Make Up (UK 2020: Dir Claire Oakley)

Oakley's brilliantly observed debut feature takes us to the out of season caravan parks of the Cornish coast, where mobile homes sit squarely looking out to sea, most empty of holidaymakers with only year round residents making up the scant population.

Into this bleak environment arrives Ruth (a stunning performance from Molly Windsor), who's here to be with her long distance boyfriend Tom, one of the park's employees (Joseph Quinn in a powerful, understated performance). He's managed by Shirley (Lisa Palfrey), a tough seen-it-all character who doesn't believe that 18 year old Ruth received permission from her parents to make the trip. Her lack of challenge confirms her guilt.

Ruth and Tom are briefly happily reunited, but Ruth wasn't banking on seeing so little of him because of work, and spends a lot of time alone in their caravan. Things become difficult early on when she finds traces of long red hair in Tom's bed; her response is to wash all the bedding, at which point she meets Jade (Stefanie Martini), another of the camp's workers, with whom Ruth feels an almost immediate connection. Things deteriorate between Tom and Ruth, particularly when she is given employment by Shirley and is able to exert some independence, but Ruth remains obsessive about the girl with red hair who she is convinced is having a relationship with her boyfriend. Her search for this shadowy woman brings her in closer contact with real life Jade, but the pressure on Ruth to acknowledge her own sexual identity is not helped by the strangeness of caravan park living and the alienation she feels from most of the people there.

What transforms Make Up from a potentially by the numbers coming of age story is the way in which Ruth's anxieties manifest themselves. She is still very much a young girl; her copying of Tom when they're in bed together prompts him to respond "how old are you?" and in one scene her lack of life skills are laid bare as she struggles to open a tin of tomato sauce, resulting in the pair dining on a plate of naked spaghetti. Ruth's relationship with Tom is beautifully nuanced, all askance looks and awkward silences; an early scene in which she has to arouse herself alone in the bathroom before having sex with him speaks volumes, and it's clear that Tom never expected her to make good on an (unseen) promise to come and stay with him.

But more painfully we witness Ruth's world gradually falling apart in the bleak Cornish landscape: Jade's offer to paint her nails - ostensibly to stop Ruth biting them - becomes an intimate moment which emotionally outstrips anything she's previously experienced. And her shame at that moment results in her trying to wipe the varnish off in a scene that borders on body horror, while her mind is flooded with brief images of an intimacy she thought she could never hope for. Ruth's glimpses of the girl with red hair, initially thought to be her rival for Tom, remain opaque (a brief sighting of a figure within an empty caravan covered in polythene for fumigating is startling) and gradually function as further manifestations of her own guilt.

If Ruth's eventual awakening, during a beach rave, illuminated by fireworks and Nick Cook's dancing cinematography (such a contrast to the static tableaux of most of the movie), is fairly straightforwardly redemptive, it's not like she hasn't earned it, but it's far from a happy denouement. At the film's start, Ruth is seen wearing one of Tom's sweatshirts, and at the end she's wrapped in Jade's oversized coat; she's swapped one protection for another, but inside Ruth has changed irrevocably. Make Up is a small, perfectly formed film, worth seeing for the myriad tiny details but also Windsor's stellar performance, a calling card if ever I saw one.

Make Up will be available exclusively on Curzon Home Cinema from 31st July.

NEW WAVE OF THE BRITISH FANTASTIC FILM 2020 #6 - Shorts Special: Reviews of Hokum (UK 2020), Clowns (UK 2020), The Isolation Horrors (UK 2020), Crow 9 (UK 2020) and Freakish (UK 2019)

Hokum (UK 2020: Dir Lee Charlish) One of the definitions of 'hokum' is 'trite, sentimental, or unrealistic situations and dialogue in a film..' but I'm pleased to report that Charlish's short contains none of those things. It's a film which is shrouded in the mystery and imagery of the tarot, suggesting a causality behind the events on screen.

A native American proverb "the soul would have no rainbow if the eyes had no tears" introduces us two two criminals, Donnie (Jim Low) and Ash ( Peter James), who hold up a betting shop. Ash is the more reluctant of the pair and Donnie does all the shouting. As the hold up progresses there's a shot of a fruit machine, possibly suggesting chance? In any event real life takes over when one of the employees triggers the alarm: Donnie takes her hostage in the getaway car, drags her into a field and shoots her in the head, much to Ash's disgust.

The narrative then fractures in time. We see Ash burying the stolen money, and then Donnie catching up with and torturing him to tell him where it's buried. Beyond angry, when Ash won't tell,  Donnie strangles him to death.

With his route to the money choked off (literally) Donnie visits a local shaman (Adrian Annis) whose assistant, Fortune (Alex Kapila) is decidedly out of it. "Hi" she says distantly on meeting Donnie. "I can see," he replies - the film is not without humour. The shaman wants a cut of the money, and recommends that Donnie see a local clairvoyant who has the power to bring people back from the dead, providing she can access a photograph of the deceased person.

But a flashback to a few weeks earlier shows that Ash had been summoned by the same shaman and given a drink laced with a hallucinogen (a beautifully filmed sequence with a great soundtrack). Ash is told to appease the spirits by making them an offering, which he achieves by burying the money, which sets off the previously recounted set of events.

In its 26 minutes Charlish, who now has thirteen short films under his belt, knows how to tell a story interestingly and so that you have to work a bit to find out what's going on. As well as the tarot deck references (accompanied by some of his beautiful animations) there are some lovely little touches like a shot of souls rising in the air, and the clairvoyant's spell casting. This is a superb short film and you are advised to catch it if you can.

Clowns (UK 2020: Dir Kris Smith, Nikki Tomb) 'A simple camping trip soon turns sour for Jasmine and her friends as they are hunted down and terrorised by psychopathic clowns' is the imdb summary of this 30 minute short film. Smith and Tombs' enjoyable recreation of backwoods slashers has Jasmine (Annina Kaski, Millennial Killer), her adopted brother Josh (Shane Buckley, Apocalyptic 2077), lairy boyfriend Lewis (Tom Summers) and friend Cindy (Vicky Lasserman) off for a camp in the woods. More precisely, to an area that Jasmine's uncle has described as a hot spot for people going missing and sightings of murderous clowns - good choice!

Rather than moving on, the four remain at the site and get slowly wasted (it also transpires that Lewis is having a thing with Cindy, not known to her best friend Jasmine). Just as bedtime beckons, a young girl, Colette (Kellyann Summers, Invasion Planet Earth) and her rather gimp like sidekick Charlie (Steven Pereira) arrive, kick up a bit of a fuss and leave again. But later that night they return in their clown guises (as Coco and Chuckles respectively) and start picking off the friends.

At just half an hour there isn't much story to Clowns; it's more an extended mood piece, the violent events of the last ten minutes effectively set up by the bickering/arguing of the four friends and the arrival of the clearly quite mad Colette (who has stepped from the frames of a Rob Zombie movie) and simpering Charlie. It's a pleasantly nasty movie, with a mix of practical effects and (unwanted, by me at any rate) CGI blood splats, and the night shooting retains the claustrophobic feel of the piece.

The Isolation Horrors (UK 2020: Dir: M W Daniels, Emma Dark, Nicolai Kornum, Richard Markworth and John Whitaker) In lockdown some of us have acquired new skills (running, jigsaws etc) Others have just hibernated, confused about the while thing. But a group of indie filmmakers decided to make some short films on their phones and pull them together into a very entertaining 25 minutes on the theme of isolation.

Using a link story by Kornum (The Midnight Trip) which has him picking up a decidedly infected looking facemask in the street (why man?) and taking it home to inspect it, he's promoted to ring a number of his friends to check on their status, which in turn leads to their own short films.

