A Night of Horror: Nightmare Radio (Argentina/New Zealand/UK 2019: Dir Various)

Ah the anthology, or portmanteau movie. Ten years ago you'd be lucky to see one a year but these days the short film concept is such an established form of movie making that you can't move for the blighters.

Rod Wilson (James Wright) hosts a horror radio show where callers phone in and recount horror and spook stories. Wilson acts like a kind of EC horror comic host, introducing a range of shorts made independently (I know, I've seen a couple of them at various film festivals). So this is best seen as a short film programme of seven mini movies (eight if you count the prologue, which is Jason Bognacki's visually stunning four minute short 'In the Dark, Dark Woods') with interruptions from people phoning in; oh and the added possibility of the studio, and indeed Wilson himself, being haunted (with echoes of Bruce McDonald's 2008 movie Pontypool here).

Joshua Long's 'Post Mortem Mary' from Australia uses, as the basis for its story, the 19th century obsession with death and photographing the recently deceased. Little Mary (Stella Charrington) and her mother travel across the continent to make dead bodies look alive and photograph them for posterity. Their latest assignment is particularly challenging; a two week old corpse of a young girl. While her mother consoles the grieving family, Mary is left alone to dress and capture the body on film. But the corpse is not as compliant as the girl expects.

In 'A Little off the Top' from 2012, directed by Canadian Adam O'Brien, Sylvio, a hair stylist (David Nerman) has one last session with a famous star, but his long standing bitterness towards those who have achieved fame translates into a literally hair raising conclusion. We're back to Australia for Matthew Richards' 'The Disappearance of Willie Bingham.' Bingham, a killer, faces execution, but is subjected instead to extensive surgery, the precise amount determined by the bereaved family of a schoolgirl he raped and murdered, as part of a new justice programme. As the amputations and organ donations continue, Bingham is exhibited in state high schools as a salutary lesson about keeping to the straight and narrow.

In Sergio Morcillo's 2017 shot 'Gotas' a Spanish dancer, 16 year old Marta (Marina Romero), orphaned at 14, is troubled by intense stomach pains. At their height, they materialise into a demonic figure who is linked to her grief and fear of the adult world. More terrorised young girls (or a young girl in this case) occurs in A.J. Briones' 2015 short 'The Smiling Man' from the USA, where a little moppet is menaced in her own home by a scarily mischievous balloon wielding clown/demon. In Pablo Pastor's 2016 Spanish I Spit on Your Grave influenced short 'Into the Mud' a girl (María Forqué) awakes naked in the forest, held captive by a male hunter. She makes her escape and when she reaches water undergoes a transformation which allows her to revenge herself on her captor. And for the last short we're in the UK with 'Vicious' which is actually an episode from the 2015 TV series Strange Events. A young woman, Lydia (Rachel Winters) is grieving the loss of her sister Katie. But the house she's living in is occupied by a malevolent presence which may or may not be her dead sibling.

The short films don't really have much commonality, although the theme of women being terrorised is pretty consistent, and over the course of the feature a little wearing. But each short is never less than well crafted and some, notably 'Post Mortem Mary', 'The Smiling Man' and 'Vicious' are nastily effective. The wraparound story is pretty flimsy, and the knowledge that the shorts existed prior to making this doesn't help. But overall this is one of the better modern anthology films, and is worth a look.

A Night Of Horror: Nightmare Radio will be available on Amazon and Google from 21st December and iTunes from 30th December.

Scary Christmas round up of (mainly) new horror movies: Reviews of The Nights Before Christmas (UK/Canada 2019), Let it Snow (Ukraine/Georgia 2020), Black Christmas (USA 2019), Unholy Night (Canada 2019), Happy Horror Days (USA 2020) and Why Hide? (UK 2018)

Normally this post would be a seasonal Supermarket Sweep (see 2018 and 2019's roundups here and here), but my usual outlets have been a bit mean with the seasonal swag this year. So I've cast the net a little wider and rummaged around to bring you some Christmas fright flicks which are either new or that I haven't yet covered.

The Nights Before Christmas NEW WAVE OF THE BRITISH FANTASTIC FILM 2020 (UK/Canada 2019: Dir Paul Tanter) Back in 2017, UK producer/director Tanter made a film entitled Once Upon a Time at Christmas, of which this movie is a direct sequel; but don't worry, you don't need to have seen the first one to understand what's happening, because not only do you get flashbacks to that movie, but the events in OUaTaC are frequently referred to.

