of the film announces Nicolas Winding Refn as a brand, like perfume or a fashion range. Maybe this is a joke on himself. After all he's no stranger to a bit of the old self reflexiveness, having been the central figure in two documentaries, 2006's Gambler, covering the period of his extensive financial difficulties, and the 2014 movie My Life Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn. I think he knows he's made a great film and it's for everyone else to catch up. In interviews Winding Refn is big on his no compromise policy, which has seen him fall out with stars, directors and famously walk off the set of the planned remake of The Equaliser three months before shooting began. Audiences have been as split over The Neon Demon as they were for Only God Forgives, but I'd rather have him make uncompromising films than Drive 2, that's for sure.

The Conjuring 2 (US 2016: Dir James Wan)

Up until now I've always seen James Wan as a confident if not particularly exciting or mature fright flick director. I found Saw (2004) a mildly diverting one gag movie and Insidious (2010) rather silly and suspense barren. I wasn't overly enamoured with The Conjuring (2013) either. I could see what he was trying to achieve - it certainly had its moments - but seemed overlong and too episodic to consistently engage. But The Conjuring 2 is another matter...what a belter of a film!

We're back in the world of Ed and Lorraine Warren, real life ghost hunters transformed by Wan into the significantly more photogenic Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga, the latter who manages levels of emotion rarely seen in this genre of film making. It's 1977 and the Warrens are recovering after their time spent trying to exorcise the murderous demon lurking in a certain house in Amityville. Come to think of it, they got their invitation to 'a house in Long Island' at the end of the first movie, set in 1971, so does that mean they were there for six years?

Meanwhile across the water something's stirring in Green Street, Enfield, England - the events leading to the now infamous 'Enfield Poltergeist' story are starting to happen. Like The Conjuring's depiction of the plight of the Perrons in Rhode Island, the sequel is also based on a true story - the haunting of a north London Council house by the spirit of a dead man, Bill Wilkins, and the physical effects on the Hodgson family resident at the time. It's a story that's been referenced as long ago as 1992 in the superlative BBC production Ghostwatch, and more recently in When the Lights Went Out (2012) and directly in last year's three part drama The Enfield Haunting.

So the Warrens are looking for some R&R time, but when they are played a tape of an old man's raspy voice and told that the speech actually came from the mouth of an 11 year old girl - the youngest Hodsgon child Janet - they're on the plane to Enfield, and discover that beneath the haunting there's something even scarier which links to one of their earlier cases, and which directly threatens the couple.

As a director James Wan has always been able to press the audience's buttons as efficiently as, say, Hitchcock, but I've always found this talent to be slightly undone by pacing issues. The Conjuring 2 is a masterclass in 'the jump', and whereas in some films overexposure to this trick breeds ennui, this movie paces itself so perfectly that the tension doesn't let up for more than a few seconds of its two hour running time (Ed's acoustic rendition of Elvis's 'Always on My Mind' notwithstanding). It's that scary that I saw it on my own in a large cinema and consider it a badge of honour that my fingers didn't flutter in front of my eyes once.

While the story and setting are pretty accurate  - it's a mark of his skill that he's taken the actual events (which have the whiff of hoax about them) and turned them into something far scarier -  Wan isn't afraid to take a few risks with his plot and visuals (he also plays fast and loose with the architecture of the English Council house - basement with running water, floorboards with no joists anyone?). This provides some visual variety in a film which doesn't have a complex plot, but the director for once spends as much time with the characters as what he wants to show us, even allowing him to stray into Spielbergian territory for the final reel.

There is some top notch acting going on here. I've already mentioned the emotional range of Vera Farmiga, but Simon McBurney is note perfect as friend of the family Maurice Grosse, and US born Madison Wolfe as Janet Hodgson is also a standout. I was astounded that he managed to get such accurate 'estuary drawl' accents from Wolfe and Australian Laura Esposito (playing Janet's sister Margaret), although in the moments when those accents slipped I was slightly taken out of the story and left musing on why it wasn't possible to cast UK kids.

It's a sign of how good this film is that at the end I both wanted and didn't want The Conjuring 3. I really want to meet Ed and Lorraine again, but I fear the franchise even more than some of the things I saw on screen over the last couple of hours.

