NEW WAVE OF THE BRITISH FANTASTIC FILM 2026 #3: Reviews of The Bloodline of Bathory (UK 2026), Dracula in Space (UK 2026), Pinocchio: Unstrung (UK 2026), Miasma (UK 2025) and Lure (UK 2026)

The Bloodline of Bathory (UK 2026: Dir Bryan Norris) Many of you will have heard of the 16th Century Hungarian noblewoman Elizabeth Báthory, who allegedly tortured and killed hundreds of girls and bathed in their blood to keep her young. But what you probably don't know is that the so named 'Bloody Countess' spent part of her life in Yorkshire; at least that's what Bryan Norris would have you believe. It's also the line spun to entice AirBnBers to try something different; a holiday stay with a murderous past.

Four women have rented the accommodation for what they hope will be a relaxing holiday; what they haven't counted on is that their destination is also a museum to the memory of Bathory, a tour around which they are obliged to suffer courtesy of the enthusiastic landlord/tour guide Martin (Michael Geary), under the watchful eye of a painting of the Countess herself. Also on the tour are a bunch of already pissed lads on a stag weekend who have, supposedly, double booked the rental. While the lads agree to stay in another local house, the girls elect to remain at the Bathory residence where, left to their own devices, they inadvertently - through the death of one of their number, Ambereen (Claudia Gregory) - trigger the resurrection of Elizabeth. Their troubles multiply when they find that they're unable to leave the house; any attempt to escape finds them right back in the room they left, where they team up with the lads and get picked off.

The concept of The Bloodline of Bathory is high; everything else remains pretty low, but by no means unenjoyable. Basically played for laughs (and there's no other way of executing so hokey a setup) within a location that's almost too cramped to contain all of the cast, the first half's overall silliness gives way to a slightly more fraught second, with some pretty good makeup and VFX from the ever resourceful Lumapix Creative Studios, who've brought some icky class to several low budget productions. Many of the cast, including star and producer Natasha Tosini, are regulars of the British Fantastic Film sausage factory, and bring the usual excitable performances you expect from this kind of thing. Overall this has a little more wit than many of its genre stablemates.

Dracula in Space (UK 2026: Dir Gregory William Randolph Jr.) Back in the day - ok the 1980s - a movie like Dracula in Space would have been made in an abandoned warehouse and included a lot of wandering around. Actually scratch that: in the UK there were, and still are, very few warehouses available for rent; and we didn't really make movies like that anyway 40 years ago. And even if such facilities were available, Louisa Warren's Champdog Films, who are behind this, couldn't have afforded the hire charge.

So what we have is the Demeter, a space vessel, departing its mission to intercept a distress signal emanating from a seemingly empty ship. Said ship contains a large coffin sized pod which, when brought aboard, disgorges the 'ruler of the damned' himself, Count Dracula (Marcus Massey). The space age crew know not of the infamous vampire, so the Count is free to feed and enslave according to tradition under cover of near darkness, until the captain of the ship, Harker (Charlotte Reidie) works out that it can be controlled by shining UV light at it.

Imagine, if you will, an ultra cheap sci fi horror movie so dark (lighting, not content) as to disguise the fact that it was filmed in an office corridor (possibly Champdog's premises?) with character names taken from Stoker's novel but with the cast having zero knowledge of the vampire myth. Imagine that movie including a 'synth' (android, not keyboard) among its crew (Felipe Chavez) whose chief skill seems to be speaking even slower and more deliberately than the rest of the cast. Imagine a cast that for over two thirds of the movie just sit around talking. Slowly. DiS is jolly hard work by anyone's standards. It's the second Champdog film this year directed by '3 time Emmy Award-winning writer, director, and producer' (it says here) Randolph Jr, although based on this bargain basement cut up of Alien and Dracula 3000 4's a while off.

Pinocchio: Unstrung (UK 2026: Dir Rhys Frake-Waterfield) According to IMDb this is the 53rd movie by Scott Jeffrey's Jagged Edge Productions in less than ten years, and one look at their projects shows considerable growth in the quality and watchability of their movies.

P:U (say it quickly) may not earn plaudits from newcomers to the JE stable, but those familiar with Scott's back catalogue may conclude that this is his company's best work yet. A fast moving but rather odd mix of comedy, horror, sentimentality and genuinely repulsive makeup effects, Frake-Waterfield (whose previous projects include the first two Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey movies; a third is planned) has appropriated the popular wooden hero of the 19th century novel (and later Walt Disney) and taken it to places that...well, you wouldn't expect.

James (Cameron Bell) is a young boy in the care of his grandfather Geppetto (Richard Brake). James's short life has been an unhappy one, losing his parents and also a friend of his own age, Zach, to cancer. So lonely James is delighted when Geppetto introduces him to Pinocchio, a little boy made out of wood, fully animated and keen to hang out with his maker's grandson. Oh and who looks a bit like Zach.

