NEW WAVE OF THE BRITISH FANTASTIC FILM 2026 #2: Reviews of Voidance (UK 2026), Rose of Nevada (UK 2025), The R.I.P Man (UK 2025), Bride of Frankenstein (UK 2025), Doctor Plague (UK 2026) and The Goodman's Croft (UK 2024/5)

Voidance (UK 2026: Dir Marianna Dean) Dean's first feature, 2023's Breaking Infinity, successfully used a 'quantum loop' idea to create an intriguing kind of low budget multiverse. And now Dean is back with a similarly high concept low cash sci fi movie. Only far less successful.

Newbie ATIC agent Alana Toro (Zoe Cunningham), who answers to the hologram direction of command chief Agent Polo (James Cosmo), is assigned her first solo mission, the final step of her training. As part of the feuding taking place between rival planets Atopia and Cho-Hacha, a terrorist group, the Marai Haria, have been attacking various targets. They have hijacked a freight ship for reasons unknown; it's Alana's mission to infiltrate the group and stop them.

And it's at this point that I have to mention the budget again, for despite the grand introduction and the opening graphics which suggest spectacle is just around the corner, Alana actually rocks up in The Forge, a dimly lit bar on a space station, where it's supposed that the terrorist group are hanging out. And here she stays for the next 80 odd minutes. For Alana has a tool at her disposal; the ability to reset the mission if she fails, enabling her to learn details about the characters she encounters with successive repeats. And if you're now thinking of movies like Source Code, Edge of Tomorrow/Live Die Repeat or even Groundhog Day, well stop now; one of the first problems with Voidance (that title! Sheesh) is that there's no clarity about what's going on, and where in those other films the 'repeat' element was a chance to learn more and have some fun along the way, both of these qualities are much missing in Dean's film.

Admittedly towards the end things tighten up a bit, by which time we've been subject to waves of histrionic full orchestra score trying and failing to convince us that something interesting is happening, and some of the flattest acting outside of the local village hall drama society; senses have been accordingly dulled. Reader, this is a slog; poorly paced, lacking in tension and, in Cunningham's Alana Toro, a mono emotional lead character that, in her wig, at times looks like Dave Hill in his 1970's Slade heyday.

Rose of Nevada (UK 2025: Dir Mark Jenkin) I try, I really try, to like Mark Jenkin's films. They're the visual equivalent of some of the earlier releases on the Ghostbox label, or maybe the 'false nostalgia' sounds of Boards of Canada.

There's no denying the care invested in his saturated images, the 16mm film stock used betraying all the glitches and pops associated with such an analogue medium, and small casts of actors giving committed, understated performances more associated with 1970s 'realist' TV plays.

And yet, for me, there's 'something' that doesn't work about his films. Rose of Nevada is his most ambitious yet, in terms of storyline. The title refers to a fishing vessel, lost at sea thirty years previously and now mysteriously returned to the harbour of a remote Cornish fishing village (almost the same location and community documented in Jenkin's 2019 debut feature Bait). 

This news is of particular concern to one of the missing men's wives (Rosalind Eleazar), who sees its re-appearance as ominous (to compound this, the words "Get off the boat now" are scratched into the vessel's woodwork). The community's economy is not good and times are hard, so it makes sense to re-use the 'Rose of Nevada' with a new crew, comprising Nick (George MacKay) and the lairy Liam (Callum Turner). The pair's first trawl is a success, the boat laden with fish. But on return the village seems to have regained a feeling of prosperity; the local pub is unusually packed, and stranger still the widow of the lost fisherman greets Liam as if they are man and wife. For the pair have returned to 1993; the vessel is not lost at sea, and Liam and Nick are welcomed back to a world that existed before they were born.

Much of the film from here on in is concerned with the young men's responses to the situation in which they find themselves, with Jenkin failing to resist some of the oft used time travel flags (a newspaper dated 1993, smoking allowed inside pubs etc). Liam is accepting, possibly relishing the stability of a new life, whereas Nick is more contemplative and, ultimately, frightened by their time imprisonment. 

As well as location (and some cast members) Jenkin here returns to the theme of Cornwall as a forgotten county, blighted by the slow collapse of the fishing industry and the rise of second-homeism; due to the time travel nature of the admittedly slender plot (which also acts as a mirror to the filmmaking process), Rose of Nevada rather rams these points home. It's an intriguing piece, but it's slightness and 'trapped in amber' mis en scene didn't really work for me.

The R.I.P Man (UK 2025: Dir Jamie Langlands) Despite its title, The R.I.P Man only just scrapes in as a 'Fantastic' film courtesy of the titular killer's modus operandi. 

In the days leading up to the 21st birthday of Clarissa (Jasmine Kheen) several of her friends wind up dead, victims of a killer who, after texting them to warn of their impending doom and then despatching them, extracts one of their teeth.

The police are initially baffled until the pieces start to be put together; a chattering teeth toy left at the scene of each crime is traced to a toymaker whose adopted son, Alden, was committed to an asylum, suffering with a rare oral disease.

You guessed it: Alden, played by Owen Llewelyn (last seen - by me at any rate - in 2022's As a Prelude to Fear), is the R.I.P Man, so named because he wears a dental plate embossed with those letters until he's completed filling his toothless gob with the teeth of his victims. At this point, I wondered whether Langlands was inspired by the eponymous creature of Louisa Warren's 'Tooth Fairy' franchise, whose lank haired monster is equally handy with the pliers (or in this case a drill).

Made for around £20,000 and filmed on the mean streets of, er, Sussex (Brighton and Worthing feature heavily), Langlands's follow up to his 2024 movie The Cellar suffers from leaden pacing, patchy performances and a police department who divide up the cliches evenly between them. It spends too long with the drama lite activities of a group of Clarissa's friends, not even stopping to give us a red herring or two; we know who the killer is pretty much from the first scene.

