The Incantation (USA 2018: Dir Jude S Walko)

Jude S. Walko’s debut feature, about a young American girl summoned to an ancient castle, the home of her ancestors, is best seen as a modern update of a gothic fairy tale.

Happy go lucky Lucy is sent to northern France to attend the funeral of a distant relative; when she arrives she meets the rather loquacious Vicar of Borley (Walko) and a starchy housekeeper, and gets a brusque welcome from both – stick to the lower floors, no guests, that kind of thing. The arrival of a local insurance salesman, who may know more than he’s letting on, completes the weird household.

Gradually Lucy’s happy selfie-based demeanour is knocked out of her by a deepening gloom in her new home; a strange little girl is seen in the woods, who may or may not be a ghost; and, while ignoring the house rules and exploring upstairs, she finds evidence that the castle had previously been used in ritual magic – even uncovering a book of witchcraft practices, the Sorteligia (sorry, that death metal band name's already been taken).

Pudgy Jean- Pierre, the local gravedigger, seems to be her only friend, but Lucy begins to feel more and more a prisoner; and when she loses her way home one evening, after getting drunk in a bar, she encounters a strange blind woman occupying a seemingly abandoned cottage (who in the end credits is described rather wonderfully as 'Ethereal Crone' - now that's a death metal band name if ever I heard one!), who warns Lucy of her fate. "I don't plan on dying anytime soon," Lucy reasons, but it seems that the house's occupants have other ideas.

Now this movie really shouldn’t work – apart from a couple of profanities, it’s strictly Sunday teatime stuff. The acting is rather pedestrian, and the whole thing seems terribly naïve. But therein lies its success. It’s totally out of step with most modern horror/supernatural films. It’s languid, beautifully filmed and very quaintly old fashioned. It takes quite a leap of faith to like it but like it I did – and a lot of its success is down to Sam Valentine as Lucy who does a really good job and carried the whole movie. Admittedly Dean Cain as Abel Baddon, the insurance guy (yes that Dean Cain) looks bemused throughout, but at least he got an all-expenses paid holiday to France.

Penny Slinger: Out of the Shadows (UK 2017: Dir Richard Kovitch)

The success of any documentary about living artists is very much dependent on the subject; writing about art documentaries even more so because of the lack of available visual context in a review.

Thankfully Richard Kovitch's documentary about 'missing' British artist Penny Slinger has the advantage of the subject eloquently and extensively narrating her story, sharing ideas about her art and the times she has lived through.

Slinger isn't missing at all - her light burnt brightly in British art circles, particuarly the decade from 1967 to 1977, but she chose to absent herself from the UK, now living a seemingly idyllic life in California, without the need to explain herself and her work.

But Kovitch's film concentrates on the first thirty odd (and sometimes very odd) years of her life, from her errant schoolgirl life in south London to her development as an artist at London's Chelsea College of Arts and later the Royal College of Art. The documentary captures an artist arriving, if not fully formed, but with a clear idea of what she wanted to convey, if not necessarily the medium in which she wanted to convey it; anything from collages, sculptures and even taxidermy. Ironically Slinger was warned off pursuing collage as a means of artistic expression - the late 1960s being all done with the (male) surrealists who championed this approach - but ultimately it is this medium that has produced her most defining work.

One of the difficulties in describing a very different time (ie the late 1960s/early 1970s) - and particularly the position of women in art during this period - is in understanding just how difficult it must have been for a female artist to achieve her vision. The suggestion that as a woman Slinger should naturally be someone's muse ("I wanted to be my own muse," she says at one point) came to a head in her relationship with Peter Whitehead, and it's here that the documentary gains real interest, and departs from the danger of simply being a narrated list of names and dates.

Their relationship began in 1969 with Whitehead whisking her off to the sprawling pile in which he was living, Lilford Hall in Northamptonshire. It was clearly a complicated one, not without love, and which left a lasting impression on Slinger. In the documentary Whitehead seems to take a practical approach to the relationship, seeing the artist and her work as a curated project (even filming them both for an abandoned movie); for Slinger, her reaction to Whitehead and indeed the derelict house in which she was living was more profound and resonant, resulting in the extended collages that made up the sprawling 'An Exorcism' work, utilising Whitehead and her close friend Suzanka Fraey. Slinger used the house as an extended metaphor for her own body, and the images comprising this work, sympathetically soundtracked by Psychological Strategy Board's analogue rumblings, are fantastic and still surprising examples of, as one critic puts it, "when Englishness goes weird."