Lilith's Awakening (US 2016: Dir Monica Demes)

Lucy is a bored and distracted girl, working at a service station in the wilds of sleepy mid America. Her husband Jonathan is more worried about a forthcoming dinner with his boss Renfield than his increasingly distant wife. Lucy has a guy on the side, Arthur, who is clearly more sexually involved with Lucy than she is with Jonathan. But Lucy doesn’t seem particularly interested in either man, and when she chooses not to show up for a midnight tryst with Arthur he instead falls victim to a strange kohl-eyed guitar-wielding exotic woman who sucks his blood. This mysterious vampire, Lilith, has previously appeared in Lucy’s dreams, triggering her period (a rare splash of colour in this otherwise monochrome film), but it’s only when Lucy tries to locate the missing Arthur and sees a drawing of the vampire in his trailer that she starts to believe Lilith might be more than a figment of her imagination. “I saw her in my dreams, and now she’s coming for me” she says. And she’s right.

The stunning black and white palette and strikingly haunting visuals of Lilith Awakens announces the latest in a small sub-genre of stylishly made films concerning contemporary female vampires, which include Michael Almereyda’s 1994 part toy camera filmed Nadja and Abel Ferrara’s gritty 1995 movie The Addiction. More recently Ana Lily Amirpour’s splendid 2014 film A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night featured an Iranian female vampire on the lookout for lowlife victims in a Hopper-esque Californian landscape, and it is to this last film that Lilith’s Awakening owes a significant stylistic debt. Intriguingly Monica Demes, the movie’s Brazilian born writer/producer/director, developed this film within the David Lynch MFA film program, so as you’d expect the movie also looks to his inspiration for many of its visual touches.

Lilith Awakens is a slow burning mood piece of a film. Every shot is exquisitely framed, and the bleakness of the Iowa landscape recalls the bleached Texan environment of Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 film The Last Picture Show. As you may have picked up, Demes uses a number of character names from the Bram Stoker novel Dracula (Lucy’s boss is even called Abe Helsing) and while this may initially seem a little clumsy, the ultimate effect is to weave this inspiration into the strangeness of the events on screen. The other standout is the soundtrack, which mixes Brazilian musician David Feldman’s brooding score with a wash of environmental sounds – fox cries have never sounded so scary, believe me – to great effect. Strong performances from newcomers Sophia Woodward and Barbara Eugenia as, respectively, Lucy and Lilith, keep the film from feeling like an exercise in cinematography. This is an enigmatic, enthralling and occasionally very unsettling debut from Demes, which will hopefully get a big screen run in the UK – it’s where it should be seen.

High-Rise (UK/Belgium 2015: Dir Ben Wheatley)

While Ben Wheatley remains one of this country's more interesting film directors, his decision to take on the 'unfilmable' JG Ballard novel 'High Rise' where others have failed (adaptations by Bruce (Withnail &I ) Robinson and Canadian director Vincenzo Natali are just two of the past attempts to bring it to screen life) seems like a step too far, or a mis-step at least, on his CV.

The first problem with High-Rise is the source material itself. Ballard was a great writer of ideas, but not necessarily a great novelist. The central theme of the book - that of a building which because of its very size, structure and capacity for anonymity facilitates a swift and comprehensive breakdown of the moral codes of those living within it - is also its main theme, applied again and again in the text. It's an allegorical one at that. Literary allegory does not generally transfer well to film, so the repetition of the theme of societal breakdown in the events on screen soon tires. It's a bit like ordering a three course meal at a restaurant where all the courses are the same. What Ballard did achieve was the sense of scale involved, from the design of the building with its vast mid floor shopping and leisure facilities, to the sheer numbers involved in the high-rise riots. Wheatley simply doesn't have the budget for this - his sets look cheap and some of the CGI is just plain poor.

There is also the issue of the film's setting. Wheatley has side-stepped the problem that, in today's world, the war in the high-rise would not have remained self contained because of social media, by locating the film in an imprecise mobile phone-free 1970s and in an unspecified place (not necessarily London, where the book was based). While this move solves a lot of issues, it raises others. The film's rather mocking recreation of the decade that fashion forgot - all hipster trousers and floral tops - has already been done to death in shows like Life on Mars and a myriad of movies from Boogie Nights to The Look of Love. There's nothing new in the look of High-Rise, and Wheatley has failed to achieve the uneasy mix of brutalist settings and garish costumes in Kurbick's 1971 movie A Clockwork Orange, a film which hangs around this one like a ghost.

Wheatley's films have to date been relatively small affairs formed from the director's own ideas, about odd, often unlikeable people living fraught lives while events unravel around them. Although that could also be said to be true about High-Rise, this is a different type of film for him. First it's a relatively faithful adaptation of a novel. It has a much bigger cast with some star names, and a wider if cost-restricted canvas (perhaps the combined wages of Tom Hiddleston, Elisabeth Moss, Jeremy Irons and Sienna Guillory didn't leave a lot over for the production budget, which is a shame because their roles could equally have been taken by unknown actors, so - deliberately- bland are their performances). Amy Jump's script, so good in A Field in England, feels trapped in Ballard's leaden prose, and that dark and subtle humour which has been a common and successful element of Wheatley's past movies has been sacrificed for some fairly deadly one liners and visual 'gags' lifted straight from the pages of the book.