Set four years after the first movie, various survivors of the killing spree have left the area, either voluntarily or via victim relocation schemes. Courtney (Keegan Chambers), whose character was in the first film, but played by a different actor, is still in mourning for Joe, murdered by the Santa killers. Courtney's father catches up with her, now living in New York. But dad becomes the first victim of a new wave of terror perpetrated by the killers from the first movie, 'Santa Claus' (Simon Phillips) and his accomplice 'Mrs Claus' (Sayla de Goede). 

Natalie Parker (Kate Schroder) is the FBI Agent who works out pretty quickly that Mr and Mrs Claus are back in town. Meanwhile Doctor Monica Mudd (Jennifer Wallis), who is Courtney's psychiatrist, was also the shrink treating the killing couple, whose real names are Nicholas Conway and Michelle Weaver; they met at an asylum, which allows me to slip in my 'there ain't no sanity clause' line. Mr and Mrs Claus catch up with Mudd at home, and murder her daughter Becky (Anne-Carolyne Binette) who's been upstairs doing a striptease for her boyfriend. The FBI apprehend Michelle, who has attended Becky's funeral, but its not long before she's escaped and the crazy pair are running rings around the cops, and continuing their murderous plan.

Tanter's film is incredibly frustrating. It looks fantastic; the photography is first rate. Canada stands in for the USA (like the first film) and its snowy forest scenery provides a dramatic backdrop to the action. But there's a problem; there isn't a single original idea in the film (although 1991's The Silence of the Lambs is clearly a big influence, with the Parker character standing in for Clarice Starling) so while it looks great, it's actually pretty boring. A 105 minute run time doesn't help. 

Casting wise gravel voiced Phillips keeps losing his American accent and de Goede visually channels Harley Quinn from this year's Birds of Prey but with the psycho cutie mannerisms of Sheri Moon Zombie; it's pretty grating. Elsewhere Kate Schroder looks awkward in her role, not helped by a pitiful cliché ridden script; but there's a drinking game to be had for every time a character mentions the killer's naughty or nice list; "It's like an actual list!" Again and again. Not very good then.

Let it Snow (Ukraine/Georgia 2020: Dir Stanislav Kapralov) Three years before the events in the movie, a prologue shows two snowboarders crashing into a young girl on the slopes and fleeing the scene; the girl dies. Three years later it's Christmas, and two Americans, cocky Max (Alex Hafner) and sensitive Mia (Ivanna Sakhno), book into the same resort near where the incident took place. Both are free snowboarders, and Max is looking forward to some fun on the infamous Black Ridge, but Lali, the unsmiling, creepy receptionist (Tinatin Dalakishvili) tells them that it's been closed off, and not to try and access it because people have disappeared there.

On their first day as they prepare to take a helicopter to their chosen location, they see a corpse in a body bag being taken to the hotel for identification; the body is that of a man, seemingly left for dead on the Black Ridge. He's yet another casualty of the mountain. As they fly past the area Max and Mia see a cross. The pilot tells them that some say the ghost of the dead girl haunts the Black Ridge and kills tourists.

With this rather good setup in place, the film proceeds to go downhill rapidly (pun intended). Max and Mia are attacked by a black clad rider on a snowmobile (they have failed to notice a hand sticking out of the snow while boarding past it). Mia recovers to find Max missing; she catches up with him only to see him being towed away by the snowmobile. The driver then lets off a small bomb which causes an avalanche, in which Mia gets trapped. And thus the movie sheds itself of anything approaching the supernatural and becomes a lame slasher movie crossed with a survival story, a sub genre very popular last decade, you may recall.

Let it Snow is set in and around the ski resort of Gudauri in Georgia (an actual place, so perhaps not the greatest bit of advertising for it). As you might expect, the scenery is stunning, and photographed beautifully. But many of the action scenes are confusingly shot and often very brief, making the film feel bitty. There some very good individual scenes, and Sakhno is put through her paces to quite a gruelling extent, but as a whole Let it Snow is a terrible mess, and most will be able to spot its final reveal coming from a very early point. A fairly shaky feature debut from Kapralov; his intentions may be good, but his execution is very far from it.

Black Christmas (USA/New Zealand 2019: Dir Sophia Takal) I'm not exactly sure why Takal and co-writer April Wolfe chose Bob Clark's 1974 movie as the jumping off point for a very loose adaptation which says some interesting things about gender politics. But I'm kind of pleased they did.