First off is Emma Dark (Seize the Night) with 'Goryo': the ghost of Izanami, a Japanese pop star, appears in her home when she deletes viral footage of his Covd-related death sent to her phone - with Dark playing both roles. In Richard Markworth's 'Across the Landing' the director of Carrigan Wakes plays a little Englander who ends up murdering a neighbour who just will not socially isolate. In John (Umbilichord) Whitaker's 'Anomalous,' a man who stockpiles bog paper (quite the thing at the start of lockdown, remember?) ends up on the receiving end when the loo rolls gang up on him. And in the final film. 'Ghosting Isolation,' MW Daniels' fears for the well-being of his dad manifest themselves in a short piece in which dad (Daniels pere) is haunted by some rather frightening figures.

Considering the restrictions under which the film was put together, it's way more entertaining than expected. Hopefully all those involved will go on to make longer and better funded projects, which it will be a pleasure to cover in DEoL's 'New Wave of the British Horror Film' strand.

You can watch The Isolation Horrors here.

Crow 9 (UK 2020: Dir Michael Curtis) Curtis is a prolific video maker/musician whose 'Zombies in Hertford' series is well worth checking out if you have the stamina (most of his films are over an hour and a half), as they're full of inventive flourishes and funny songs. It's childish stuff but the surreal edge makes them really interesting (see the link at the bottom of the review).

His latest, Crow 9, clocks in at a more modest 25 minutes and is the second film in this post to have been inspired by the 2020 pandemic. It's in the form of a video diary filmed over a number of days by an unnamed narrator - let's call him Mike - who's in lockdown, having been furloughed. His day job is at the local biosphere where he's working on an app that distributes bird seed which has been treated to serve as an avian deterrent. The biosphere is also working on a virus of its own; the Crow 9 of the title.

Mike is bored, bored, bored. He gives us a musical interlude to alleviate the monotony, treats us to his keepy-uppy skills with a football and films the empty streets of Hertford on his daily constitutional.

But in the outside world strange things are happening. Odd voices emerge from the radio and phone in show callers talk about not being able to trust their pets any more; "My puss looks shifty: she knows but she's not telling." Mike tries to sign up for movie streaming but there's something wrong with his internet connection and he can't contact his brother. He does manage to call his friend Doris (Sara L Aston in a brief, hilarious cameo) but she's distracted by the birds outside the window and cuts the call short as she thinks they're trying to get in. Later Mike hears a disturbance in the kitchen and finds a freaky looking feathered fiend helping itself to what's left of his food. He manages to hide upstairs to escape the attacking avian.

Meanwhile the radio tells us that the virus has mutated, making humans stupid and rendering birds a threat to mankind. Mike accesses his work mainframe and manages to release the Crow 9 virus which he hopes will defeat the birds, who put out a radio call for people to flock to the local Corn Exchange building, telling them they will be safe. But the avians are lying! They have intercepted the counter virus, and the head bird informs the assembled stupid humans that they're about to take over. "Brand new world!" the birds chant, and the masses (including Mike) echo the victory cry.

I loved Curtis's short but very funny film, clearly shot on the hoof (or claw): Mike is a kind of liberal everyman, bemoaning those who don't obey pandemic distancing measures, and capturing the misery of the lone lockdowner. It's also the best visual record I've seen of the pandemic. Excellent stuff!

You can see all of Mike's videos here.

Freakish (UK 2019/2020: Dir Ross Heath) It's a bit of a question mark whether Freakish was released last year or in 2020. Ross told me that it was 'staggered' so I think I can count it as a this year release.

This 30 minute short, and the second in this post to feature a killer clown - the 'Freakish' of the title - focuses on a house with three generations of occupants menaced by him. The first is a writer who gets as far as typing the word 'freakish' on his old school typewriter before our titular hero springs up, with an appropriately manic cackle, and despatches him.

Six months later a couple, Jack (Kevin Mangar) and Kate (Lucy Lewendon) move into the house, not knowing of the fate of the previous dweller. Jack finds the dead author's typewriter, still with its single page containing the word 'Freakish.' And it's not long before Freakish himself makes an appearance at the window, causing Jack to give chase, and running into a couple of policemen who perhaps understandably don't believe his story about pursuing a killer clown. Which is a shame as the rozzers become Freakish's next victims. Back at the house Jack is still talking about clowns, much to the annoyance of Kate who thinks he's just had too much to drink. Kate's parents arrive for a visit; her sister was also due to turn up but we know that she's become another notch on Freakish's kill list, shortly followed by mum and dad. Looks like no-one's getting out of here alive.

Chris Shipton plays Freakish, a brick outhouse of a man who would normally be fairly easy to track down, courtesy of a couple of ear tunnels and a large tattoo on his neck that I'm pretty sure reads 'chorizo', except for his cunning clown mask disguise. One can sympathise with the killer's desire to off the cast, as after a few minutes in their company you'd probably feel the same. I'd single out Kevin Mangar for particular attention due to his almost total lack of acting skills ("Stop. I'm in pain!" he cries unconvincingly at one point after Freakish takes to him with his knife). Freakish is filmed without much flair (is this the world's first Dogme slasher?) and on occasion rather brutally edited, but it's all quite fun, and if you like the sound of it, you might be pleased to know that Heath is in pre-production with 'Freakish 2' due in 2021, just one of nine projects in various stages of completion due in the next couple of years.

Supermarket Sweep #16 - Reviews of Infected (UK 2015), Brahms: The Boy II (USA/Canada 2020), Tooth Fairy (UK 2019), The Axiom (USA 2017), Polaroid (USA/Norway 2019) and Among the Shadows (USA 2019)

Infected aka Containment (UK 2015: Dir Neil McEnery-West) I can't possibly think why 4DigitalMedia would think to dust off this 2015 UK virus thriller and repackage it as a brand new movie, can you?

But I'm pleased they did (although pssst you can watch it free under its original title on Amazon Video), for this is a very accomplished, not to mention downbeat little film.

Divorced dad Mark (Lee Ross) wakes up a little worse for wear and late for his custody hearing. Through the wall he can hear his elderly alcoholic neighbour Enid (Sheila Benidorm Reid). But Mark is unable to leave his rather seedy flat. The windows are locked and the front door has been sealed. Outside people in orange hazmat suits are setting up a field hospital, and a message piped into the apartment complex advises people to remain calm, and claims that the crisis is a gas leak. Before long one of the flimsy walls in Mark's flat is punched through - it's his neighbour Sergei (a brilliantly psychopathic performance from Andrew Leung) who, with his mute brother Nicu (Gabriel Senior) has decided to take the law in his own hands. The group is joined by the calm, rational Sally (Louise Brealy) and her conspiracy theorist partner Aiden (Billy Postethwaite). Together this unlikely group must defend themselves against both the authorities and, worse, their neighbours.

The daft thing about the retitling of this movie also ruins one of the best things about it: there's no infection as such (unless it's supposed to be an ironic change). While the 'gas leak' story is clearly a cover, and the people in the hazmat suits are expecting causalities, there doesn't seem to be any virus. The real danger in the film is fear and panic, with people turning on themselves faced with a terrifying situation. McEnery-West's film is about as unformulaic as possible: there are no real set pieces, no final reel plot reveal, just a sense of dread and confusion. Indeed when the group manage to detain one of the suited people, Hazel (Pippa Nixon) she seems as confused as the residents, it being her first day on the job. The nearest comparison in overall bleakness and nihilism is probably Romero's The Crazies (1973) but the remote coastal location of the flats (it was filmed in Southampton) also gives the thing a Ballardian feel. Not perfect by any means, but a very intense watch, an top marks for being the director's first feature.