It's difficult to know to what extent Slinger's reaction to Lilford Hall and the Whitehead years was a response to living with the artist or to the wider issues of the status of women in art generally. As Slinger says "the personal is political," and her subsequent filmed work with the late Jane Arden, who was a major influence in helping her expand her artistic ideas, demonstrates the extent to which she initially embraced the director's radical feminist agenda, then walked away, finding its constraints limiting.

While Out of the Shadows is successful is conveying the reality of the artistic struggle during this period, with the exception of Slinger the talking heads providing the context are rather austere and distant, treating the artist more like a delicate museum piece than a living breathing person. The latter sections of the documentary work best, but what stands out clearly overall is Slinger's work, still challenging now, and her striking use of varied and contrasting images and forms. The artist's composed presence on screen, serene and always faintly smiling, belies the devoted and radical artist within, but I'd like to have seen less reserve and more excitement in celebrating her diverse and stimulating output.     

Supermarket Sweep #2 - Reviews of Beyond the Woods (Ireland 2018), Anna (USA 2017), The House on Elm Lake (UK 2017), Straight From Hell (USA 2017), Carnivore: Werewolf of London (UK 2017) and American Bigfoot (USA 2017)

Beyond the Woods (Ireland 2018: Dir Sean Breathnach) Writer/producer/editor/director/special
effects/sound designer Breatnach's first feature - a 2016 movie dressed up as a new release - is an hour of people bickering and fifteen minutes of inexplicable horror featuring a rags wearing demon and some half hearted possessed people.

Honestly this movie runs for an hour and a quarter and took me two goes to get through it. A group of twentysomethings rendezvous at the Irish country house of Emma. Drinks are drunk. A illicit threesome is entered into. People feel guilty. More drinking occurs. A nearby sinkhole has opened up (from which the guy in rags eventually emerges) which gets smellier and smellier. Someone tries to escape by driving off but ends up where she started from.

Turns out the guy in rags is a soul collecting demon and the occupants of the cottage fulfil that requirement, courtesy of the axe that he wields. There's a nice scene towards the end where the final girl, Lucy, does a bit of a deal to escape, which is then ruined by an off screen sound effect. This is a really dumb, tedious film and everyone involved in it should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves. I did love the imdb reviewer who wrote 'Sky TV had this down as 5/5, they need poking in the bloody eye.' Quite.

Anna (USA 2017: Dir Michael Crum) Ah a horror comedy about a possessed doll. Which is occasionally (shock) quite funny. Crum casts himself as Shawn, who along with his mate Jacob are a pair of paranormal investigating doofuses (doofi?). Together they hear about a doll, currently resident in a paranormal museum, who has the power to pull the soul of any person coming into contact with it into hell. Shawn and Jacob steal the doll from the museum and take it back to their shitty apartment, where after sacrificing a prostitute - accidentally - and courtesy of a local witch, the doll starts to do her stuff.

At over an hour and a half long this feels very drawn out and has all kinds of pacing issues. Plus it sounds like it was recorded on a dictaphone. Things hot up briefly at the hour point, with some nice jump scares after the witch becomes possessed by the doll, effects clearly referring to The Thing. Shawn and Jacob are likeable idiots, and their larking about raises a few laughs, even if they do overplay the dumb and dumber hand a bit. But the whole thing needed to be a bit less amateurish and much more tightly edited to hold the attention. And let's face it, dolls just aren't scary. No, they're REALLY not.

The House on Elm Lake (UK 2017: Dir James Klass) Well done to the makers of this movie for actually finding a house by the lake in the UK - not a typical model for bricks and mortar building in this country - as the setting for this cheap and occasionally rather nasty riff on Amityville 2: The Possession. Houses by lakes are ten a cent in the US of course, and the waterside setting, redolent of many low budget American horror movies, suggests a desire to reap some income Stateside.