It's Christmas and the students of Hawthorne College (named after its founder, the racist, sexist patriarch Calvin Hawthorne) are preparing for the holidays. Well most of them. A bunch of girls from an all female sorority house, who for one reason or another aren't travelling home, are preparing for the annual 'Orphans dinner'.

Chief among them is Riley (Imogen Poots) who is in recovery after she was sexually assaulted by one of the students, Brian (Ryan McIntyre). Riley's complaint after the attack was not handled well; it was deemed that she was complicit and Brian escaped punishment. The incident leaves many of her friends bitter and angry, not least Kris (Aleyse Shannon) who is waging a one woman war against all forms of oppression; starting with a petition against one of the lecturers, Professor Gelson (Cary Elwes) for his refusal to stop teaching the works of 'old white men' in his classics class (a rather good scene has him quoting Camille Paglia in an attempt to dismiss feminist critique of male language; he's a condescending so and so). The girls put on a revue show, with Riley standing in at the last minute, and the highlight of their set is a blistering put down of the male hegemony on campus. Which of course infuriates the boys.

But, as numbers dwindle in the houses, they reduce further courtesy of a black cowled figure (or is it figures? It seems to be everywhere at once) who's offing the girls one by one. Riley witnesses a ritual involving some of the guys and the bust of Hawthorne (which Kris successfully campaigned to have removed from college grounds). Is this in some way connected with the murders? Well yes and no.

The very on point themes of male oppression and millennial anger underpin a lot of what's happening here. The Kris character personifies much of this tension. "They're classics," she says of the choice of authors in Gerson's English class. "But they're not mine." But Black Christmas is also about Riley's journey back from victim to heroine; at one point she goes looking for one of her friends and finds her about to be forced into having sex with one of the frat boys. Riley quietly stays in the room, silently forcing the boy to leave; it's a great scene.

Takal's nods to Clark's original film pop up now and again; the infamous dirty phone call scene turns out to be a bad connection with the mum of one of the missing girls, and the 'plastic bag' murder is recreated, but this time over the head of one of the oppressors. I can see how a lot of people wouldn't have liked this movie; its politics are not subtle and it's a very 'triggery' film, to use current parlance. But I really liked Takal's reboot. Yes it's a PG-13 horror movie and yes it's been designed with a certain demographic in mind, but it worked for me.

Unholy Night (Canada 2019: Dir Chris Chitaroni, Kristian Lariviere and Randy Smith) It's Christmas and lonely Lilly (Jennifer Allanson, who like a lot of this movie's cast, were in Lariviere's entertaining 2018 flick Hens Night) is a put upon nurse whose ward manager is just a big meanie, ordering her around something rotten. Lilly, who struggles with self image issues, doesn't make a stand. She gets assigned to a older patient, Mr Iblis (Jim McDonald), who's nearing the end of his life. He has with him a scrapbook, the contents of which he discloses to Lilly, in the form of two stories. 

The first is 'Christmas with the Cannibals.' A young couple, John and Iris, very much in love, are travelling over to Iris's parents; it's the first time John has met them. To take the pressure off Iris suggests they have some 'shrooms, which means that they're pretty baked when they arrive. Iris's family are decidedly odd, and John's high means that he's occasionally hallucinating. But he certainly isn't seeing things when he finds a freezer full of body parts in the basement. Yes, Iris's family are cannibals (a fact she obviously hadn't previously disclosed). John attempts escape but it seems the whole town, including a police officer - and Iris's ex - is in on the act; John's protestations about cannibalism fall on deaf ears.

The second story, 'Drunk Dead Debbie', concerns a group of women who, while putting together an audition tape for a TV dating show, learn of the legend of 'Drunk Dead Debbie'; the Debbie in question was a shy office worker whose colleagues pranked her by getting her drunk at an office party (the prank backfired as Debbie choked on her own vomit and died). As a result, the story goes that if you look in a mirror and say 'Drunk Dead Debbie' three times, Debbie will come back from the grave. So they do. And she does. And a rather nasty end awaits them all.

The final story is also a conclusion to everything we've seen so far. Lilly gets off her shift, and goes home to her hideously overbearing mother, who has clearly systematically put her daughter down her whole life, including a ritual of locking her in a cupboard every Christmas Eve. Well Lilly's about to undergo an epiphany, as she finds out exactly why her mother locked her up, discovering her true self for the first time. And it ain't pretty (it also explains the prologue to the film). 

This modestly budgeted ($20,000 and that might be Canadian dollars) sort of compendium movie might be very rough round the edges, but I really liked its shoestring inventiveness. It's not hugely funny but it has an anarchic feel and everyone looks like they had a great time making it. 