Brahms: The Boy II (USA/Canada 2020: Dir William Brent Bell) Brent Bell's 2016 movie The Boy certainly had its moments, but the announcement of a sequel was, if not inevitable, unsurprising. What is surprising is that The Boy II is a much better film than the first instalment.

Location wise we're back in that weird trying-to-be-the-UK-but-it's-really-Canada land, as the filmmakers try and pass off clearly non British locations as English country houses (once again the exteriors of Craigdarroch Castle, an impressive turreted Victorian pile in British Columbia, are utilised to good effect), but here it just heightens the oddness of the movie by being a little 'off.'

Recovering after a terrible home invasion which leaves mum Liza (Katie Holmes) traumatised and her son Jude (Christopher Convery) mute, dad Sean (Owain Yeoman) decides to pack the family off to a country retreat to put their lives back together. It doesn't take them long to realise that the house is in the grounds of the vast Heelshire family home (where the events of the last movie took place, although our family are unaware of this), and it takes Jude even less time to find the dummy Brahms - with one hand sticking out of an open grave - and bring the thing back home for mum to clean up. Jude and Brahms form a close bond and for a while the parents tolerate their son's obsession because it seems to be bringing him out of his shell. Groundsman Joe (Ralph Ineson) eventually spills the beans about what happened in the 'big house' and there's the usual two thirds point research footage while Liza and Sean work out the threat facing the family.

The Boy II, despite the very silly explanation for what's going on (which kind of runs counter to what happened in the first movie), does have a lovely sombre mood and, like the first film, builds tension without overdoing the jump shots. As dummies go Brahms is relatively creepy, and Liza's frequent PTSD flashbacks help to confuse the audience further as to what's real and what isn't.

Oh and BTW, did I see one Tom Cruise in the catering credits? Look out Katie, he's behind you!

Tooth Fairy (UK 2019: Dir Louisa Warren) Warren's previous genre movies have all revolved around a similar setup (and many have used the same farmyard location); a group of 'ordinary' people coming into contact with a creature borne of an ancient curse. I've been a bit harsh about her movies in the past and while Tooth Fairy has a lot of problems, it does at least improve on her other movies in terms of execution of action scenes, albeit within a very limited budget.

In a reasonably exciting 1983 prologue the mother of three kids does battle with a strange shapeshifting creature who goes by the name of  'Tooth' (and in its natural state is a figure in a black cloak wearing a Halloween mask), locks both the creature and herself in a farm outbuilding and sets fire to everything, with the kids witness to mum's death.

Their mother's sacrifice leaves lingering emotional scars on the three kids, who thirty years later have children of their own. Jen (Claudine-Helene Aumord) has two grown up daughters, Lane, who has since died and Carla (Claire-Maria Fox) who has custody of Lane's son Corey (Clayton Frake) and who has a terrible relationship with her now alcoholic mother. Now I have to mention here that in getting to know the characters it's necessary to overcome some rather splendid miscasting: Aumord is I'm guessing about the same age as Fox, yet they are supposed to be mother and daughter. Even worse is local cleric Father Ruben (Will Dodd) a sixty-something character whose role seems unspecific, being played by a twenty-something actor with a voice like Hugh Grant and a gait like Clive Dunn doing his old man shtick in 'Dad's Army.' Jen's brother Matt (James Ashton) has become devoutly religious but can show no emotional warmth to daughter Shannon (Mali Watkins) following the death of his wife Mora; and finally there's Layla (Eleanor Thomas), now a drug addict living in a caravan with an abusive partner and neglectful of her child (further casting issues; Layla was just a few years younger than Jen in the prologue, but she's played by someone who's about 20).

Into this soapy stew enters Joe (Manny Jai Montana), a black guy who was with Lane but got it on with Carla, and is the father of Corey (although Corey is not mixed race, prompting Joe's line that his son "doesn't look anything like me" - so that's alright then). While all this inter family tension is unravelling 'Tooth' has returned from the grave courtesy of a homeless man who has wandered onto the farm and sacrifices his teeth to the arisen creature, and the spiral of death begins again, thirty years on.

Things really only get moving in Tooth Fairy in the final fifteen minutes, which is pretty standard timing for low budget exploitation pictures to be fair. But rather like Warren's 'Scarecrow' movies, which follow the same narrative pattern, once the evil is awoken towards the start of the movie you wonder just what it's doing for the next hour? The shapeshifting nature of 'Tooth' is nicely done - the creature can appear in the form of whoever the victim has in their mind at the time, and some of the oral extractions are well handled; I also liked the generational curse aspect of the film. However, while this is a step up from Warren's previous genre films, it's still glacially paced, and the drama and the horror are in no way interlinked, so at times feel like two different films clashing with each other.


The Axiom (USA 2017: Dir Nicholas Woods) Choosing a sort of mash up of headscratchers The Ritual (2017), The Corridor (2010) and The Endless (2017) for a first feature is pretty ambitious, and the director at least deserves some recognition for attempting something slightly out of the ordinary.

A group of friends, led by brother and sister McKenzie (Hattie Smith) and Martin (Zac Titus) are arranging a visit to a National Forest in which their sister Marilyn has gone missing (which they know because of a journal left behind by her). However McKenzie thinks fit to remove certain pages from it before the trip begins, which spell out the dangers that lie ahead of them once they enter the place.

Along for the ride are Friends Darcy (Nicole Dambro), Edgar (Taylor Flowers) and awkward Brit Gerrik (Michael Peter Harrison). En route the group stop at the Forest office and encounter park ranger Leon (Kiwi William Kircher, just about disguising his New Zealand accent), who gives them some skinny on the area, tells them his wife went missing in there and asks them to retrieve her bracelet if they find it. Now at this point any normal people would be thanking everybody for their time, phoning the authorities and heading home, but no, these intrepid travellers saddle up and head into almost certain danger.

The first signs of weirdness involve one of the group briefly failing to be able to see any of the others; also Edgar gets sight of a ghostly female figure, which again only he can see (he later works out from looking at a photograph that it's ranger Leon's now late missus). But after an illicit woodlands liaison between Martin and Darcy - which ends with Martin hallucinating a creature that attacks her - things start to ramp up a little, and before we know it everyone is accusing everyone else and the knives come out. And then it gets really odd.

Woods pretty much chucks everything into this one, including a major plot development at almost the 90 minute mark, which for a 98 minute film takes quite some doing. Quite a lot of the ideas don't really work, and it feels like the director may be aware of this as he rather rushes from one idea to the next. The biggest problem I had with The Axiom is that I didn't believe a word of it. I can be quite plot gullible - I'm not one of these people that instinctively questions the motivations of the cast providing the movie as a whole feels coherent - but even I was throwing my hands up at some points. However, the movie has some great ideas; the movie's central premise about the existence of the 'axiom' even suggests sequels, or maybe a really interesting portmanteau movie. But this needed a lot more work to finesse the story and the pace. Pity, but good try.

Polaroid (USA/Norway 2019: Dir Lars Klevberg) You put snow in a movie? I'm putty in your hands. But even copious amounts of the white stuff couldn't save this one.

Quirky Bird (Kathryn Prescott), who works part time in a local antique shop, is given a 1970s era Polaroid camera, and because she's the outsider type, she even recognises the make. The thing about the camera is that it's haunted, and its USP (unique spooking point) is that whoever the camera photographs is doomed to meet an untimely end courtesy of the ghost in the machine.