High-Rise is also a mess. The book's depiction of the gradual rise of the madness in the building has been traded in for a montage scene about half way through the film which transforms the residents from mild bickerers to sex crazed savages - we then get a further hour of 'action' which is neither exciting nor particularly shocking (David Cronenberg's 1975 movie Shivers, also inspired by Ballard's book, managed this so much better). In the Q&A I saw accompanying the film Reece Sheersmith was complaining that much of his role as Steele, the crazed dentist, was dropped from the final cut. While I know that this happens when editing films, nevertheless I do not consider this a good sign.

Finally I suppose 'High Rise' remains an unfilmable book largely because many years have passed since its publication, and the original prescience of its subject matter is now normalised. We have high rises all around us these days. Government housing policy mixes the rich with the less rich, with developers building separate entrances for the 'haves' and 'have mores' without any obvious signs of resident wars breaking out. In our capitalist times such accommodation polices aren't seen as segregation but rather opportunity. So Wheatley's film is too little too late, a toothless romp with little to say, overlong and uneven, and, yes, rather low-rent.

The Forest (US 2016: Dir Jason Zada)

A few reviewers recently have been bemoaning the rise of PG horror - scary movies that limit gore, violence and intensity to ensure they play to as wide an audience as possible - and including The Forest as a prime example of why this strategy doesn't work. There are lots of reasons why The Forest doesn't work, but it's nothing to do with toning down the content - the movie's been given a 15 certificate in the UK anyway, a classification which is a pretty broad church and which most modern horrors seem to get awarded. And there are plenty of films that are scary without being overtly gory.

No, first time feature director Jason Zada's The Forest doesn't work because it's a tedious, derivative and wholly pointless film, which makes absolutely no sense even as you're watching it (as opposed to those movies where you get a 'no sense' hangover trying to understand a movie after you've seen it).

Sara Price learns of her twin sister Jess's disappearance while teaching in Tokyo. Jess apparently took a class of kids into the infamous Aokigahara forest in the shadow of Mount Fuji, and disappeared. This place is known as 'Suicide Forest' because of the number of people who enter the area to take their own life. Refusing to believe that her sister has killed herself, Sara travels to Japan to locate Jess, enlisting the help of Aiden, a guy she meets in a bar and Michi, a park ranger.

The first thirty or so minutes of The Forest had me looking up various sources to confirm or deny that it was a remake of a Japanese horror movie, a habit so beloved by US film makers a few years ago. As well as the 'authentic' locations (although apparently Serbia stood in for Japan) we get the familiar homespun exposition delivered as warning - the forest contains spirits, unhappy ghosts of previous suicide victims, seeking revenge, who will cause you harm if you stray from the path etc. But this is no remake, although it may as well have been as it's so derivative. To be honest the early scenes were well set out, good to look at, and boded well for something, if not original, then at least engaging.

The trouble starts when Sara arrives at the forest visitor centre and shows a photo of Jess to the proprietor (yep, she shows a photo of her identical twin for recognition purposes). In a nice bit of cross racial profiling the lodge lady confirms that Jess has been found and takes Sara down to the basement morgue where a number of bodies are laid out under sheets. Bodies. In a morgue. In a tourist lodge. In summer. Now I know that the Japanese way of death is rather different to western traditions, but this is, well I was going to write ridiculous but that becomes relative once the film progresses. However in trad DEoL fashion I won't divulge any more of the plot, except to mention that the body in the morgue isn't Jess, Sara does stray off the path, there is a lot of screaming and running, and the audience is left wondering what is real, what is in Sara's mind, and did Jess really exist in the first place? You probably don't need me to add that I cared not a jot by the end.

Acting wise it's all fairly efficient if unremarkable. Gimlet-eyed Brit girl-who-is-in-everything-at-the-moment Natalie Dormer stars as Sara and Jess - you can tell the difference because Jess has dark hair, although they both have reasonably convincing US accents. She does a pretty good job of being scared, and the camera can't take its eyes off her (I still think she looks like a skinnier version of Charlie Brooks but that's probably just me).

There's a rather unsavoury footnote to all this. Apparently Aokigahara forest is an actual place, in the shadow of Mount Fuji in Japan, and is renowned as a suicide site - sources tells us that there can be up to 100 deaths a year here - and a number of the details about techniques used by the suicidal are included in The Forest. Nice. No wonder that the film makers had to find another country for their location. Now I'm not an overly sensitive person but this all left a rather nasty taste in my mouth. Not recommended for all sorts of reasons then.