James takes his wooden friend to school where, contrary to the instructions given by Geppetto, he introduces Pinocchio to his mates. But 'Pin's' own moral and spiritual guidance comes from a witchy soul hanging on the back of a door, the Woods Mother, and a small Cricket, voiced by the Robert Englund. Both remind Pinocchio that in order to be a fully functioning boy, he needs to harvest skin and organs, presumably to replace or upgrade his wooden form. Let the rebuild commence!

The most remarkable thing about the surprisingly confident (and bonkers) P:U is the care with which the effects are rendered. Pinocchio as a creation is a combination of animatronics, puppetry and, despite protestations to the contrary, what looks like a smattering of CGI; it's an effective combination and one that obviously stretched the resources of the team (end credit behind the scenes footage attests to this). Mood wise the film oscillates slightly uneasily between light comedy, YA hi jinx (although with liberal bouts of swearing) and, when Pin gets to do his stuff, some of the most startling and realistic (for the budget) practical gore effects I've seen in quite some time; not for this movie the worn out CGI blood splatter FX common to such low budget productions. Of course the movie doesn't make a lick of sense, and Pin seems able to move around school and hospital alike without being discovered, despite basically being a three foot high ambulatory tree trunk. The somewhat redemptive ending is as tonally weird as the rest of the film, but I didn't care, because I loved it. Like a Full Moon picture realised by Guillermo del Toro, this is hugely daft and very messy fun.

Miasma (UK 2025: Dir James Head) Anyone who thinks that the spirit of good old fashioned English eccentricity is a thing of the past, let me introduce you to James Head's sophomore feature as director, following on from 2022's affectionate M R James parody Squeak and I'll Run to You.

Strap yourselves in for this one. Dr Gerald Antrobus (Tony Stansfield, returning from Squeak) is the manager of a local insane asylum, whose inmates include 120 year old Professor Rex Shepherd (William Fitzgerald, also returning from Head's first feature), a killer of 10 who blames the murders on Spotus, a mouldy demon dog he unearthed while excavating in Little Barking, a small town in Cornwall, along with a farting creature called Miasma.

Antrobus is summoned to the reading of a will belonging to his estranged, now late father, the location being the same Little Barking. Once there, via a spell at a time shifting pub called 'The Loose Stool' (you may detect a certain scatological theme here, and you wouldn't be wrong), he arrives at the home of the executor, General Lord Gordon Waverley (Jonathan Hansler, Bogieville, Frankenstein: Legacy) and his grumpy housekeeper Ms Danvers (Katherine M. Ciani). But there's a snag; the will isn't there. It's hidden in the coffin of his father on Devil's Island, a place guarded by Miasma. And Gerald has to go and retrieve it.

If this sounds to you like a rip roarer, then reader I'm here to disabuse you of that notion; at a bum numbing near two hours, Miasma never roars. Rather, for the first half of the movie at any rate, it crawls. Things aren't helped by having most of the film's first act filmed with static actors against green screen, although things liven up slightly when Cornwall is reached. There is no attempt at pacing here, and Stansfield performs his lines as if he were paid for the gaps between them (actually I'm pretty sure no one got paid). The best thing in this is Ciani as the Yugoslavian housekeeper, whose cloud of depression and much welcome physical comedy seems to have strayed in from another film altogether. Chaps, I'm sure Miasma was a blast to make, but it certainly isn't to sit through; the odd bit of invention aside, it's not as big and clever as it thinks it is.

Lure (UK 2026: Dir Oliver Cox) Cox's debut feature is Saw lite in Berkshire. Really. 

Six young men are separately invited to dinner at the impressively grand house wherein lives equally sprightly Islay (Silvia Presente); all six think that the invitation is personal, but when they arrive they're knocked out, branded, tied up and sat around a table. 

This is clearly no ordinary dinner party. Islay, assisted by her father Edward (Tom Stocker) and mother Camilla (Pippa Winslow) is keen to pick out a suitor and father to her child, and only the fittest shall survive. A prologue suggests that this is not the first time this has been attempted.

Yes this is a setup which gives way to 75 minutes of Saw type games, starting fairly mildly with a quiz (the loser suffering a knife in the leg) and a game of cards. Things swiftly escalate into more cruel eye gouging stuff, as the suitors struggle to a) stay alive and b) outwit their captors.

Lure is pretty harsh; like its inspiration, there's little attempt at (or need for?) characteristation; the chaps are all fairly mercenary sorts, who clearly thought that an invitation to a pretty woman's house meant sex. They are of course swiftly disabused of this (indeed Islay discovers that two of the suitors came armed with condoms), and any hope that the group might escape seems dashed by the fact that an unseen control voice - again Saw like - is in charge of the game. 

Cox's movie is well done but pretty inconsequential; I'm not a fan of the hard edit but it could have been useful here, as a largely static camera forces the overwrought score to do all the hard work. I didn't believe a word of it but then I don't think that Cox was aiming for realism here, perhaps more a warning to young men about the objectification of women.

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.

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.