Bird's friendship circle, who comprise the usual generic gaggle of disposable teens, one by one end up as photographic subject matter and, shortly afterwards, corpses. It's left to the last people standing to do the usual last reel detective work and uncover the story behind the spook, which involves a crazed teacher and a daughter with special educational needs.

TV regular Shauna MacDonald turns up as Bird's busy mum (dad is no more, which gives rise to a fairly pointless sub plot), Grace (Twin Peaks) Zabriskie is on hand as the crazy old lady who might just be the link to defeating the ghost, and Mitch Pileggi from The X Files is the Sheriff with a secret. Apart from that pretty much everybody else is less than 20 years old - or acts like it - and you really don't care what happens to any of them.

But here's the thing: Lars Klevberg - who made such a decent fist of last year's Childs Play reboot and developed this movie from a 2015 short film of the same name - knows what he's doing when he puts a film together. The snowy Nova Scotia locations look great and the movie bulges with atmosphere; some of the set pieces look pretty good too. It's just that the premise of a haunted camera is so patently ridiculous, plus the fact that nobody thinks to do what Bird finally does - chuck the damn thing in the river - and the cast take this way too seriously. A dud, but a nice looking one.

Among the Shadows (USA 2019: Dir Tiago Mesquita) While you're jonesing for an announcement about the development of 'Underworld 6', here's a crappy knock off from 2017 which takes all of the style and elan of those movies and flushes them down the toilet.

Among the Shadows is set in a post Brexit, post EU Belgium where a new European Federation has been set up, headed by Richard Sherman (Kristoffel Verdonck) assisted by his faithful wife Patricia (Lindsay Lohan...yeah I know). A supporter and protector of the presidency, Harry Goldstone, who is the uncle of Kristy Wolfe (Kate Beckinsale-alike Charlotte Beckett) has been murdered. Kristy and Harry are werewolves, as is Richard, although Patricia is a vampire. Patricia enlists Kristy, who is sniffing around for her uncle's murderers, to replace Harry in guarding the President's life. Woven within this basic plot are various elements including a posse of glowing eyed vamps who have a preponderance for attacking women joggers, telepathy, boardroom drama, an angry Scottish detective and a lot of footage shot in what I think is the Cimetière de Bruxelles.

A movie edited not so much by people as hedge trimmers, the movie is so confusing it feels like a bunch of random footage that someone was asked to patch up as best they could in post production. With the sound recorded on what sounds like one of the better dictaphones on the market, and a dizzying cast of various nationalities that enter and exit the stage with no regard for plot progression, Among the Shadows feels like a political thriller with added, and completely unnecessary fangs. Nobody in the credits will want this one on their CV, but particular sympathy lies with Lohan. Clearly someone employed for an afternoon's work and with no idea what's going on (on occasion it looks like she can be seen reading from cue cards), additional footage of the Patricia character is achieved by using a body double with different hair who keeps her face away from the camera and a voice that clearly isn't Lohan's. I was reminded of the chiropractor who doubled for the late Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood Jr's 1957 movie Plan 9 from Outer Space.

This is the 96th film I have reviewed in the 'Supermarket Sweep' strand, and I suppose I should feel blessed that this is the first time I have really struggled not to hit the off button of the DVD player before the end of the movie. Truly, truly putrid stuff and apparently it took $12 million to bring this to the screen.

Disappearance at Clifton Hill (Canada 2020: Dir Albert Shin)

I visited Niagara Falls, out of tourist season, a few years ago. It's an odd place: the low level cacophony of the falling water - arguably an 'eighth wonder of the world' if only King Kong would budge over - backdrops a mix of fading homes, extraordinary cold war structures and some truly tacky tourist attractions. It's hard to believe that this could be a holiday - and in some cases honeymoon - destination (step forward 1953's Niagara), but there's nowt so strange as folk.

Which brings us nicely to the characters in Shin's latest feature, and in particular Abby (Tuppence Middleton). Abby has returned to the place where she grew up, Clifton Hill right next to the Falls (a real location, home of the world famous 'Street of Fun' which looks anything but) to deal with the closure and sale of a motel, the 'Rainbow Inn,' owned by her recently deceased mother. A complex character, Abby contrasts with her no nonsense sister Laure (Hannah Gross) who unlike Abby has remained in the Falls area, with both her and husband Marcus (Noah Reid) employed as security staff at a local casino.

Abby's return seems fairly pointless; the terms of the sale of the motel have already been agreed with the local family run fat cat Charles Lake Company - head honcho of which is the uber suave Charlie Lake III (Eric Johnson), a man who you just know has secrets beneath the smile, and who wants to level the site and turn it into a "glow in the dark" golf course. But the real reason for her return is more personal: as a 7 year old back in the early 1990s, she witnessed the violent kidnapping of a boy by two adults - while out on a fishing trip with her family - whose appearance was distinguished by having a bloody bandage over one of his eyes. A lucky snap taken by her mother at the time showed the female occupant of the car used in the abduction; and Abby is determined to get to the bottom of the mystery surrounding the incident, after finding out that the boy - now identified as Alex Moulin, the son of famed local circus act The Marvellous Moulins - was publicly believed to have taken his own life by plunging into the Falls, although no body was ever found. Utilising local historian and podcaster Walter (a laconic David Cronenberg) who broadcasts from the basement of the famous Flying Saucer restaurant, Abby is able to dig deeper into the story, finding unusual connections which suggest something wider and more sinister.

But there's a further twist to this story (actually there are a lot but I won't spoil them here): Abby is the classic unreliable narrator who has been telly porky pies since childhood. And her return from the city follows a period of self enforced hospitalisation where her fantasist ways had got out of hand. So Abby's investigations are all taken with more than a pinch of salt by her sister, and her disclosures are either disbelieved or denied.

The early scenes of Disappearance at Clifton Hill recall mid period Atom Egoyan; odd characters suppressing their real motives, and the Canadian landscape given an unloved look courtesy of Catherine Lutes' impassive camera. Middleton plays a character that's difficult to sympathise with because she gives so little away, and she takes some increasingly bizarre risks in the name of the investigation that after a while credibility is strained a little, although her sense of loss and confusion remain believable. But there's a good supporting cast to keep things low key and anchored, including Cronenberg and Elizabeth Saunders as the terrifying animal trainer Bev Mole (Elizabeth Saunders). The story behind the movie may not exactly be original, but Shin deserves praise for filming it in a strange and unusual Canadian location - separated from America by one bridge and a passport control office; one can only imagine what it must be like growing up in the place.

Disappearance At Clifton Hill is available on Digital Download from 20 July and on DVD from 3 August.

NEW WAVE OF THE BRITISH FANTASTIC FILM 2020 #5: Reviews of You Are Going to Be a Star (UK 2020), Alien Outbreak (UK 2020), I Scream on the Beach (UK 2020), Return of the Tooth Fairy (UK 2020), The Curse of Blood and Straw (UK 2020) and The Fable of Isabella (UK 2020)

You Are Going to Be a Star (UK 2020: Created by Jackson Batchelor, Sam Mason Bell) Trash Arts kick off volume 5 of NWotBHF with their lockdown filmed oddball comedy horror featurette.

A series of contestants audition for an on line talent show, 'You Are Going To Be a Star.' The host, a kind of freakout Max Headroom character called The Agent (Ryan Carter) complete with dodgy syrup and some trippy background visuals, promises prizes (including a mystery one) for the competition winner.