Happy Horror Days (USA 2020: Dir Various) Well if you thought the last movie was low budget, try this one on for size. Bit of a cheat including this because of the nine short films that make up the feature, all of which refer to American holidays, only one of them relates to Christmas. Watching this was a bit like viewing a shorts programme; some were ok, some were awful and/or incomprehensible; and all round Happy Horror Days was fairly uninspiring. Anyhow, this is what's included.

New Year's Eve; 'Father Time' - a pregnant woman learns that far from being a benevolent old soul, Father Time resurrects himself every year in the body of the new year's first born. And guess whose waters break with five minutes to go until midnight?

St. Patrick's Day; 'Becoming Patrick' - baffling short short in which a boy is abducted, tortured and returned to his family as, well, Saint Patrick. No, me neither.

Easter: 'Forty Winks' - a lively but difficult to interpret film in which a woman refuses to observe the no meat eating observance of the holiday and turns into a sleepwalking potential killer who eats the family dog and threatens her husabnd, who ties her up.

4th July: '4th July' - a very nasty little film. Two trailer trash white racist MAGA types, a man and a woman, break into the house of a black couple. The black guy is raped by the white man while the MAGA couple let fly with the N-word. Worse is to come, and just when you think there's going to be retribution, the white racist cops arrive. Jeez.

Labor Day: 'Labor Day' - a pregnant woman becomes stuck in a time loop, where it's forever Labor day, and her birth experience becomes more bizarre the more times she re-lives it. But is she actually pregnant in the first place?

Halloween; 'Candy' - a couple move into a home in the hills, vacated in a hurry by the previous owners who have left all their stuff. The home has problems including a leak in the ceiling and a thing in the shed, but more problematically the hills are alive (at least the foliage is) and nature claims the couple via strangling creepers. So that's what happened to the last owners!

Thanksgiving; 'Cranberry Sauce' - a short moral tale. A woman has only enough money to buy a tin of cranberry sauce (required by her mother) or cigarettes. She chooses the fags but when she encounters an entity in a tunnel, who won't let her pass, she goes back to the shop and swaps the cigs for the tin; a much more effective weapon against the entity.

Hanukkah; 'Hanukkah' - Crystal, a gold digging young woman, is getting set to fleece older guy Soloman over dinner at his house. Unfortunately Soloman's wife returns to celebrate Hanukkah, and the stage is set for a rather difficult, and murderous dinner.

Christmas; 'Merry and Fright' - at the Anderson's Christmas party, Bob decides to tell a story about two generations of killer Santas, father and son.

Why Hide? aka Christmas Presence (UK 2018: Dir James Edward Cook) A group of friends are off to the country to stay with Rose McKenzie (Charlotte Atkinson), who has rented a house for the Christmas holiday. It's Rose's first Christmas without her father; her twin sister Daisy disappeared when Rose was 10, and her mother subsequently died of a broken heart. Her friends consist of new age-y Anita (Lorna Brown) and her bickering husband Marcus (Mark Chatterton), and would be writer Samantha (Elsie Bennett) and her partner, cheese obsessed (Welsh) valley girl Jo (Orla Cottingham); Samantha has just switched to women. Bitchy fashion designer, Hugo (William Holstead), makes up the party. 

As they settle in, the tensions within the group become manifest. Anita pretentiously sees herself continuing a family tradition of healers and mystics. McKenzie holds forth about the pushing of the LGBTQ+ agenda, and Hugo utters a string of sotto voce putdowns aimed at everyone in sight; it could be a long first evening. But when Hugo dishes out his presents early because he has to leave the next day, his gifts to the group - prototypes of a new range of underwear he's developed, the 'Why Hide?' range (crotchless skimpies, basically) - trigger a drunken photoshoot which breaks the ice somewhat. Later that night a drunk Anita dances in the house grounds, summoning spirits.

The next morning Hugo goes missing after seeing something on the edge of the grounds. Has Anita conjured something forth unknowingly? The rest search for him, and find that his car (with tyres slashed) and clothes are still around. Hugo's body is later found. When the rest try to ring for emergency services, the phone has been cut off. Some time later McKenzie finds Hugo tied up in a cupboard, still alive. So who is the body in the kitchen? It's Hugo too. McKenzie twigs that something supernatural is going on which directly links to her missing sister; her friends, and McKenzie herself, are all in grave danger.