On the plus side it's well and consistently photographed, does not drown in an over emphatic soundtrack (and even uses a local band in a couple of club scenes) and in Llewelyn's Alden, gives us a creepy killer. Langlands is already making the sequel, fright fans.

Bride of Frankenstein (Awakens) (UK 2025: Dir Louisa Warren) Warren's 38th (!) feature as director uses Maggie Gyllenhaal's movie The Bride! as a spiritual jumping off point, but this is very much a Champdog Productions joint (Warren's in house company), meaning that it's not meant to be taken all that seriously and is a lot of fun as a result. The distributors had the foresight to add the word 'Awakens' to the title, just in case we were wondering about the named monster's dormancy.

A confusing prologue, explained not much later in the movie, has a dead man reanimated into a flesh eating zombie via a book of spells (and such a book now appears as a Champdog trademark in nearly every Warren movie). 

Newly married Santana (a game Nicola Ditter) is heading off for a new life with disgraced surgeon husband...wait for it...Frank N. Stein (Geordie actor Wayne Dobson, all impressive ink and fight-in-a-car-park charm) and away from her deeply unimpressed family. But their bliss is short lived when Santana is hit by a car and killed. Luckily she gifted Frank a book of spells as a wedding present; yes, the same one we saw in the prologue. It contains the means to resurrect the dead; the only snag is that Frank needs new body parts. Roping in his old ex surgeon pal Dr Pret (Jack Darrell) Frank's obvious destination for the required limbs is Santana's family, headed by the god fearing Arthur (Graeme Muncer). Santana, newly re-assembled, although looking exactly the same, is magicked back into life and sets about munching on the rest of the cast.

Although this is arguably Warren's most successful feature to date (it doesn't have any, or much, of the mid movie slump from which the majority of her movies suffer), the director still can't resist bogging the whole thing down with some character drama which gets in the way of the action. To be honest the whole 'Frankenstein' angle is simply an audience hook, as the Bride's shtick isn't much different to Warren's other creature features. But it's fun while it lasts and Ditter gives us a very physical - and at times nuanced - performance.

Doctor Plague (UK 2026: Dir Ben Fortune) Fortune's first stint in the director's chair is aided and abetted by genre veteran, producer Jonathan Sothcott, whose company Shogun films is behind the venture. 

Martin Kemp (yes, that Martin Kemp, and arguably the best actor in this) is troubled detective John Verney. Marriage in pieces, son getting mixed up with the wrong crowd and career facing an uncertain future - his boss, Parker (David Yip, of BBC drama The Chinese Detective fame, about which you may need to ask your parents) sees him as a couple of steps from the detective knacker's yard - Verney is down on his luck, and now has the added problem of thirty one unexplained dead or missing persons on his east London patch.

The culprit is a guy in a plague doctor outfit, with glowing green eyes and a "Repent or die!" catchphrase, as evidenced by the only person who has survived the attacks but who later mysteriously dies while in hospital. Teased for his inability to solve the crimes by an itinerant YouTuber, a desperate Verney thinks there might be a link between the killer/abductor and the Jack the Ripper murders. He consults an expert, Professor Altman (Peter James) and discovers a link to the Brethren of the Flame, a sect who flourished during the Pandemic and who deal out divine retribution to people who've been naughty. When Verney's son is also kidnapped things become personal; is this gang related, or is there something more supernatural going on?

'No-ish' is the spoilerish response; again, right up to the last ten minutes or so Doctor Plague, despite its title, risked being dropped from my 'Fantastic' films survey as it looked like it might remain a rather prosaic psycho on the loose police procedural. That it saves its spookiest moments for the last reel does not rescue the rest of the film from overall blandness. Kemp is very watchable, and Sothcott has made a career out of casting 'resting' UK TV thesp mates in his productions (not to mention his rather unusual looking wife Nerissa) but a capable bunch of actors can't save a dull script and an overall lack of pace. 

The Goodman's Croft (UK 2024/5: Dir Doug Kyle) Kyle is an independent filmmaker living in Scotland who has been producing and directing idiosyncratic movies since 2016. A man who understands the link between myth, landscape and humanity, his films aren't polished but they're warm, witty and deserve to be more widely seen.

In The Goodman's Croft, which manages to be funnier - and more action packed - than most of his projects, Kyle plays Chris Ward, an ex RAF Pastor whose travels to foreign climes have brought him face to face with the devil.

Now returned to Scotland, Ward is seeking 'The Goodman's Croft', an area of the Highlands historically reserved for Beelzebub. But his researches are fraught with menace, whether being Satanically stalked or distracted by the gruff Scorbie (a Kyle regular, his brother Andrew). And then there's the Parish Council, a group of disparate types presumably constituted to keep anyone away from the Croft. Meanwhile more secular powers worldwide are failing to hold together global peace; it comes to something when the search for the devil is less important than the prospect of World War III.

With such lofty and depressing themes at work, it's both surprising and refreshing that Kyle treats his subject so lightly; there's an amusing script here, some charming characterisation, and the extended gunplay seems to be a first for the director, who packs an awful lot into his 67 minutes. Scrappy as you like, it looks like The Goodman's Croft was made over two years (2024 and 2025) but only released this year.

You can watch all of Kyle's films via his Chaos Box YouTube channel.

Touch Me (USA 2025: Dir Addison Heimann)

If the creators of The Mighty Boosh had bonded over lunch with Frank Henenlotter (I'll leave you to work out the details of that one) Touch Me may have been the result.