A motley group of contestants chance their arm for a sniff of the winnings, all played by various alumni of the Portsmouth/Southampton arts scene. There's Dave Dangerous whose talent is knives (Spencer Craig, Gore Theatre), Tony Newton, a comedy clown beat poet (er, Tony Newton, Virus of the Dead), Laverne Loraine, cat telepath (Molly Brown, This Mourning), Kristine from the south who knows everything ( Karina Kinga Kiss, The Cursed Soul), Vanessa the competitive whistler (Aoife Mae Pembro, State of Mind), Rusty the metalhead (Russell Churcher, The Unwanted), Ian Grayson, expert reader (Mason Bell, Millennial Killer), Stacey from London who is a terrible dancer (Lauren Buchanan, Possession), Declan Kieth, official baby name consultant (Jack White), Steve Butterson, movie buff (Shawn C Phillips, The Candy Witch), Kirsty Ball, one man Abba tribute act (James E Taylor, Day of the Stranger), Nicoli the sexy dancer (Andy Dixon, Ophelia), Dr Crunch the biscuit obsessed rapper (Jackson Batchelor, The Truth Will Out) and finally nervous Nigel, who doesn't seem to have any kind of talent at all (Simon Berry, Millennial Killer). Contestants are asked to look at a cat video and decide how many cats are in it, do their audition turn, do it again backwards, make a sandwich, and then eat it (not so great for Laverne who's used cat food in hers). The turns reminded me of the type of act that Graham Lister would offer up in Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer's Big Night Out TV show (ie a bit rubbish).

The Agent decides that they should all win and awards them all a mystery prize: death. Perhaps this is a critique of me me me reality TV culture, or just a surreal exercise in what can be achieved in a lockdown situation. Either way it's fitfully funny and occasionally very creative. And I really want to hear Rusty's song turned into a proper production. Nuts.

You can watch You Are Going to Be a Star on YouTube.

Alien Outbreak (UK 2020: Dir Neil Rowe) Police Sergeant Zoe Norris (Katherine Drake), a Canadian who has transferred to the UK with her fiance, finds herself posted to a sleepy village, where not much happens. Well, normally not much happens, but as the movie opens Zoe is tackling a violent loner, Freddie (Ian Rowe) who has been picked up wandering the streets. Annoyed that she let the vagrant get the better of her, Zoe is then asked to check out the suicide of a local man. When she arrives she finds his distraught widow, who feels that her husband's death was out of character. Shortly after the old woman cries "It's my goddamn fault!" and shoots herself in the head.

Zoe, understandably distraught (although Drake's face remains fairly impassive throughout the movie, no matter what's thrown at her), is asked by her colleague Patrick (Ritchie Crane) to drive over to the local tavern, where there's been a disturbance. En route she finds a corpse in the road and investigating a local farmhouse finds another addled person who says "It's trying to get in the house." She meets the first of the alien machines, a kind of steampunk version of the critters from Starship Troopers, which descend from a larger ship. Eventually rejoining Patrick at the pub, they work out that the mass suicides are being triggered by the visiting aliens invading people's minds, and Zoe, Patrick and a gaggle of pub bound locals must work out how to defeat the alien menace before their minds are overthrown.

On face value Alien Outbreak is good old fashioned tea time sci fi, which is knowing enough to employ those reliable set staples, the good old British boozer and an abandoned MoD building (as is the mind control element of the story). The aliens looks stunning, both grungy and super sleek, and their alien masters, who/which come in a range of humanoid sizes, are equally sinister. But beyond the admirable SFX and some good setups, there's not much going on here, apart from lots of running about and worried faces. Alien Outbreak shoots its extra terrestrial load a little early, and after the toys are brought out there isn't really anywhere left to go. It's a shame as the film looks fabulous in a grungy, 1970s TV way, but there's a lack of depth which ultimately lets it down.

I Scream on the Beach (UK 2020: Dir Alexander Churchyard, Michael Holiday) One look at the poster for this film tells you everything you need to know about I Scream on the Beach's wholesale fetishisation of the 1980s. And who can blame the directors? There's such a rich pop cultural seam to mine, it's no wonder that a lot of filmmakers are going down this stylistic route; but Churchyard and Holiday's picture stands out as a micro budget time capsule marvel.

Set on the Essex coast during the 1980s in the fictional town of Mellow Beach ("Catch 'em, kill 'em, eat 'em", states the town sign) in the days leading up to Halloween, Emily (Hannah Paterson, Churchyard's missus) and her friend Claudine (Rosie Kingston) are bored young people in a dead end town, who while away their days working in a grotty pub (run by genre regular Dani Thompson who plays manager and struggling actor Paula) and dealing with over amorous but equally bored blokes, namely Claudine's on/off boyfriend Bants (Ross Howard), Jeremy (Jamie Evans) and luckless Dave (Reis Daniel), who has a thing for Emily but is too shy to act on it. Emily is the daughter of a single mother, and depending on whose story one believes, Emily's dad Tim was either a feckless fool who dumped his daughter on the beach and scarpered, or a top secret scientist involved in strange human experiments who was killed for what he knew, a murder carried out by someone in a gas mask and witnessed by his daughter.

Emily becomes bothered by a guy in the pub who won't stop looking at her; his presence seems to trigger vivid dreams about the death of her father. And following one of those dreams (which also involves a cameo from Troma boss Lloyd Kaufman as a guiding spirit - and why not?) she wakes up to find a box of papers and photographs at the end of her bed, which had previously belonged to dad. One of the photos features dad and two other men, both scientists, one of whom is the same guy she's seen in the pub. And when local fisherman Keith is killed, she decides to visit the allotment where the old guy has a hut. She's chased away but reaches the gradual conclusion that her version of her dad's disappearance was the correct one, and that the killer with the gas mask may be back. Meanwhile at the local nick, committed policewoman Kincaid (Leigh Trifari) is trying to make headway with the murder investigation, not helped by her shifty boss Chief Inspector Bradley (Martin W. Payne).

The kernel of I Scream on the Beach may be a fairly straightforward thriller story with red herrings galore and added zombies, but what makes it really special is the elements that wrap around it; the most striking aspect, which hits you from the first frame, is the look of the thing. Presented as a 'Dodgy Dan Home Video' production, complete with spot on trailers (but for real Brit indie films), the whole movie plays like a murky VHS tape, tracking marks and all. This gets more meta when one of the films under discussion by the boys, marked out for a Halloween watch-a-thon, is a so called banned movie (this is the 1980s we're talking about) called 'The Decorator' which in fact turns out to be Churchyard and Holiday's next planned project!

The movie is stuffed with the detritus of that decade: old fivers; smoking in pubs; old phone books; a total lack of mobile phones, replaced by working, and probably piss stained phone boxes (remember them?); and a slavish obsession with cassettes and portable music centres. It's also chock full of movie references, including the gas mask killer from My Bloody Valentine, numerous nods to The Evil Dead (including some nice stop frame animation and some effective practical splatter FX), giallo movies, a blink-and-you'll-miss-it homage to Cannibal Holocaust, and some Critters style glove puppet action. The boys' discussion of video titles brings a smile to the face, from those who remember such chats back in the day, and faux titles like 'Frat Party Blender Massacre' are spot on. OK it does occasionally stray into 'Garth Marenghi' territory - the whole thing is voice synced in post which allows for some hilarious bit part performances - and the payoff is just daft. But this is a resourceful, staggeringly inventive film, which is already on course for one of my favourites of the year. And I'd buy the soundtrack in a beat!

Return of the Tooth Fairy aka Tooth Fairy 2 (UK 2020: Dir Louisa Warren) Warren's sequel to last year's Tooth Fairy is set fifteen years after the events of the first film. Hang on! The original movie featured a prologue set in 1983, with the remainder of the events taking place thirty years later ie 2013. So that would set the sequel in...2028! Comfortingly not much seems to have changed in England's near future. We haven't nuked ourselves to ash or been decimated by a pandemic.