But quite what US audiences will make of this is anyone's business - it's overlong, very slow and very, very unscary. The House on Elm Lake is the story of a husband and wife, who, with their young daughter, rent a waterside retreat to make a new start in life, only to fall foul of a murderous presence in the house which has driven previous occupants to murder and suicide. This is actually a remake of a 2014 movie, Lucifer's Night, directed by one Henry W. Smith, who is also Second AD on this film. And the connections continue: The House on Elm Lake actually 'stars' a number of people who were in Smith's movie as the same characters, namely mum Hayley (Becca Hirani), daughter Penny (Faye Goodwin) and several of the ghosts. Lucifer's Night seems never to have received a home release - but we have the 2017 version at least.

Hirani (or Fletcher as she's sometimes known) is becoming something of a micro budget exploitation movie queen, having been in a few things last year: director James Klass's other horror film (12 Deaths of Christmas aka Mother Krampus); a 50 Shades ripoff called Darker Shades of Elise; and a remake of the 1982 video nasty Unhinged. While it's good to see this kind of home grown talent being nurtured, Ms Hirani and her chums in the film are no great shakes at the old acting, and the effects, although avoiding the CGI route, and fairly feeble. There are one or two scenes involving half glimpsed figures that work reasonably well, but, well, it's just not very good.

Straight From Hell (USA 2017: Dir Ryan Brookheart) Despite the 2017 packaging, this is actually a 2015 movie originally titled Trace. It's a surprisingly competent if desperately unoriginal piece, but as a first feature it's very watchable, not least because of the easy on the eye twentysomething cast; when we first meet them are shooting the breeze and drinking together, eventually arriving at that staple of dinner party conversation, EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomenon).

The group are the usual bunch of those up for it and those not, but nominal leader of the pack Nick leads everyone down to his basement recording studio, where he's been studying EVP, to invite them to a 21st century version of a good old fashioned seance. Before you know it, the group have summoned an invisible demon called Abigor, who tells then (via subliminal messages on tape) that he's going to pick the group off one by one, to enable him to rejoin the living.

The movie scores points for largely confining itself to closed spaces and for maintaining some tension as the members of the group die off. The critic who described it as 'goretastic!' must have been watching a different movie, but it's reasonably creepy in places, and refreshingly doesn't spend too much time on the demonic backstory. Generic but not unappealing.

Carnivore: Werewolf of London (UK 2017: Dir Simon Wells) At a future point some intrepid writer - maybe me, who knows? - will do some research on UK holiday cottage rentals used in low budget horror films, allowing the public the opportunity to walk in the steps of minor actors in search of a unique location experience - I can see a map with bloodspatters for 'X marks the spot' now. Simon Wells seems justifiably proud of having picked his woodland spot for Carnivore: Werewolf of London (although judging by the accent of the guy who looks after the cottage we are indeed some way from the big smoke), in that 80% of the scenes take place within the cottage's ultra modern interiors.

We're in the company of Dave and his young girlfriend Abi, away for a dirty weekend. Abi is American (I think; somebody called Atlanta Johnson who is a Brit and did not, I assume, have a US voice coach) and Dave is, well, a bit angry (a slightly Jason Statham like Ben Lloyd-Holmes). So the clothes come off and go back on again in a series of intimate moments that are probably more uncomfortable for the audience than the actors taking part. But someone (or something)'s watching them from outside the cottage and wants to get in, as Dave and Abi fight for their lives against the unseen menace.

Except very soon the menace makes itself very visible and is just a guy in a werewolf suit, a werewolf that is both pretty resourceless and gets turned on by watching outdoor sex. The werewolf is, pardon the phrase, seriously overexposed and less would most definitely have been more in terms of the creature effects. I'm going to guess that with the odd one liner and hokey situations the director doesn't want us to take this too seriously. But any attempt at a horror comedy falls flat; Johnson and Lloyd-Holmes aren't great at building tension and are saddled with a fairly terrible script. The reveal of the origin of the werewolf is delivered so slowly that I'm sure 90% of the viewing audience will have shouted it back at the screen before the truth is uttered. And as for the shameless nod to a much better werewolf movie in the title - well London location spotters, be prepared to go elsewhere, because the Capital is only briefly glimpsed in the movie. Next!

