Black Mountain Side (Canada 2014: Dir Nick Szostakiwskyj)

The creepy and beguiling Black Mountain Side has now officially achieved movie 'sleeper status'; it was made back in 2014, spent most of 2015 doing the US festival circuit, only finally getting a UK home release in the second part of 2016 (no theatrical run sadly), with the distributors mysteriously dropping 'Side' from the DVD issue, which I'm choosing to ignore. If a director as talented as the early twenty-something Nick Szostakiwskyj (who also wrote and co-produced the film) thinks Black Mountain Side's ok for a title, that's good enough for me.

This intense snowbound psychological brain bender has been described as a love letter to John Carpenter's 1982 movie The Thing, which is fair; as well as sharing a wintry backdrop - Canada's British Colombia - the film also features an all male cast of archaeologists who are driven collectively crazy following the discovery of an ancient shrine in the mountains. But there are other valid comparisons - the steadicam gliding over the snow, tracking the characters as their screws start to loosen, recalls the menacing camera sweeps of 1980's The Shining, and there's a touch of Sam Raimi's 1981 splatterfest The Evil Dead in the claustrophobic wood cabin environments shared by the men.

The cast of Black Mountain Side uttering a collective "WTF?"

Black Mountain Side takes a while to set up its horror and body count. The introduction of an expert on ancient structures, brought in to the group to help solve the mystery of the shrine, is the point at which the story takes off. But as much as we do get a rather Lovecraftian explanation involving ancient bacteria and a cult of self-mutilation, we remain as confused as the rest of the team about what is real and what is hallucination, particularly when the focal point of the force - a strange elk-like creature
who may or may not have a glowing nose - is finally revealed.

Strange stuff indeed and as well as some pin-sharp acting performances the film's sound design is crucial here - there's no score, just the endless silence of deep snowfall and the ticks and creaks of the cabins, so when the sharp bursts of violence occur among the men it's all the more shocking. The director has described the shoot as very intense. He hired some out of season holiday cabins deep in the forest - undoubtedly charming in summer but bleak and inhospitable in the depths of winter - with the cast sleeping where they were filming, helping to create a hugely oppressive atmosphere. That the film refuses to deliver a happy ending is probably a given - that it manages to create a mounting sense of tension despite the increasingly unusual events on screen makes me recommend it to you wholeheartedly. A film to watch more than once, certainly.

Unspoken (Canada 2015: Dir Sheldon Wilson)

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

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

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

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

Spooky Adrian (played by Sunny Suljic)

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

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

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