What we have is Corey, who as a little boy in Tooth Fairy was one of the few survivors of the supernatural creature's last reign of terror. Now grown up (played by Jake Watkins) and having been through university, Corey's not a stable fellow, after being irrevocably changed by the events of his childhood, following which his mother was committed to an institution and his father left the country. His uni mate Edgar (Gus Fithen) encourages him to come along to their graduation year reunion, being held in what I assume is a house rented for the purpose. Edgar has an American accent, as do most of his Uni pals (explained away by the fact that their intake had an unusually high proportion of Yanks), but Corey is reluctant to join them, feeling like he'll be an outsider. The sweetener is that Jess (Katie McKenna), a classmate for whom he clearly still carries a torch, will be there.

Unfortunately, as he finds out on arrival, so is Paul (AJ Blackwell), the only other Brit in the gang's friendship circle. Paul lived in the same village as Corey when the original attacks were carried out, and he grew up surrounded by a family who were deeply suspicious of the fact that Corey and his parents managed to survive the killings, to the point where they believed he might actually have been involved in them. Jess's presence calms Corey somewhat, despite some very weird freakout moments which show how close the lad is to losing it: he knows that Paul doesn't like him, just not the reason. It makes for an awkward reunion, made worse when Paul, in cahoots with pal Ray (Simon Manley), decides to prank Corey by staging a faux seance to summon the Tooth Fairy, and roping in his cousin Danielle (Amy Blackthorne) to dress up as the TF to spook him. But reading from his book of incantations, Paul summons the real TF (except I'm not sure he does - in the film's prologue the creature has already been summoned by a little girl, with the demon going on to slaughter the entire family).

So as Paul and the friends gradually realise that it's the real TF doing the offing (and fittingly first to go - in the first of a number of death by molar extraction scenes, executed, as in the first film, very effectively - is fake TF Danielle), they fight to stay alive as the creature moves among them, very slowly, wielding its pliers of doom.

This is essentially a three hander - four if you count the TF - between Corey, Jess and Paul, and they are hands down the best actors in the film; their classmates - who also include Hazel (Venetia Cook), and Jo (Chelsea Greenwood) - are little more than victims to be of the scary Fairy. There's a nice bit of extension of the Fairy story towards the end, some good uses of the TF's ability to appear in the guise of others; oh and there's a dead silly final shot which, in true Warren style, leaves an opening for more of the same. Warren is constantly improving as a filmmaker, and one should not forget the meagre resources with which she's working; Return of the Tooth Fairy is very watchable and, in the first half at least, at times genuinely suspenseful.

The Curse of Blood and Straw (UK 2020: Dir Twit Twoo Films) Deconstruction of narrative is always a dicey thing to manage on film. Nic Roeg was great at it. Andrei Tarkovsky knew what he was doing. The makers behind the borderline incomprehensible The Curse of Blood and Straw? Not so much.

The quartet responsible for this are Ewan Rigg, Mark Fox, Ian W. Moody and Tom Stavely, who between them play all the parts. The basic premise is that, in 1986, a group of Americans have come to the UK to bulldoze most of a sleepy village called Crowspass (actually a village near Chelmsford, Essex) and turn it into a super theme park called 'Speedway Boulevard.' However, Crowspass has a history of supernatural activity, as disclosed in the opening scenes, featuring a local journalist, John Jonson, and PC Teddy Jones, who are scouting the local fields for evidence of ghostly activity. Johnson is attacked by a scarecrow figure, and when they escape to the local pub, The Handyman's Arms (in reality it's a shed) they find a dead body and the scarecrow's mask. Oh there's also a zombie walking around called Andy Crane. The body has been despatched by the shades wearing, long haired John Hurt, who spends his nights getting wasted with his mates, drinking beer and skinning up (a scene where the shed gradually fills up with dope smoke is pretty funny). And as the demolition ball starts to break up the village, will its magic soul be able to stop the march of progress?

Who knows? I remained as confused at the end of the film as I was in the middle and at the beginning. At 59 minutes long The Curse of Blood and Straw more than once tests the patience (the imdb entry suggests that the film has taken about three years to complete), and the horror elements are rather peripheral to most of the 'action' making this a borderline choice for inclusion in the NWotBHF project. But, as with most movies, there's always something to savour. In this case it's the blatant stealing of soundtrack material, whether atmospheric music (from Phantasm, Suspiria et al) to recognisable rock 'classics,' all thoughtfully listed in the film's closing credits with nary a thought to rights clearance. Some of the film is shot at twilight with no lighting, making it impossible to see what's happening, and the lack of a script throws up some fairly funny improvised comments, delivered while at least one member of the cast in some of the scenes threatens to corpse or collapse in giggles. Basically an hour of blokes mucking about, and should you wish you can catch the whole thing on YouTube. But, and I'm not advocating drug use here, something herbal may help with the ride.

The Fable of Isabella (UK 2020: Dir Sarah MacGregor) In Whitby scriptwriter Guy Renfield (Jonathan Hansler) has squirrelled himself away in his mother's beach house to overcome his writer's block and complete the first draft of his movie script. But his commissioning publisher Jerry (David Wayman) is becoming concerned at his ability to deliver, so he flies in research assistant and Renfield fan Svajone MacDonald (Kris Darrell) all the way over from the US to assist with its completion.

Renfield's script subject matter concerns a 14 year old girl from the 17th century, the Isabella of the title, accused of witchcraft following a string of murders in the locality, which included members of her own family, and subsequently hanged. Fortuitously MacDonald seems to have some knowledge of the case which will, she hopes, aid her ability to assist.

In a separate but increasingly linked story, a group of filmmakers, headed by the not quite on the level Elaine Hirsch (Felicia Bowen) leads her team, comprising assistant Clara (Laura Field) and tech chaps Taz (Abel Tyler) and G (Gary MacDonald), deeper and deeper into the woods. Their aim? To document the wanderings of Isabella the 'witch' from her arrival in the locality to her eventual death. This section of the movie is rendered mostly in black and white, and the 'recovered' nature of the footage suggests that this expedition may not turn out well.

Exactly how well is revealed as the decision of Renfield and MacDonald; in a clever bit of plotting it's disclosed that Hirsch and her team are actually the characters in the script made flesh. The pair's constant re-editing of material affects what we see within the FF material. And as the writer and his assistant work through the night to complete the script, the fate of the investigative team becomes subject to the whim of supernatural forces; maybe Isabella herself, exerting power from beyond the grave?

The Fable of Isabella weaves history (the title character is based on Yorkshire’s best-known witch, Isabella Billington, who was sentenced to death for crucifying her mother on the 5th January, 1649), myth and legend into one beguiling and, at times confusing meditation on storytelling and the legacy of belief. Like The Blair Witch Project (1999) before it - which was an influence - the film reaches into history and folklore and re-presents it, for the characters in Renfield's script at least, as a credible contemporary threat (indeed some footage of the annual Whitby goth festival clearly demonstrates that for many folklore and myth are still an important part of their lives). Much remains unexplained in the film - possibly the outcome of having to edit down the original three hour cut to 90 minutes - and narratively it's sometimes hard to follow. But I didn't mind being confused; life is, after all, a messy business, and MacGregor is dealing with some big themes here.

The Fable of Isabella makes great use of some stunning coastal scenery, and utilises a soundtrack that often isn't music as much as found aural folkloric elements. The cast is small but well chosen; in particular Kris Darrell and Jonathan Hansler make a very good odd-couple, and their depiction of the creative process is very believable. A little ragged round the edges then, but an ambitious, thoughtful film; the proposed spin off TV series promises to be very interesting.