American Bigfoot aka Kampout (USA 2017: Dir Glenn Martin) According to imdb director Glenn Martin brought out a director's cut of this movie the year before Kampout was released (and for once the retitling of the film actually makes sense - Kampout?). Heaven forbid that it should have been any longer than the lumbering hour and a half of this mess.

Martin really doesn't know what he's trying to do here. It's ostensibly a Sasquatch comedy with added gore and lots of local 'colour' - all filmed in and around Nelsonville, Ohio, utilising real locations and even a bit of actual history; one of the movie's down on their luck characters owes his penury to the closure of the town's coal mines. It's possible that local people were recruited for some of the cast, as aside from the actors who one recognises (Zach Gremlins Gilligan and Clint Evilspeak Howard) pretty much everyone else is a dud in the acting department.

The story - a bigfoot family loses baby bigfoot when it's shot and decides to go on a murderous rampage - seems to get lost within the director's admittedly sincere wish to establish character, and as such there's a lot of pretty meaningless dialogue which all goes nowhere fast. So while there's nothing really wrong with American Bigfoot - it's quite well put together and the Ohio countryside looks beautiful - the Sasquatch costumes are awful, the comedy fails to deliver for the most part, and it has an open ended conclusion which is pitiful rather than thought provoking. It's just a very unnecessary film, but hey, you pays your £3, you takes your chance.

Mad to be Normal (UK 2018: Dir Robert Mullan)

While certain areas of the 1960s have been long plundered by filmmakers in pursuit of their own nostalgic vision, unearthing the UK counterculture of the time has largely been the province of writers - like Barry Miles - rather than movie directors.

Mad to be Normal details the attempts of one of the UK's leading countercultural lights - Scottish psychiatrist Ronald David (R.D.) Laing - to establish and (sort of) run Kingsley Hall, an east London free clinic where, between 1965 and 1970, patients with a variety of mental health conditions were (self) referred. Laing's groundbreaking work, based not on the prescription of pacifying drugs and the application of Electro Convulsive Therapy (in contrast to the medical establishments' practices of the time in treating mental 'disorders') but in breaking down the barriers between doctor and patient, and espousing a kind of 'do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law' approach to therapy. Laing is as happy boozing with patients as he is trying to understand their psychoses, and describes Kingsley Hall not as a "mental institution, but a small household of people in different states of mind in the absence on power relations."

Director Robert Mullan, whose documentary background serves him well in the depictions of the clinic at work, chronicled the last two years of Laing's life (he died in 1989) and a book of those times, which bears the same title as the film, demonstrates the closeness of director and subject. Perhaps a little too close, as any real opposition to Laing's approach in the film is provided by the medical powers that be, a bunch of stuffed shirts that the audience is positively not required, or even allowed, to sympathise with.

Mullan's film starts off a little awkwardly with some rather obvious 1960s musical shorthand - 'Season of the Witch,' 'Tired of Waiting' and 'You Really Got Me' - to give us a sense of time and place. To be fair, this and some rather jarring insertions of real 'swinging London' footage into the action are the only obvious attempts to 'sixtiesise' the piece so glaringly; most of the drama takes place inside Kingsley Hall. But the director's message is clear; if you go against the establishment, the entitled classes will always win. Laing's work is a cipher for the mood of the 1960s - out with the old, in with the new, the children hating the parents and all they stand for (a view with which Laing had considerable sympathy). Mullan is to

Gabriel Byrne, Michael Gambon and David Tennant
in Mad to be Normal

be praised for letting Laing's own sangfroid be his undoing as much as the work he does - a growing sense of failure and disappointment surrounds the clinic, but Laing avoids the modern advice to 'fail and fail fast' and introduces LSD to his patients in an attempt to get to the heart of their problems. Laing's behaviour at home is also exposed - his incessant need for truth doesn't extend to niceties like keeping silence regarding information told to him in confidence by his daughter.

As Laing, David Tennant has rescued himself from a recent spate of indifferent roles. The actor has clearly done his homework, nailing the psychiatrist's accent and mannerisms perfectly. Arguably more thuggish and less cerebral than his subject, he nonetheless convinces with a combination of intensity and passion. His relationship with the bottle is nicely summed up by being asked if he'd like something to drink at lunch? "Just some Chianti," he orders nonchalantly, adding "first of the day."