"I fucked an alien, an alien named Brian", confesses anxiety filled Joey (Olivia Taylor Dudley) to her therapist, in the middle of recounting a bizarre and not altogether safe sexual experience. Joey encounters the track suited, impressively coiffed and potentially planet saving intergalactic visitor while on a catering gig (Lou Taylor Pucci). One touch of his glowing finger relieves her of her inner fears, and the resultant drunken sex with tentacles, although not consensual, is life changing.

Joey's description of the event as a sort of "hentai porn" experience is a pretty good description for the majority of Heimann's decidedly odd sophomore feature. To flee her weird and borderline dangerous encounter, Joey retreats to the safety of the home she shares with gay Craig (Jordan Gavaris); their slacker shtick is one of the highlights of the film.

But that safety is short lived; when their shower backs up with horseshit leaving them unable to afford the plumbing fees, 'Brian' enters the scene again when Joey accepts an invitation to his weekend retreat, bringing Craig with her. In between bouts of hip hop workouts with his assistant, Laura (Marlene Forte), 'Brian' seduces both flatmates; but his promises of a solution to earthly climate change mask a sinister, and more deadly purpose.

That Touch Me's executive producers include those purveyors of the headscratchy, Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, is a thumbs up for the combination of humour and absurdity that abounds in Heimann's film, which takes a whacked out look at addiction (chemical and emotional), self help and friendship without ever becoming self consciously quirky. Dudley and Gavaris are excellent as the two vaguely millennial friends - I could have watched a movie starring just the two of them - and Pucci's Brian is splendidly polymorphously perverse. If this was filmed twenty years ago it would definitely have been more explicit (the credited Intimacy Coordinator is a sign of the times) and because of this at times I felt that Touch Me held back a little. But it's a funny, inventive movie with enough quirks and ticks to maintain interest.

Touch Me is available on digital download from 4th May.

NEW WAVE OF THE BRITISH FANTASTIC FILM 2021 #24 - the final three: Reviews of Philia (UK 2021), Slammer (UK 2021) and Burns Night (UK 2021)

Philia (UK 2021: Dir Various) Welcome to the cinema of transgression as we meet a group of people who are clearly working through their own issues in a group therapy environment, tutored by a chap in a bow tie. He explains that the dictionary definition of 'Philia' is 'to love something that is connected to a sexual attraction to what is not normal'. Apparently it's the opposite of 'phobia'. So now you know.

What follows over the next 100 minutes is a series of short films that explore, in mostly abstract ways, a series of 'philias'. There's Mythophilia - the desire to have sex with a mythical beast; Astrophilia - an obsession with stars, planets and outer space; Dacryphilia & Hematolagnia - an obsession with tears and blood; Acarophilia - the love of scratching; Acousticophilia - arousal from music and sounds; Lactophilia - sexual pleasure from milk or sucking the female breast; Necrophilia - fairly self explanatory; and Pictophilia - deriving sexual pleasure from looking at pictures or watching porn.

Until the hour point most of the films only hint at something approaching narrative, and it's only with Lactophilia (featuring the ever-willing-to-go-there Martin Payne as a hammer wielding baby abductor) and the final Pictophilia that we're given a story. This is, I hope the filmmakers won't mind me commenting, unpleasant and soporific stuff. Made with the crudest of materials - during lockdown, natch - it's painfully slow and uneventful. But it is true to the spirit of experimental filmmaking and, to be frank, not everything has to be The Sound of Music, right?

Slammer (UK 2021: Dir Ted Byron Baybutt) Baybutt's debut feature was, according to the director, five years in the making, and filmed during the pandemic.

The sweeping story revolves around a scientist, Ann Waterman (Flora Montgomery), engaged in research for a company called Hansegret, aimed at the eradication of disease. At home she lives with, as she terms it, her 'agoraphobic architect' boyfriend John Howlett (James Atherton) in a rather fractious relationship, not helped by her grief over the recent death of her father, clearly quite a big noise in the same industry.

Ann's sudden disappearance triggers concern and the arrival of the police in the shape of Detective Russell (Josephine Melville) while John is comforted by Sophie (Victoria Emslie). 

But while Ann has departed the world as we know it, she's actually been incarcerated in a kind of future prison. Painfully, she's allowed to monitor everything that's happening on earth (including a growing closeness between John and Sophie) as unseen powers prepare her for the next phase of her life. Even stranger, a stiff backed politician named Mark (Samuel Clemens) is being lined up as next Prime Minister; but is he actually real?

Big pharma, cryptocurrency, conspiracy theories and political corruption all swim around in Slammer. The audience, meanwhile, is generally left clueless as to what is happening. I'm certainly up for a bit of oblique filmmaking, but the opaque nature of Slammer's narrative and the general lack of clarity and resolution - even in the last section which I feel the director hopes will explain things more than it actually does - makes the movie pretty hard work, although there's no denying Baybutt's ambition.

Maybe it was the length of time over which the film was developed, maybe it was the director being too close to the material for too long, but confusion only really works in a movie if you're going to give the audience the necessary keys to unlock the mystery within. Disappointing.

Burns Night (UK 2021: Dir Dean Hoff) The genesis of Burns Night stretches back over ten years, to two seasons of a web TV series, Caledonia, which in themselves were developed from a five book cycle of fantasy novels written by the Scottish born non-binary director, whose upbringing included a long spell drifting in America. 

And Scotland - specifically Glasgow - is the location for the whole Caledonia concept, involving Detective Inspector Leah Bishop, transferred to the city's Interpol office, and discovering that she's the only human in the building; her colleagues are all mythological creatures from Scottish folklore.