You can view The Fable of Isabella free by logging on to reveelmovies.com and searching.

NEW WAVE OF THE BRITISH FANTASTIC FILM 2020 #4: Reviews of After Dark aka Vampire Virus (UK 2020), Morris (UK 2020), Virtual Death Match (UK 2020), We Wait in the Woods (UK 2020), The Truth Will Out (UK 2020) and Dead Again (UK 2020)

After Dark aka Vampire Virus (UK 2020: Dir Charlie Steeds) One of two horror movies coming out in 2020 (hopefully) from the prolific and ever watchable Steeds, this one feels like an indulgence of the director's VHS guzzling past.

Set in contemporary USA (OK it isn't, but Steeds tries harder than most to convince us we're Stateside, with a cast offering good US accents and clever integration of American stock footage and UK locations) we meet Jennifer (Natalie Martins), who is having Sex and the City style chats with her girlfriends in a bar. Jen, who shares a flat with her gay friend Jack (Peter Lofsgard) is guy-less, and her friends want to fix that, so they move on to a club. But instead of hooking up with a man, Jen meets the beautiful and enigmatic Izabella (Jéssica Alonso) to whom she is instantly attracted. She sustains a cut to her hand, and Izabella, who is a nurse, offers to take her somewhere quiet to dress the wound ("I don't do public restrooms" she explains). 

Some time later Jen wakes up on her own in a back alley: the cut on her hand has vanished but she has sustained a nasty wound on her body, and only a vague memory of the previous night. Strange things are happening to her. After she returns home and showers she can't see her reflection in the bathroom mirror. And she seems to have acquired additional strength too. Elsewhere in the city, police are investigating a series of murders where, inexplicably, the bodies have been drained of 50% of their blood via a single wound on the abdomen. Jen gradually concludes that she's been bitten by a vampire, and the biter was none other than Izabella.

Vampire Virus (a title foisted on the film by the distribution company apparently) is a rather different film from Steeds. It's less plot driven than some his other movies, but where it really shines is its mis-en-scene. As I was watching I wrote in my notebook 'a gay neon wet dream.' Actually that suggests a level of explicitness that the movie doesn't have, but it's incredibly stylised, with a superb neon drenched colour scheme (although it's all cleverly achieved by conventional lighting - there's no actual neon) very much in debt to, well the 1980s for a start, and more recently the movies of Nicolas Winding Refn (Steeds was cinematographer on this and he's done a really good job). The soundtrack is a mix of specially written pieces from Matt Akers and a host of synthwave artists such as 'Betamaxx', 'Jordan F' and my favourite artist 'Streetcleaner' - the music complements the visuals perfectly.  

Of course if this were pure retro cinema it might come across as slightly arch, but beneath the camp Steeds draws on some interesting themes. One of the investigating police team is Freddie (Derek Nelson), who is gay but can't come out at work for fear of reprisals (he's seeing Jack in secret); and the connection between the spread of the vampire contagion and its breeding ground in the clubs is a thinly disguised nod to the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. It's classy, stylish and sinuous fun; I cannot believe how Steeds achieves films of this quality on such meagre budgets.

Morris (UK 2020: Dir Jason M J Brown) Back in the 1980s, a group of children are latched on to by loner boy Morris (Daniel Crowe), who just wants to hang out with them. But like every close knit circle, breaking in is hard and Morris becomes the object of ridicule, which can only end badly; and one day, while fooling around on the railway tracks (PIFs being largely useless here obviously) Morris is hit by a train and killed. The group scarper and agree to say nothing about the incident.

Fast forward to 2019, and the friends are now in their early thirties. They've stayed reasonably close, their lives fatally entwined because of their secret. But as the film opens we watch one of them, a bruised and bloodied Courtney (Natalie Biggs), being chased into a car breakers yard by an unseen figure; the horns of the cars mysteriously begin to sound in unison, and Courtney has to dodge a falling vehicle (a very neat effect) forcing her to climb onto a bridge to escape her attacker. "We didn't mean to leave you," she says, terrified, before falling to her death.

'You left me for dead - tonight you die' is written on a note posted to Courtney earlier that day. Courtney checks with the rest of the group whether they've received anything similar; they haven't, although some have been having nightmares. They comprise Sarah (Kate Richmond-Ward), her boyfriend Marcus (Adam Probets) who is ready to believe in a supernatural explanation, and Nathan (Darren Randall), who has problems of his own; his son was one of a number of schoolkids who have disappeared without trace, together with the school bus in which they were travelling. Nathan is determined to get to the bottom of the mystery, which is compounded when Marcus produces a photo of the back of said bus, which features the shadowy, ghostly figure of Morris. Courtney goes to see the only one of their group who refuses to talk about the past, Chris (James Barnes), but he doesn't want to know: later Chris is killed by Morris while investigating noises in his loft.

Courtney is hosting an 80s themed party that evening to celebrate her leaving the village for a new job; of course she never makes it. At the party the DJ plays a tune that he says is a request from a 'Morris' and sure enough, the kohl eyed spirit of the maligned boy turns up at the party with a knife, aiming to kill Courtney but mistakenly stabbing Emily (Lisa Poisman), Nathan's girlfriend and group 'outsider.' Courtney escapes the party and the rest, as they say, is history. The friends must now band together to protect themselves from Morris's murderous spirit. But that's far from the end of the story.

Brown is an ambitious low budget film maker whose previous feature, 2018's Dark Vale, contained many of the themes that are Morris's positives. Both are very 'English' films in their use of location, and particular scenes shot in and around damp woods and streams (Nathan's discovery of the bus in which his son and the rest of the class have been killed, wedged into a tunnel, is one of the film's highlight scenes) maintain a real sense of eeriness. Morris is also really successful at interweaving the past and the present; the fact that the 'friends' are united by their past rather than a desire to stay together is echoed in the gradual breakdown of their association as the film progresses. And the figure of Morris, while economically rendered, is quite creepy, his arrival often announced by sounds of electricity, tying his spirit back to the tracks on which he died.

You have to go with the whole thing not to find the plot reveal a bit silly, and unfortunately some of the acting is less than stellar, although I understand that Brown was forced to do some post production add ons, so this is forgiven. I could really have done with more build up to the haunting though; it's a great story and I would have liked it to unfold a little more incrementally. But Morris scores in the right places. It's creepy (and there were a couple of jump moments which took even me by surprise) and atmospheric, helped by a subtle electronic score from Steve Smith which burbles and blips in all the right places.

Virtual Death Match (UK 2020: Dir Louisa Warren) The prolific Warren - a trait she shares with many independent UK film makers - seems to split the subject matter for her films between horror, fighting sagas and sci fi. Virtual Death Match is to some extent a mash up of all three genres; it's also arguably her best film yet.

In the near future - 2030 to be precise - a group of people apply for, and are successful in being chosen for a Virtual Reality competition called The Dojo for a prize of $1 million (yes the film is set in the UK but most of the cast talk with US accents - it's a thing). The story focuses on Jill (Sarah T. Cohen, ClownDoll, Cupid) who wants to win the cash to support her husband who's seriously ill in hospital (although there's a sting in that tale), but the others in the group are all hungry for the prize. There's competitive Ian (Richard Myers) who thinks it's in the bag, Sophie (Kate Milner Evans, ClownDoll, The Candy Witch), older than the rest of the contestants, fey Faye (Tiffany-Ellen Robinson, Curse of the Scarecrow, The Final Scream), intense Giovanni (Will Dodd) and hard nosed Tamzin (Lorena Andrea). The game is set up with four levels; the contestants don VR headsets and then join the action. In the first they have to battle killer scarecrows (what is it with Warren and scarecrows?), the second level contains battling nuns, and the third a chainsaw wielding clown (Warren herself) and a knife happy mime artist. Each of the contestants receives three 'lives' and those that make it through all three rounds, get to square up to a mystery villain - and there can only be one winner.