Oddly but perhaps understandably none of the other characters in the film are based on real people, yet are strong enough to suggest otherwise. Elisabeth Moss is Angie Wood, an American student who falls in love with Laing at first sight and steers him through the highs and lows of the Kingsley Hall years. Angie is introduced to Laing by Jim (Gabriel Byrne), a staff member who also spends a lot of time receiving help in the clinic rather than dispensing it; Byrne, an actor who has been rather wasted recently, is brilliant in this, a nuanced but on the edge performance, all jowls and haunted eyes. Michael Gambon also turns in a considerate and mournful performance as Sydney Kotok, despite a rather crass LSD flashback sequence.

It is indeed a stellar cast which elevates the material above the risk of being at times a slightly slow and repetitive film to something infinitely better. But itis Tennant's wired, committed performance that you'll remember.

Apostasy (UK 2017: Dir Daniel Kokotajlo)

Apostasy offers Siobhan Finneran the opportunity for one of her finest performances to date, as a Jehovah's Witness single parent in the north west of England, raising two daughters within the faith. Finneran is superb as Ivanna, whose children Luisa and younger sister Alex have grown up following the strict tenets of the Witnesses - no observance of birthdays or Christmas, no television, in fact no embellishments to a life where salvation is awaited through a predicted second coming.

Alex, who is deeply religious, was ill as a baby and undertook a forced blood transfusion (another no no for the Witnesses - "Blood is the lifeforce"). She has had to live with the stigma of going against the group's moral precepts all her young life, despite remaining in poor health, and her wooing by rising Witness star Steven is almost inevitable. Luisa, more doubtful about her faith, chooses another path, becoming pregnant by an outsider (she is part of a team who witness in the predominantly Asian area of the town - the father is Indian). As a result she is forced to leave the Witnesses, breaking ties with Ivanna, whose first thought when she hears about the pregnancy, rather than her daughter's welfare, is that the unnamed dad needs to be brought to meetings. Things take a darker turn when Alex is suddenly taken ill at a party, and Ivanna's beliefs are tested to breaking point, torn between her roles as mother and her commitment to the Witnesses - and yes, they are mutually exclusive.

The depiction of .Jehovah's Witnesses on film is occasional to say the least. Outside of promotional material filmed by the movement and several documentaries, some of Apostasy's moral questions were aired in Basil Dearden's 1962 movie Life for Ruth, brave enough at the time, and a little seen 2007 short, Jehovah's Witness, dealt with a preacher's crisis of conscience. And that's about it.

Daniel Kokotajlo brings his own personal experience of apostasy to his first feature - he was a Jehovah's Witness who gave up his beliefs for a secular life - to make a very personal film which never hectors about the religion, despite it being portrayed as a very 'other' faith: demons being mentioned in casual conversation; an almost medieval sense of the Witnesses seeing themselves as fallen souls awaiting a better next life; and loudspeakers in the Kingdom Hall toilets so no one can miss the sermons.  Kokotajlo divides the scenes of suburban mundanity with quotes from the Bible - proof if we needed it that the belief system offers no chance for escape.

Apostasy is a very quiet movie, its contemplative tone mirroring the deep beliefs held by the congregation and the burden of faith carried by the elders, responsible for taking the key decisions about who's in and who's out of the gang - and a pregnant Luisa (superbly played by Sacha Coronation Street Parkinson) is certainly out. It's virtually music free too - there's drama enough without the need to accentuate events with a score.

Through all of this is Ivanna, stoic in her beliefs, even in the face of loss; her defiance of the elders to care for pregnant Luisa after leaving the family home is poignant and tragic - Ivanna insists they eat in separate rooms to demonstrate the limits of her involvement.

"No one knows how god will judge you," says Ivanna at one point, but most of the drama in this heartbreaking movie is the result of how the characters judge each other. It's a painful film, and a very personal one for the director, but which left the press screening audience with whom I saw it - a hardened bunch if ever there was one - very quiet and, yes, moved.