Burns Night is the adaptation of the third of these novels, which plunges us into a strange world of Leah, here played by Maria Jones. When Bishop's work partner Detective Inspector (and selkie) Dorian Grey (Alasdair Reavey) goes missing, she enlists the help of Robert Burns (Joshua Layden) to find him. And yes it's that Robert Burns, the famous (and dead) Scottish poet. Except he's now a vampire, turned centuries previously by the enigmatic Desdemona (Hoff); together they have 'lived' and hunted together down the years.

Burns Night also boasts a pair of lads who form part of the six mythical defenders of the city; a fluffy beast called Fludge who Leah finds under her bed and to whom she becomes attached; a laboratory whose staff includes a ghost lab assistant, Hazel (Nicole Donald); oh and Jesus (Neil MacKinnon). After about half an hour of this I really wished I'd read at least one of the source books to help me navigate the no budget bonkersness; it's not so much that it's hard to follow (actually it is) but that it's hard to hear, such is the really quite challenging sound quality. But what the film lacks in polish it makes up for in invention and genuine 'otherness'. Glasgow doesn't come out of Burns Night particularly glowingly, but I get the feeling that the cast would also see this as a celebration of the freaks that occupy the city's darker corners.

You can watch Burns Night for free here. 

NEW WAVE OF THE BRITISH FANTASTIC FILM 2026 #1: Reviews of Bone Keeper (UK 2025), Daggers Inn (UK 2025), Jitters (UK 2025), Forty Five (UK 2025), Beyond Mamushi (UK 2026) and Wizard of Oz: The Dead Walk (UK 2025)

Bone Keeper (UK 2025: Dir Howard J Ford) Imagine the cast of - and story from - the average Scott Jeffrey Jagged Edge production, beamed down into a movie with ten times that company's budget, and the result is Ford's latest feature.

Olivia (Sarah Alexander Marks, The Killing Tree, Manor of Darkness and a whole load of others) is searching for her mother, who has gone missing while on the hunt for her own father, an adventurer journalist who also vanished in the same place; a cave system on the Welsh border. All have been investigating the legend of the 'Bone Keeper'.

Determined to track mum down using maps in family journals, Olivia teams up with some friends, and arranges a trip. Along for the ride are cocky TA trailed Ethan (Louis James, Bogieville), Olivia's friend Annabelle (Tiffany Hannam-Daniels, The Lockdown Hauntings), Nick (Tyler Winchcombe, Piglet) and science nerds Nadia (Sophie Eleni, Walking Against the Rain) and Ravi (Danny Rahim in his first British 'fantastic' film role). En route to meet Professor Harrison (John Rhys-Davies, G-Loc, those Lord of the Rings films) they pickup a hitchhiking woman, travel blogger Ashley aka 'Bitchhiker' (Sarah T Cohen, Cinderella's Curse, Alien Invasion) whose addition can give the mission a bit of much needed publicity.

Harrison's 'be careful in the caves' entreaties fall on deaf ears as Olivia and the gang tool up for a bit of spelunking; but the tentacular entity they discover deep in the rocks turns out to be nastier than any of them imagined.

Ford's movie is one of two distinct halves. In the first the bickering and emoting amongst friends is very familiar territory (pretty much all of the flicks mentioned above include similar character developing techniques), and for a while David Engellau's score almost manages to drown out the drama. But when the caves loom into view (enigmatically filmed in the Forest of Dean) Ford really finds his feet. The underground scenes carry a real tension and the creature, a mix of CGI and practical effects, is impressive both in production and intent. 

I could have done without the rather silly prologue in which the origin of the creature is established (and a little more detail on how it manages its hybridity would have been welcome), but Bone Keeper manages to shrug off its early scenes and become a thoroughly nasty monster flick. It is perhaps a shame that the next time we'll see this cast will likely be a return to the low budgets - and expectations - of Mr Jeffrey and his ilk. Shame as here they acquit themselves really well.

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

Daggers Inn (UK 2025: Dir James Smith) Smith and his creative/life partner Caroline Spence have a reputation for creating credible features from very little at all; Casting Kill, their 2023 movie, was an expansive (not expensive) mini giallo filmed in just a small handful of locations.

Daggers Inn bases its events in a cosy Essex village, passing as the fictional Haxanbury (geddit?). In the manner of all small town murder mysteries Haxanbury is a place you might want to visit but wouldn't want to live in.

Central to Haxanbury's problems is a ruthless local firm nominally run by Stanley Montagu-John (Martin Payne), but subject to internal feuding between company members Lauren (Terry Bamberger, a real American for once, rather than a dubious UK actor adopting a bogus accent) and the supremely odious Toby Vass (James Hamer-Morton). Expansion is on their mind, and they'll do anything in service of it - including murder.

But things are about to change. A stranger, Donna (Anna Danvers), arrives in the village, on a quest to find out what happened to her twin sister Sibyl, and one suspects she knows more than she's letting on. Donna weaves a spell around the villagers, drawing them under her influence, as she infiltrates the company in a quest to find the truth, teaming up with outsider Samron (Gavin Gordon) and put upon company employee Karen (Eve Kathryn Oliver) in the process.

There are so many ways in which Daggers Inn gets it right. Smith ensures that nothing is explained (in a good way). Is Donna a witch, or maybe even Sibyl in returned form? Certainly her arrival prompts some unusual behaviour; company employees become entranced, and Toby's girlfriend Bethany (genre regular Charlie Bond), who may be central to the mystery, is determined to be rid of her. The director, who like previous projects also serves behind the camera, does some wonderful things capturing both the external landscape and the claustrophobic goings on in the medieval village's board rooms and tea shops. Casting is spot on, performances being as generally understated as the movie's sound design (always a blessing in a genre where directors mistakenly feel that a histrionic score can make up for a project's shortcomings). 