Part of what makes VDM watchable is the sense of fun had by the cast, although it looks like the shoot wasn't blessed with good weather. The inclusion of scarecrows and nuns as assailants - both stock 'monsters' for UK indie horror - suggests that Warren isn't taking this very seriously; she seems to be having a great time as a colourful killer clown. Her films can be fairly laid back affairs in terms of pacing, but this is pretty much non stop action with the contestants having to assist each other for most of the movie - until it's everyone for themselves. Eventually of course the remaining characters are forced to confess their darkest secrets (in a round where they are forced to hold guns to their heads and kill themselves if they fail to tell the truth) so nobody emerges covered in glory. James R. Wilson's lush score makes us forget we're watching a group of actors running around English fields and farms. There's a cynical side to this film in that the game is being watched by small bunch of champagne guzzling elite, and there's the almost inevitable 'if you die in VR do you die in real life?' question. But although this has all been done before VDM is still great fun and a testament to what can be done with a few quid and an up for it cast.

We Wait in the Woods (UK 2020: Dir Joe Duncombe) Less than a feature, more than a short, Duncombe's film ends with a dedication 'In memory of lost friends' and a message to 'Find someone to talk to.' The central character in the film, around who the story revolves, has already died when the movie starts; while the cause of death isn't mentioned, it's pretty clear from these end messages what has happened.

A group of friends of the dead man - Jay - gather together to camp in the woods where they used to party, and give him a send off. They weren't invited to the funeral, presumably seen as bad influences; a further clue to how he might have died. There's Ant (Jamie Evans) and his girlfriend Lisa (Marian Elizabeth), Mark (Ian Anderson) and his 'muse' Izzy (Pandora Ind), and Charlie (Henry Morris), who seems to be named after his favourite drug, and his uptight girlfriend Hayley (Céline Beran, a Texan, sporting a genuine American accent, rather rare in indie Brit horrors).

Events start slowly. An old man who Charlie meets in the field warns him "I wouldn't stay over night if I was you" and Ant starts to get a bit spooked, but otherwise the group smoke, drink, snort and pill themselves silly while reminiscing about their lost friend, and on the morning after all they have to worry about is their collective comedown heads. But on the second day things get weird. Mark finds himself trapped in his tent, with the camping gas canisters mysteriously punctured. Izzy wanders off and is attacked by an unseen force, and as night draws on, it's clear that something wants them dead.

Little is explained in We Wait in the Woods, including the 'we' of the title. Is it Jay, seeking retribution from beyond the grave, or something darker and older? At 45 minutes in length there's little to get hold of context wise, beyond a broad understanding of the functionality (or otherwise) of the three couples. The movie is entirely filmed on location, and the woodland setting is one of the best things about the film. I suppose we should be pleased that for once we have a film that doesn't drown its audience in explanations for the strange goings on, but I found it just a bit too inconclusive. It's got a good atmosphere though, and a pleasantly downbeat feel.

The Truth Will Out (UK 2020: Dir Jessica Hunt, Sam Mason-Bell) The busy people at Trash Arts bring us another low budget Portsmouth set feature, a downbeat piece about the occult and the perils of reality television.

Thomas (Kevin Cordell) is the host of a TV show called 'Hard Streets UK.' In front of the camera he's polite and gracious with the people he interviews, but when they're turned off he's a curmudgeon who treats his team - Darren (Jackson Batchelor) and Stanley (Mason-Bell) - like dirt, and is a bit of a perv to boot. We join the team as they make their way through the rainy streets of the town, en route to a house containing three local gypsies, with whom they are to spend three days filming, and who are also reputed to be witches.

The household comprises a mother, Diana (Suki Jones), who is from the 'old country' and her daughters Kate (played by Hunt) and 19 year old Phoebe (Kayla Charlton). "Remember, no wandering hands this time!" Thomas is warned by his crew, an instruction not heeded by the star who, on the first night, invites young, innocent Phoebe into his room and masturbates in front of her, while recording the whole thing: it's a deeply disturbing scene, made worse by its length, but it takes the movie from something reasonably lighthearted into much darker territory. As the weekend progresses the team try to understand the nature of the religion - or belief, as the women prefer - held by the gypsies and the extent of their powers. Thomas's nocturnal activities don't go unnoticed by Darren and Stanley whose own agenda is to expose his inclinations and get him taken off the show. But Kate and Phoebe have their own reasons for inviting the crew into their home, the people behind 'Hard Streets UK' are about to find out what witchcraft really means.

The Truth Will Out is a simple film, unflashy in its execution but rather troubling. A lot of this is down to the performance of Cordell as Thomas, equally odious as a moaning, cynical TV 'professional' as he is sexual predator. And having a character like him living under the same (small) roof as a group of innocent women - supposedly - makes for a very sleazy setup. And his descent to (temporary) madness under the force of the witches' powers is also extremely unsettling. This is complemented by Rusty Apper's minimal electronic score, and some surprisingly effective photography, given the limited setup. A nice and nasty surprise from an inventive production company, and well worth catching when it eventually appears on VoD.

Dead Again (UK 2020: Dir Steven M. Smith) I've not been a huge fan of Smith's previous features, but I'm pleased to write that his latest comedy horror, although still a bit ragged round the edges, hits the spot.

New recruit PC Bruce Brody (Elliot Cable) arrives for his first day of work at the police station in the sleepy village of Little Pitchford. There he meets been-around-the-block Sergeant Sean Cooper (Tony Fadil), who Brody will be replacing - it's Cooper's last day. After an uneasy start - Cooper's 70s references to Jaws and 'Starsky and Hutch' fall on deaf ears with the newcomer as he was born in the 1990s - Brody gets shown round the village where, according to Sean, "nothing happens here; it's like a morgue in a recession."

In another part of the village two young people, Katie (Sonera Angel) and Dan (Chris Monk), out in the woods, come across a flesh eating zombie and seek refuge by breaking in to an abandoned manor house (actually the fire-wrecked Poltimore House in Devon, also used in Scare Attraction). They are busted by local farmer Bob (Mark Wingett) and house owner Ellen (Kit Pascoe) who catch them in the act. Brody and Cooper are summoned to deal with the housebreakers but the whole group find themselves surrounded by a zombie horde, which are actually (I think) reanimated corpses triggered by an alien invasion. The group must fight their way out of the house, with all the odds stacked against them.

Smith - who took on multiple technical roles for this film - cheekily integrates carefully edited Corona Virus speech footage from Macron, Johnson and Trump at the beginning of the movie to add some global context to the invasion, which may be in poor taste but it's cleverly done. He's also done a good job with the action scenes; and sparing use of CGI coupled with excellent make up effects (step forward Isabella Larter and her team) and some nifty camerawork (Smith again) make the attack scenes pretty tense. The cast are a lot more suited to their roles than some of Smith's previous movies, and Wingett - who's turning out to be a Nic Cage of the UK home counties - returns from one of Smith's other 2020 horrors, Doll House, to give a decidedly over the top performance. But the star of the show is Fadil as Sean 'Starsky' Cooper, who gets some great lines and is very convincing as a village copper who exists in a state of constant ennui. The rather confusing alien invasion plot line seems like an excuse to shoehorn in some admittedly impressive CGI of a mother ship, but it doesn't matter, as this is amiable stuff, clocking in at about 65 mins if the front and end credits are excluded.