Supermarket Sweep #1 - Reviews of Circus Kane (USA 2017), Angel of Death (Canada 2017), Mother's Doll (USA 2016), Ghoul (USA 2017), Nightlight (USA 2017) and Terrifier (USA 2017)

Since Poundland stopped stocking pile 'em high sell 'em cheap horror movies, I've been forced to dig a bit deeper and extend my search to bring you a whole load of reviews of new (ish) movies. So it's to the supermarkets I've turned my attentions, for this hopefully regular round up of bargain basement fright flicks. Now as I'm not sponsored by any of the major grocery chains I can't advertise from where I derived my haul - but one of them sounds like Wazzda and the other Disdainsburys. So, if youre out shopping for groceries and get tempted by the mid priced DVDs on the superstore racks, well better read this item first. Onwards!

Circus Kane (USA 2017: Dir Christopher Ray). Promising start. Not a very old movie dusted off and clumsily retitled (there will be many of them I predict) but a genuine film from the correct year and sporting its original release title. The end credits give away that the director is actually Christopher Douglas Olen Ray. Yep he's the 40 year old son of our pal Fred Olen Ray. Argh!

And while he hasn't yet matched his dad's prodigious output as director, he ain't doing bad - this is his thirteenth feature. And it's a whole lot more watchable than some of Olen Ray pere's efforts, that's for sure.

A diverse group of horror media people accept a challenge to spend 24 hours in a rambling house previously occupied by the late arch clown, Balthazar Kane. In true House on Haunted Hill style they're offered $250,000 each if they make it through the night. Needless to write that most of them don't. The house is rigged with enough tricks and trap door stuff to keep the rag tag media team busy (think The Crystal Maze via the Saw franchise) and there are three demonic clowns hanging about to cut the group down to size just in case the booby trapped rooms don't get them. Behind all this action is the soon to be resurrected figure of Kane himself, although he has a little assistance in one of the dafter last reel reveals I've recently witnessed.

As much as he's emulating dad, who is thanked at the end of the movie, Ray is clearly also in debt to the films of Rob Zombie - cast of odd characters, random cultural references etc - but this is cheaply done stuff, and it's difficult to perceive much threat in a house that seems held together predominantly with plywood. Various teens get offed in nasty ways but it's all pretty dreary. Outstanding role goes to Ted Monte as video store owning Big Ed, who manages to talk almost entirely in movie quotes while looking like a low rent Robert Downey Jr. There's a clown movie in this article which is pretty good. But it's not this one.

Angel of Death aka Evangeline (Canada 2017: Dir Karen Lam) Ah, that's more like it. This 2013 independent movie has been dressed up and retitled Angel of Death, but it doesn't make it any less silly or pretentious. Coming across like a more gothy I Spit on Your Grave with a side order of The Crow, the flick features not one but two killers and is a rather poor advertisement both for the Great White North or indeed men in general.

Evangeline is a lonely student, relocated to a new school after a family bereavement. She comes out of her shell for a frat party, but falls under the attention of a rich boy and overall nasty bit of work who, with his mates, assaults and leaves her for dead in the woods. Meanwhile one of the school faculty, who has a sideline in murdering young women and working out in the nude, does his thing for no particular reason. Eva is discovered near death by a group of generally benevolent homeless guys, but is possessed by an evil spirit within the woods, who empowers her to seek revenge on, well men generally it seems.

I've actually seen this movie twice and it was no better the second time. Plot lines that go nowhere, a serial killer with no narrative tie in, some truly shonky acting and a handful of scary pop promo possession scenes. The Canadian countryside sure looks pretty, but revenge fuelled kohl eyed Evangeline (Katerina Katelieva) is as menacing as a sock puppet, and the whole thing is so obvious and literal - not to mention at times baffling - that by the time the Evanescence style end theme rose up over the credits I was pretty convinced that Ms Lam should not be allowed near a camera again. Sadly she has just wrapped another supernatural movie called The Curse of Willow Song. I can wait.

Mother's Doll aka The Melancholy Fantastic (USA 2016: Dir Alejandro Daniel) More retitling alert. The distribution company have seen fit to replace the rather brilliant original title of this movie with Mother's Doll for obvious cash in purposes, and then compound the crime by placing the DVD cover art and title over the movie's opening credits. Pretty shameful stuff, particularly as this is a nice little independent film which started off life in 2009 picking up quite a few plaudits on the Festival circuit, before being re-released (and re-edited) in 2016 as Doll in the Dark, a longer cut than this version.