One of the reasons that I cover small scale British 'fantastic' cinema is some filmmakers' ability to craft silk purses out of sow's ears, a skill which Smith and Spence have in abundance. Excellent stuff. 

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

Jitters (UK 2025: Dir Marc Zammit) Now I quite liked Zammit's co-directed second feature, 2024's Witch, an inventive film that wasn't perfect but remained pretty watchable.

Grizzled Detective Nick Collymore (Fabrizio Santino, adopting a US accent for no reason apart from he's reasonably good at it) has returned to duty after a rather ugly incident and is keen to get back in the policing saddle, by intruding onto a crime scene, namely the death of a gamer, Tiff (Jessica Impiazzi), her body found slumped at a computer.

Meanwhile colleague Detective Sam Harding (Anto Sharp) is also investigating a death - this time filmed online. Tech wiz Dean Holness (Jack Cray) has taken his own life via nailgun in front of his many fans. Further investigations have revealed that he was working alongside Tiff on a new AI game.

Other deaths occur and Nick discovers that the game can be accessed via a USB. A personal test reveals a weird avatar called Jitters (Daniel Jordan) who poses riddles which, if solved, release cash (possibly in bitcoin). But the real power of the game isn't realised until Nick understands that, once downloaded, the avatar's deadly reach extends to anything with internet connectivity.

Jitters is a very different beast to Witch, a combination of police procedural and a modern AI take on A Nightmare on Elm Street and Videodrome. Collymore's character is the hardboiled cop more usually seen on TV screens rather than the movies, with family and health problems to contend with. The 'Jitters' character is a good few years older than a lot of the other cast members, making his odd 'clown-with-a-colander' getup quite distinctive. Jitters could do with tightening up a bit but it's an ambitious pic for the budget, and the final scene's suggestion of a sequel wouldn't be the worst idea in the world.

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

Forty-Five (UK 2025: Dir Bazz Hancher) The 'forty five' of the title in Hancher's latest could refer as much to its slender run time (actually it's just a little over 40 minutes) as its true meaning, the sum of an arcane subtraction in the Bible's Book of Daniel, relating to the Antichrist and the end of the world.

Under three quarters of an hour is pushing it to depict such monumental events, so Hancher wisely focuses events on a smaller canvas of torture and damnation.

Three years after the death of his daughter Ariel, in a sickening ritual killing where the girl's corpse and nether regions are re-arranged to form an inverted cross, her distraught father Boyd Fallon (Kemal Yildirim, who does a nice line in troubled characters) is still on the hunt for Ariel's killer.

A hired private investigator swears off the case but directs Fallon to a succession of people who may hold information, namely an agitated priest, Father Vaughn (Andrew Tales from the Great War Elias), cancer ravaged Ruben Blake (Laurence Saunders) and an unhinged, badly beaten woman, Botis (Laura Liptrot). All have have suffered greatly after contact with the obscure, other worldly 'forty five', and as Fallon digs deeper and gets closer to the truth, he is plagued by death dreams and, ultimately, discovers why his daughter died... and who really murdered her.

Hancher's film is compact, beautifully photographed and rich with apocrypha, and in Yildirim's character creates a tragic figure straight out of Aeschylus, a man destined to uncover his own fatal truth. Disturbing images abound, and Hancher is correct in keeping his film lean and mean. I liked this a lot.

Beyond Mamushi (UK 2026: Dir M W Daniels) My last exposure to Daniel's work was his segment of the lockdown movie The Isolation Horrors. 

Here he brings us a 50 minute psychological drama, centring on Kate (newcomer Corina Jayne), a troubled soul, with a violent, controlling partner, Chris (Gary Cross) and the Mamushi of the title (Jemma Thompson), Kate's therapist (Mamushi is her surname) who seems to have forgotten most of her code of ethics.

Chris exhibits classic controlling behaviours; nasty then nice, belittling and flattering in turn, witholding then making her beg for the medication she seems to need.

Ama Mamushi indicates that she's taken a tough love to Kate's progress, but clearly oversteps the mark when she suggests to her client that murder is probably the only way out of her abusive relationship. Kate's horrendous position is made worse when, on a visit to Chris's father, the older man tries to rape her. Kate's response triggers a cycle of violence which she seems helpless to avoid.

I confess that in 2026 the 'bonkers-woman-driven-to-murder' narrative is more than a little unwelcome. There's very little subtlety here in the story of a woman driven to the edge and then over it, and the reason provided for her actions is just a little silly. Jayne does well in her first role and the film's brevity is to its credit; Daniels took on most of the behind the camera roles and it's clearly a passion project for him, but I found it generally uninvolving and, honestly, more than a little unnecessary.

Wizard of Oz: The Dead Walk (UK 2025: Dir Louisa Warren) We love Louisa Warren's films at DEoL towers and here she is with her latest TCU entry, the title of which sounds a little like those classics vs horror mashups that were all the rage some years ago.

When I interviewed Warren back in 2021, she mentioned that she made two types of movies; 'wacky' and 'serious'. Wisely, because of her own rather childlike obsessions, Warren has decided to stick with the first category in recent years, and Wizard of Oz: The Dead Walk might just be her most 'wacky' yet.

Dorothy (the authentically American Alina Desmond) has been rescued from a dying Oz by her Auntie Em (Jodyanne Richardson, who by resemblance is possibly related to the Richardson acting dynasty), in the process getting herself hooked on heroin.

