Hereditary (USA 2018: Dir Ari Aster)

Horror films SHOULD NOT BE TWO HOURS LONG. There, it's out there. Bit shouty but you get the point. Hereditary is actually over two hours long, and this is a drawback, as it is impossible to sustain the tension generated by the first half of a movie if said movie runs for 127 minutes. Mind you, if it had generated the tension of the first hour right the way through, it would be advisable for cinemas showing the film to revive those marketing wheezes of the 1960s by having a crew from St John Ambulance on standby to deal with fainting members of the audience.

So, being Ari Aster's feature debut as director, I'll be generous and assume that any mild sagginess at the movie's mid point is all about him giving the audience a bit of a breather, before things ramp up again for Hereditary's climax. And, like a Masterchef judge who initially slags off a beautifully presented dish knowing that they're really going to give it maximum points, for the things that Aster puts on the screen and how his superb cast of actors deliver it, it's well deserving of praise.

I've long thought Toni Colette has a face for horror (as witnessed in 1999's The Sixth Sense and even occasionally in the 2015 comedy horror Krampus) and she is note perfect as Annie Graham, an artist who, when we first meet her, is dealing with the death of her mother, a person she wasn't particularly close to, while being tolerantly supported by husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne). She's annoyed that her daughter Charlie (a miraculous debut performance from 15 year old Milly Shapiro) seemed to be her late mum's favourite, and this guilt, with a mix of feelings generated via bereavement, leads her to believe that her mother's presence remains in the house. Normally this would be sufficient content alone for a movie, but these events are just a jumping off point for the rest of the show (although the spoiler free policy of this site forbids me explaining much more).

Aster is rather guilty of throwing everything genre into the mix - seances, discovered books, a spooky attic - but there are so many great flourishes that this can be forgiven even if the sheer weight of parlour tricks slightly dilutes the impact of the movie's climax. And there's a refreshing lack of jump scares accompanied by thundering music. In fact the soundtrack by Colin Stetson is a haunted house theme ride all of its own, all shudders, clicks, whirrs and silences. Quite brilliant.

But I haven't mentioned Toni Collette for a while. Now 46, the actor's face is impossible to take your gaze away from. And that's because Aster spends a lot of time sticking it in your face with the audience watching her respond to the awfulness around her - a trick pulled off to the same effect in the recent mother! This is to some extent Annie's movie, as nearly all the events unfold via her experience or detection, and it's only right at the end that the action opens out - it's a shift in tone which again almost threatens to unseat the movie which has, up to this point, been a succession of things only partly glimpsed. Praise also for Milly Shapiro's performance - old beyond her years, her passive face nevertheless communicating a whole film's worth of fears and anxieties. Also excellent is Alex Wolff, playing Annie and Steve's son Peter. Wolff is also currently in Marc Meyers' My Friend Dahmer - which I confess to not having liked very much - but nothing prepared me for his searing performance in this movie. One scene in particular, if you see the film, will definitely haunt you for days.

Hereditary is a fright flick that has impressed me the more I think about it. Yes it has its flaws, but more often than not it hits the spot, and as a debut feature Aster should be congratulated for doing new things with some very old tools.

The Endless (USA 2017: Dir Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead)

Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s follow up to their excellent 2014 romance-with-tentacles movie Spring is a real melon twister of the highest order.

Benson and Moorhead both star (casting themselves using their own first names) as brothers, who ten years previously had escaped from a woodland deity worshipping cult. The group had adopted the pair from infancy, rescuing them from a car crash near the commune which killed their mother.

But returning to normal life has clearly been difficult. When we first meet them, Justin and Aaron are both stuck in menial cleaning jobs, living a real second gear existence. But a strange package delivered to their home, containing an old video tape featuring one of the cult - Anna - seeming to address them personally, sets off a desire (by Aaron at least) to return to the commune. Grudgingly Justin agrees to accompany him. 

When the brothers arrive at the so called ‘Camp Arcadia’ they find the cult members no older than when they last saw them. The group are also preparing for an ‘Ascension’ which presumably will find the commune members reborn. Justin remains sceptical but Aaron is quickly seduced back into the cult's strange ways and rituals, forming an attachment with Anna, now broadly the same age, who raised him from a baby.

As usual to tell more of the plot would be to spoil the fun, suffice it to say that we’re in Triangle, Time Crimes and Primer territory here. And while all those films are good in their own ways, what makes The Endless such a terrific movie is the balance of ‘oh wow’ moments with a rich vein of dry humour which not only adds to the suspension of disbelief needed to accept the movie’s plot, but makes Benson (who wrote the script) and Moorhead (also Director of Photography on the flick) a really enjoyable duo to spend time with.

Other supporting characters are also well-defined, particularly the inscrutable cult leader Hal (Tate Ellington) and there's a fine turn from James Jordan as the brilliantly named and creatively angry Shitty Carl - intriguingly some of these characters return from Benson and Morehead's debut feature, 2012's Resolution, suggesting that the cycles in which the cast of this movie operate may exceed the confines of the film. The Endless builds quietly from its linear opening, and tells its story with some care while opening out the drama, resisting the urge to be overly tricksy and maintaining wit and humanity: the ending packs such a punch because the preceding hour and a half has been structured so well.

One of my favourite films of the year so far. See it.

Exquisite Corpse (USA 2010 Dir: Scott David Russell)

Despite the DVD distribution company rather clumsily re-dressing this movie as House of Death and pretending it dates from 2014, Exquisite Corpse was actually made back in 2010 (not to be confused with 2012's The Exquisite Corpse Project or an adaptation of the 1996 Poppy Z Brite novel of the same name), and is a bizarre retelling of Re-Animator but with a squeaky-clean cast that seem to have strayed in from old One Tree Hill episodes.

Steve Sandvoss plays Nicholas, a bright med student who is obsessed with bringing an end to death. His experiments on lab mice have so far resulted in precisely the opposite - and has a box of expired rodents to prove it - but when he accidentally sends a charge through one of them, the results, combined with a serum previously applied to the late mouse (extracted from humans at various points including orgasm and childbirth), produces the effect he was hoping for. This medical breakthrough proves extremely useful when his new girlfriend, rather pretentious artist Sophia (helium voiced Nicole Vicius) accidentally drowns while on a weekend break with Nicholas and two friends. Administering the serum Sophia is brought back to life, but it's not long before the only things she wants to eat in the refrigerator are the bags of blood that Nicholas has brought home from the lab.

Things get pretty gruesome in Exquisite Corpse but the whole thing is served up with a sheen worthy of high quality TV drama. There are some unintentionally funny sequences (Nicholas and his jock friend spouting medico-babble, and particularly Sophia's first death scene which intercuts between her thrashing in the water, Nicholas grinding coffee grounds and said jock friend and squeeze getting jiggy with it). There are attempts to classic up the dialogue, with frequent references to the state of orgasm in French (la petite mort) and not to be trusted course supervisor Dr Waldman (this film's version of Re-Animator's Dr Carl Hill) alluding to Greek drama, likening Nicholas to Orpheus and Sophia to Euridyce.

Silly as it is I found Exquisite Corpse to be far more entertaining than I was expecting. More than likely to turn up at charity shop near you sometime soon, it'll be worth at least 99 pence of your hard earneds.