The title Melancholy Fantastic is a quote from Kierkegaard, and a lot of literary references surround this film, not least Albert Camus' 'The Stranger,' which has echoes in the movie's plot.

Melanie is a young girl grieving the death of her father in a car crash and her mother's subsequent suicide. Things are clearly not right in her world - she carries round a full size home made doll who she dresses up, and as it's Christmas she decorates her tree - but with garlands of razor blades. Melanie's state of mind also sees her happily making sandwiches with mouldy bread and drinking glasses of way past its sell by date milk (a nice bit of mental health shorthand memorably deployed at the end of Buddy Giovinazzo's 1984 movie Combat Shock). Into her life comes gothy Dukken (his name is Danish for 'doll') who forms a sort of relationship with the clearly damaged Melanie. He is tolerant of her odd behaviour and attachment to her creepy inanimate friend. But Melanie's grief is an out of control thing, and when she hears the voice of her mother coming from the doll, things begin to get dangerous.

Mother's Doll (ugh!) is basically a two hander with excellent performances from Amy Crowdis as Melanie and Robin Lord Taylor (who would later turn up in the TV show Gotham) as Dukken (it's a shame that Crowdis hasn't done more in front of the camera since - she seems to have developed a role behind the scenes in recent years - as she carries the movie). It's slow paced for sure, although still very watchable (aided by the beautiful backdrop of wintry Connecticut), but if anyone buys it hoping for Annabelle style thrills, they're in for a massive disappointment.

Ghoul (USA 2017: Dir Gregory Wilson) Well no, actually this is a 2011 TV movie re-released, one assumes, to cash in on the recent rash of movies using the same title, which proudly calls itself Brian Keene's Ghoul in that it's based on the guy's 2007 novel. Keene's critics, and indeed the author himself, have acknowledged a debt to Stephen King in his writings, and Ghoul is a kind of 'It' lite, a rite of passage story wherein three outsider boys take on an ancient menace, complete with various angsty subplots including adult unemployment, alcoholism and, in perhaps the most distasteful story thread, incest. The problem is that Wilson's movie barely scrapes the 1 hour 15 minute mark and so the whole thing becomes a rather confusing mess of half unravelled storylines. There's even a Scooby Doo ending revealing the truth behind the ghoul which makes not one iota of sense in terms of what we've previously seen.

The young cast are reasonably competent in their roles, standout being Nolan (Modern Family) Gould as Timothy, the only child of the three friends without a troubled upbringing, and 80s regular Catherine Mary Stewart also turns up, casting possibly inspired by the movie being set in the same decade (way before the whole 80s kids shtick of Stranger Things materialised). Sean Spillane's soundtrack of FM rock adds to the period authenticity, but this is pretty uninvolving stuff and the TV movie sheen of the production removes any vestige of threat or terror.

Nightlight (USA 2017: Dir Scott Beck, Ryan Woods) Ok so let's get the really silly thing out of the way first; this 2013 movie - released in 2015 and now re-packaged - is shot POV style through a flashlight. Yes that's right, through a flashlight. Not a flashlight attached to a camera, but a common or garden switch on/switch off flashlight. Quite why the directors decided on this particular take on the 'found footage' genre instead of just shooting a movie about kids messing about in the woods is beyond me. Of course said kids would need flashlights if they were messing about in the woods at night, and watching a film about kids trying to scare themselves silly in the woods at night would be pretty tiresome if there was no gimmick to make you think you're watching something cleverer than it actually is.

For we're in the Covington Woods, an area of the US countryside favoured by young people wishing to take their own lives. It's a location steeped in folklore, complete with an abandoned church that people are warned against entering, where the spirits of the newly departed are reborn into the trees and rocks of the wooded realm. So this is the obvious place for a group of kids - and their flashlights don't forget - to fool about in the dark. Yeah, they go in the church too. Twits. 