Em has secured her a place at the Emerald rehab centre, a dodgy clinic run by Dr Oscar Diggs (Stephen Samson) and occupied by patients who still seem to be able to access the hard stuff. Kept heavily sedated while withdrawing, Dorothy has vivid dreams involving malevolent versions of the scarecrow and the tinman from Oz, and the good witch Glinda (Yvonne Curwen) who also seems to have transformed into something more evil. Dorothy dreams about an ancient book hidden in a tree; when she wakes she realises that the tree - and the book - are within the clinic grounds. Reading a passage from the book brings the murderous Oz characters into the real world to begin a campaign of mayhem and death.

With a cast list including the daftly named Detective Jack L Antern (Adam Barnett) this is very silly stuff indeed, but actually quite watchable and at times gory, albeit within the constraints of the usual Warren budget. The director manages to include a cursed book - a bit of a Warren signature move - and the absence of the cowardly lion is sort of explained towards the end of a movie which also wins an award for including the opening credit sequence about three minutes before the end titles. It's bonkers, most people won't like it, but I for one am hungry  - well ok peckish - for more.  

NEW WAVE OF THE BRITISH FANTASTIC FILM 2021 #23: Reviews of Caveat (UK 2020), Censor (UK 2021), Infinitum: Subject Unknown (UK 2021), The Intergalactic Adventures of Max Cloud (UK 2020), Last Night in Soho (UK 2021) and The Legend of Jack and Jill (UK 2021)

Caveat (UK 2020: Dir Damian McCarthy) Mood trumps narrative in McCarthy's debut feature. A lone guy, shaggy of beard and haunted of look, accepts a job offer that most of us would reject out of hand. Isaac (Jonathan French), who can also add post accident amnesia to his list of woes, is asked by the uncle of a young girl to 'babysit' her for a short while, on payment of £200 a day. Isaac, who clearly hasn't seen money like that for a long time, cautiously accepts.

When the girl's uncle, Moe (Ben Caplan) escorts Isaac to the location of his charge, the latter is disconcerted to find that the house is on an island - and he can't swim. Further details emerge. The niece, Olga (Leila Sykes) has a fear of men, being touched and pretty much everything else, and Isaac will be obliged to wear a full bridle, anchored in the cellar, but which gives him access to the whole house except Olga's room. Olga's mother has died, and her father took his own life; hence the need for, what? A companion? A housekeeper?

With two hundred reasons to say yes, Isaac accepts the terms. The isolation is intense, the only sound to be heard being the scream of foxes, and the strange company of Olga, who warily brandishes a crossbow on their first encounter. But Isaac's curiosity gets the better of him, and a search of the house reveals that Moe's explanation isn't quite correct; worse, it's possible that he's been to the house before.

There's a certain fairy tale quality to Caveat, setting the film up as an exercise in atmosphere rather than telling a story. The question here is not 'why did Isaac accept the position?' but 'what's the nature of the threat?'. In some ways the film is a reimagining of the classic 'governess with eerie child' tale, but, taking place as it does in a house bereft of anything resembling a home, one filtered through the lens of the Quay Brothers. If you accept Caveat on the premise there's a lot to, if not like, admire, there are one or two sequences which are genuinely frightening. Sykes's elegantly deadpan delivery as the troubled Olga is central to the movie, against which French's increasingly spooked Isaac plays well. Macabre and unsettling, I liked this a lot.

Censor (UK 2021: Dir Prano Bailey-Bond) Beloved by 'proper' critics, and roundly embraced by the BFI on first release (who part funded the thing) Censor delighted those who saw in its subject matter - the 'Video Nasties' scandal of the 1980s - a very meta take on the whole business, while angering those ardent collectors of the original DPP list of 'banned' films who seemed to have a problem with Bailey-Bond, a woman, straying onto their turf, making something which they dismissed as too arty, with  - horrors! - a female central character.

Censor is a low budget meta movie that takes its subject seriously (Kim Newman is an executive producer, for flip's sake). Enid (Niamh Algar), prim, buttoned up and extremely serious, is one of a group of censors navigating the choppy waters of the early 1980s. Their work is, pun intended, cut out for them as they decide how much eye gouging, stabbing or beheading to excise from the films they review or, as sometimes preferred by their risk averse boss, whether to ban the thing altogether. It's a strategy that gains credibility when a real life crime is seized upon by the press as mirroring the events in one of the films passed.

While the political climate tries to associate the viewing of such items with an increase in violent crime, Enid's motivations seem triggered by an event which has already happened to her; the disappearance of her sister Nina some years previously while both were out playing in the woods as children. The decision of Enid's parents to finally declare their missing daughter dead is a tipping point for the guilt ridden censor who sees, in one of the productions of the exploitation duo - shadowy Frederic North (Adrian Schiller) and unctuous Doug Smart (Michael Smiley) - a cast member who looks like Nina. Enid's determination to uncover the truth takes her through the video booth looking glass and into the movies themselves. 

As well as the whole 'video nasty' gatekeeping issue, many of the film's detractors did not like Censor's rather abstract denouement, which contrasts with its relatively coherent first half. But this is a psychological film whose subject suffers the fractured end result of compartmentalising her life to cope with trauma, and there are no easy answers. This is Bailey-Bond's first feature and at times it feels like it, but it's also bold filmmaking which makes for distinctly uneasy viewing, not least its Stasi Germany take on the early 1980s.

Infinitum: Subject Unknown (UK 2021: Dir Matthew Butler-Hart) There's something about the restrictions inflicted by the 2020 pandemic that feeds into the DIY spirit of independent filmmaking. I really liked both Butler-Hart's 2018 feature, the moody The Isle and, looking forwards, his 2024 film Dagr.

Sandwiched between these films is the director's intimate but ambitious sci fi mindbender, filmed on an iphone and with a cast comprising, well Mrs Butler-Hart and a couple of borrowed luvvies. Let me explain.