And so clearly I was not predisposed to like Nightlight. But it does have a number of things going for it once the cliche of the setup and the daftness of the whole nature of filming is overcome. As an entirely shot on location movie the directors make very good use of the dense woods. It also manages one or two nifty scares, making good use of an obviously slender budget. Unfortunately Nightlight delivers all of its goods far too quickly, as if Beck and Woods feared audience ennui and were so focused on hooking us in that they forgot to pace themselves, so it kind of runs out of steam at the hour mark - bit of a problem when you have another twenty minutes of wood romping and screaming at nothing in particular to go.

Terrifier (USA 2017: Dir Damien Leone) Good lord, what an extraordinarily violent film! A friend had tipped me off that this was a kind of return to the golden days of gore movies, and how right they were.

Plot wise, it's a little thin: Art the clown (a character who featured in director Leone's previous movie, 2013's multi story All Hallows Eve, and was the basis for a 2011 short of the same name) is back on Halloween night. A worse for wear woman witnesses her friend - another woman -  being despatched by Art after said friend is let into a house so she can use the bathroom, and runs for her life.

That's it. It's simple, brutal and David Howard Thornton (taking over from Mike Gianelli, who played Art in both All Hallows Eve and the short) is quite brilliant, highly dangerous but also very darkly funny as the killer clown. How this is so watchable with its paper thin premise and lack of plot progression is entirely down to a combination of Thornton's performance, breakneck speed of pace and an economical hour and a quarter running time. The effects are pretty much of the latex and fake blood kind, and there's a lot of them; heads squished, shots at close range, and, in possibly the most toe curling scene, a woman strung up and chainsawed in half. It's very Rob Zombie of course, and instantly forgettable, but while it's on it does its job very effectively. Not for everyone, mind.

The First Purge (USA 2018: Dir Gerard McMurray)

For reasons best known to himself (or rather Blumhouse) James DeMonaco, who successfully directed the first three Purge movies, has shifted over to producing and writing duties for the latest instalment of this popular Hunger-Games-for-adults franchise. DeMonaco was scriptwriter for all the series entries so far, and one had hoped that the continuity would benefit new director Gerard McMurray, who promised much with his hazing ritual debut feature Burning Sands last year.

Sadly The First Purge is the weakest franchise entry to date. Of particular disappointment is the squandered opportunity for some ‘on point’ comparisons between the world today and the politics of The Purge. But no, McMurray is almost obscenely keen to jettison anything narratively that gets in the way of a bit of gung ho action.

So as the title rather unsubtly suggests, The First Purge takes us back to the origins of the ultimate Mischief Night, where for 12 hours every year all policing of and in the US is suspended, leaving inhabitants to roam free all night, settling scores and causing mayhem with whatever weapons come to hand. We learn a bit about the rise of The Purge’s creators, the New Founding Fathers of America, an ultra-right wing party that capture the mood of a nation in a severe economic slump, and who want to, well, make America great again. Sound familiar? Of course in 2013 when the first movie came out, the Donald was a shadowy figure on the electoral horizon, but the series has lost no time - up to now at least - in drawing more and more comparisons between Purge world and our own (and lest we forget, as I was remarking to someone at the screening I attended, that it’s only seven years since Blighty had its own Purge moment, with impromptu city riots that were extinguished as quickly as they erupted).

The opportunity to explore the political and social development of The Purge – as an experiment dreamt up by the NFFA to reduce crime, initially confined to Staten Island, and enabled by paying volunteers $5000 each to participate – is largely ignored, and instead McMurray focuses on some almost shockingly stereotypical black characters – drug dealer, put upon nice girl with bad boyfriend etc - to tell the story of poverty stricken but basically good people caught up in bad government policy.

The rest of the plot is woefully thin, with characters having to get from A to B to escape lots of people waving weapons but presenting very little actual threat; indeed one of the more dramatic moments revolves around a pre Purge ‘dis’ between two characters – one a junkie (of course) - which signposts their eventual face off once they have weapons in their hands.

This isn’t to write that The First Purge is…well my next word was going to be boring, but actually it was in parts. It’s leaden and ploddy, with lots of action but nowhere to go with it. What’s more criminal (pun intended) is that the dynamics of The Purge – so interestingly investigated in the previous three movies – have been cast aside as the most inconvenient of McGuffins, so that McMurray could clear the stage for scene after scene of inconsequential action.