At an unspecified point in time (the future? Present day?) the discovery of an alternate earth, albeit one which is war torn, has excited scientists and occasioned much experimentation, including human subjects.

One such is Jane (Tori Butler-Hart) who wakes up tied to a chair in an otherwise empty room. Managing to free herself, Jane experiences visions of the other earth, but is initially unable to leave without being returned to her original position. A gradual understanding of her situation - and how to liberate herself - enables Jane to escape by car (her drive through empty suburban streets is chilling both visually and as a reminder of the very real weirdness of the pandemic). Eventually Jane happens across the Wytness Centre, a building which houses those attempting to understand the 'paraverse'. But her discovery of files and recordings only deepens her concern about her role in the search for scientific answers.

Abandon hope anyone expecting a fast paced sci fi thriller; Butler-Hart's movie is deliberately slow, focusing on Jane's anguish and slow realisation of the truth, with only occasional CGI interventions which frankly aren't really necessary. Tori is the centre of the film and acquits herself well considering she's in every scene; well every scene except those featuring a rather bemused Sir Ian McKellen and a scientist (Conleth Hall). I: SU isn't for everyone. I got a real sense that this was Butler-Hart, frustrated at the limits being placed on him as a filmmaker and deciding to make his 'fuck the pandemic' movie. 

The Intergalactic Adventures of Max Cloud (UK 2020: Dir Martin Owen) According to his professional page, TIAoMC has been in development since 2018, which is unsurprising as it has labour of love written all over it. 

It's a witty piece in thrall to video gaming of the late 1980s/early 1990s, and what you get out of it rather depends on how nostalgic you find the setup. 

It's Brooklyn in 1990. Sarah (Isabelle Allen) just loves games, particularly playing 'Max Cloud' with her friend Cowboy (Franz Drameh), much to the annoyance of her father Tony (distinguished TV actor Sam Hazeldine). 

Sucked into the game via a Space Witch (Jason Maza), she becomes one of the game characters, Jake (Elliot Langridge), a chef who, with his boss Max Cloud (Scott Adkins), have crash landed on Heinous (yep, rhymes with 'anus'), a notorious prison planet. Heinous is home to the evil Revengor (the John Hannah) and his deputy Shee (Lashana Lynch); Max and his team must complete various level missions to escape the planet, while Cowboy, back in Sarah's room in New York, assists.

TIAoMC has a great setup, zigzagging between 20th Century USA (actually the whole thing was filmed in a studio in Yorkshire) and the world of the game (with some fab graphics depicting the characters on screen in all their 8 Bitness). It also has a witty script; unfortunately everything runs out of steam way too quickly as the restrictions of the budget prohibit any real development of what we're seeing. But everyone looks like they're having a good time and go to hard man Adkins steals the show as the chisel jawed, unreconstructed Cloud.

Last Night in Soho (UK 2021: Dir Edgar Wright) Edgar Wright's hymn to a vanished Soho (a theme also developed in the 2022 portmanteau movie Midnight Peepshow) is also his Mulholland Drive, with a murderous background, a seedy underbelly and switched identities.

Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie) is young, talented and besotted with the 1960s. Living with her grandmother (Rita Tussingham) in deepest Cornwall following her mother's suicide, she's in for a shock when, securing herself a place in a London fashion school, she finds that the 'big smoke' is a far cry from the swinging decade she idolises.

When she arrives, as well as the casual misogyny she encounters on the streets, Eloise experiences a different type of threat in the form of the city raised girls on her course, whose bullying behaviour exploits her rural upbringing. Leaving the pressure of student housing she rents a time capsule like bedsit run by Ms Collins (Diana Rigg in her last role) which hasn't been redecorated by the owner since the 1960s. But once installed in her room Eloise, who her grandmother has described as 'sensitive' (in more ways than one), begins to tune in to an older London, and in particular the spirit of an aspiring singer and performer Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy), who may have occupied Ellie's room back in the 1960s. Eloise finds it increasingly hard to separate the past from the present, and wonders whether the poor mental health fatally experienced by her mother has passed on to her, as the visions of Sandie and her tortured life in Soho intrude into her present day existence.

Wright's love of the giallo movie is also thoroughly explored in Last Night in Soho's exponentially nasty setup, which balances elements of the ghost story narrative with the director's trademark production flashiness. I actually gasped when, in the first of Eloise's increasingly dreamlike visions, she walks down an alleyway and into a stunningly rendered 1960s West End, complete with bright marquee lights, rain slicked streets and a mile high poster of the (then) latest James Bond film above the cinema (actually London's Haymarket). The movie is far from subtle; cast wise, with the exception of caring fellow student John (Michael Ajayo) all the blokes are awful, and most of the women not much better. But this is an Edgar Wright film of course, a director with great vision but often little maturity; Last Night in Soho has lots to savour but leaves a distinctly bitter aftertaste.

The Legend of Jack and Jill (UK 2021: Dir Jack Peter Mundy) The fifth of no less than five features directed by Mundy during 2021, basing an entire movie on the slim premise of a 12 line poem is one of the more ambitious undertakings in the genre now referred to  - sigh - as the Twisted Child Universe (TCU).

But Mundy, supported by the Scott Jeffrey Jagged Edge production machine, doesn't even need all 12 as the inspiration for his Sawney Beane/TCM style backwoods chiller; just the first - and most well known - verse is enough. In a prologue two children, Jack and Jill, are urged by their mother to run up a hill (geddit?) not to fetch a pail of water but to escape their berserk dad; mum sacrifices herself for their safety.

The two kids grow up feral; they're also possibly deformed, although it may be that their misshapen faces are the result of them wearing masks of human skin; this, like so much in the movie, is never explained. What is known is that a succession of hikers are reported missing in the area; intrepid local reporter Bernice (Sarah T. Cohen) is sent to investigate and comes a J&J cropper; the assumption is that the missing become dinner.

The main 'action' in the movie centres around a group of friends who travel out to the same area to help one of their number, Eden (Beatrice Fletcher) get over the suicide of her boyfriend. Much hand wringing follows as everyone examines their own grief; friendships deepen - there's even a same sex unfulfilled crush - and then J&J work out that their version of a Deliveroo order has arrived; and then the killings begin. The fact that the hillside killers live about half a mile away from the house where the group are staying (the ubiquitous Jeffrey youth hostel, one supposes) strains the concept of their lonely feral existence, but let that be the least of your WTF moments. On a more positive note, James Morgan's rural cinematography is often rather striking, and as Jill scream queen regular Antonia Whillans manages to elicit pathos in her role of a cannibal who perhaps would rather not be; but then Mundy mounts a climax where our two villains live to fight (and eat) another day; indeed, Jack and Jill 2 and 3 would be just around the corner.

Jimmy and Stiggs (USA 2025: Dir Joe Begos)

Joe Begos's world turned dayglow around 2019 when, following his first two rather sedate features (Almost Human and The Mind's Eye from 2013 and 2015 respectively), he leapt onto the stage at London's FrightFest with a battle cry to "watch this movie, motherfuckers!" and gave the world the vampire/art movie Bliss. Awash with bright colours, neon drenching and a lot of grunge, Begos set the tone for his movies to come. VFW, from the same year, was a more sedate but equally colour rich tale of veterans under siege in a bar; and the bright blues and greens lighting up his seasonal robo Santa movie Christmas Bloody Christmas (2022) were entirely in keeping with that movie's general er, excess.

Dayglow is present and correct in Jimmy and Stiggs, but sadly it's the only thing going for it. Like most of the director's films, the premise is brief. Jimmy (Begos, who also had a part in his last movie) is an unpleasant, unhinged film director whose latest project has fallen through (I'm guessing nobody wanted to work with him) and decides to snort and drink everything in sight to compensate for the bad news, ignoring his prospective date in the process. The result is a blackout, where 12 hours of his life go missing - but not entirely. His morning after recollections suggest that there may have been an attempt at alien abduction (and at this early point the audience are probably thinking that they're welcome to him).

Jimmy, who lives in an apartment littered with half empty bottles (I'm guessing he would never see them as half full), pills and powders, invites his friend and sometime filmmaking partner Stiggs (Matt Mercer, go to indieweird actor) round to help him figure what the hell's going on. On the TV Jimmy's hoovering up programmes about alien probes, but in case people are jumping to conclude that it's all in the guy's head, there are visiting aliens; and Jimmy and Stiggs must go to war with them.

The hyperbolic dialogue between the wretched pair is matched by attention deficit editing and a colour scheme which outdoes all his other movies; the best comparator here would be the insufferable characters in Ryan Kruger's 2020 movie Fried Barry crossed with the dayglow VHS nightmares created by Cassandra Sechler and Craig Jacobson. The practical FX, which look like they might be impressive, are lost in the oversaturated look, and there's only so long you want to spend in company of a couple of bums, one of whom has a death wish booze and drugs habit. Sure it's anarchic, over the top and relentlessly gloopy, but so's a custard pie fight, and I stopped finding them good value a long time ago. 

Jimmy and Stiggs is available on UK and Ireland digital platforms from 16 February 2026  

Missing Child Videotape (Japan 2024: Dir Ryota Kondo)

Keita Kodama (Sugita Rairu) divides his time between working in a grocery shop, sharing his small flat with psychically gifted room mate Tsukasa Amano (Hirai Amon) and devoting time to assisting in the location of missing persons. When we first meet Keita he's managed to track down a young boy, previously presumed vanished. "Big brother," whispers the rescued child, enigmatically.

The motives for the young man's extra curricular duties are disclosed via a journalist, Mikoto Kuzumi (Kokoro Morita), seeking an interview with Keita via Tsukasa; she enlightens him that thirteen years previously Keita's young brother Hinata had gone missing while the pair were exploring the same area. Keita's guilt over the still absent sibling is not helped by his mother sending him various possessions of his late father, including a video tape, shot by Keita at the point where Hinata disappeared, showing a mysterious and possibly haunted building which had subsequently also vanished.

Kuzumi, who is supposedly writing a positive piece about Keita and the recovered boy, digs deeper and, in classic J-horror fashion, discovers that the area in which the disappearances took place - Mt. Mashiro - has a history of similar incidents. The journalist, Keita and Tsukasa realise that if they are to discover the truth they must journey to the mountain and face their fears.

This is director Kondo Ryota's first feature, developed from a short film of the same name. Ryota's overall production steer comes via Takashi Shimizu, a name that should mean far more to fans of fantastic film than it may do; much of Shimizu's work as a director, outside of his Ju-On: the Grudge movies and 2004's excellent Marebito has failed to achieve a UK theatrical or even physical release.

In summary MCV could be seen as a 'greatest hits' of J-Horror; 'haunted' videotape; isolated rural location; spooky if unresolved narrative. But Kondo takes those elements and inserts them in a film less 'slow' than 'stop' burn; almost score-less, most of the film's scenes progress in near silence, a mood of gloom and despair prevailing throughout. There is a climax of sorts but anyone seeking tidy resolution will be left wanting. If there's a criticism it's that the performances are a little too underplayed to truly take hold, and the film's themes aren't fully developed, but there's no doubting the director's ability to create a mood of ratcheted up creepiness.

Missing Child Videotape plays as part of the Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme 2026 which takes place in cinemas around the UK from 6 February to 31 March 2026. You can watch the trailer here.