Why Hide? (I preferred the Christmas Presence title although this isn't really a Christmas themed movie per se) starts off a little like Abigail Blackmore's 2019 movie Tales from the Lodge, with a group of not quite friends gathering in a country house and facing danger. It takes a little while for the evil - in this case a shape shifting entity - to expose itself, so along the way we get a lot of spooky red herrings. The budget doesn't allow for a full on final reel (although there is a fiery finish, ending up with a pun on Boxing Day), but when the movie shifts up a gear it's quite fun. Whether you like the early scenes banter between a group of people, who don't like each other that much, getting pissed and opening up is a matter of taste. Jo and Hugo get the best lines but after a while the snark starts to grate. I've seen this movie twice now and it's a strangely comforting home grown horror pic, well photographed and with enough content to survive a second watch.

NEW WAVE OF THE BRITISH FANTASTIC FILM 2020 #11: Reviews of The Understanding (UK 2020), His House (UK 2020), Vengeance of the Leprechaun (UK 2020), Medusa, Queen of the Serpents (UK 2020), Redwood Massacre: Annihilation (UK 2020) and Hosts (UK 2020)

The Understanding (UK 2020: Dir Adam Starks)  Xander Addington (Joshua Copeland), a confused man with little memory of childhood, travels out of London back to where "it all began." Specifically he heads to the town where he grew up: Graveshill, population 4000. It's a place where messages like 'Turn back' are painted on tree trunks: a forgotten town with historic devil worshipping connections. 

The purpose of his visit is to hear the reading of the will of his late father, who took his own life; Xander had become distant from him. The will leaves him his father's house and the local asylum, which dad also owned; he was an influential man in Graveshill. The solicitor in charge expects that Xander will want to sell both properties and has already lined up interested developers. But Xander surprises him; he wants to move in. 

In the woods he meets a deaf and blind man who wears a full head mask. He also encounters Tyler (Starks), who is surprised that anyone would return to the town, particularly as there had been around 700 murders in the area in the previous decade, and as a result Graveshill had cut itself off from the rest of the world and become self sufficient.  

Tyler comes to see him later that evening, after Xander glimpses some shadows in the house. He tells him that the asylum was built in 1870. The town was built around it. In 1910 the asylum was closed and the inmates were rehomed in Graveshill. The people committing the crimes all said they were driven by voices. The whole town is descended from mad men and criminals.

Pretty much everyone in the town is either angry at his return or shocked; Tyler shows him an article written a while back declaring Xander dead. Henry Walker, the Town Mayor (Rick Klink) wants to buy the asylum. The frosty reception continues with the girl behind the counter at the local cinema, who carries a wad of notes and a stun grenade in her bag. In fact the only person who's friendly to him is the woman behind the bar of the local, but she ends up dead. Xander's sketchy memories of his childhood included one Dr Landon, who used to make house visits. He decides to track Landon down; big mistake. 

Starks' debut feature sadly seriously overreaches itself. It's got enough plot strands for about three movies, and becomes more baffling as it progresses. Considering the paucity of budget, Starks manages some clever effects including some creative gore, but he's let down by flat performances (Copeland is pretty uninteresting as the movie's lead). Starks mentioned to me that some of the film was shot in 2019, with the remainder completed this year during lockdown; as a result, it wasn't what the director had envisioned. It's a pity as the project is well photographed, and there are some good soundtrack choices. Here's to him having more luck with his next one.

His House (UK 2020: Dir Remi Weekes) Bol Majur (Sope Dirisu) and his wife Rial (Wunmi Mosaku) escape from a war torn country and make their way by boat to the UK, tragically losing their daughter during the voyage. After being held in detention in the UK, they are housed, at an address of the Government's choosing, on condition that they do not work or move from the property they've been allocated (a fact that keeps them tied to the house when the weirdness starts). It's a home in the middle of a run down housing estate (filmed in Tilbury). Normally refugees would be expected to share accommodation, but strangely the Majurs have sole occupancy of the house. Their social worker Mark (Matt Smith) is impressed at Bol's confident signature on papers; "I work in a bank. I worked in a bank," he says. 

Although the authorities urge them to fit in, the challenges of being strangers in a strange land combine with their post war stresses and grief at the loss of their child. They literally don't know where they are living; even people of colour on the estate are racist towards them. 

Bol is determined to adjust to his new country; he buys western clothes and suggests that he and Rial use knives and forks when they eat. Which makes it all the more problematic when he starts to see things in the house; visions of demons and witches. Rial is more accepting of the supernatural threat, but it's not clear whether the house itself is haunted or the pair have brought something into their new home. Either way, Bol concludes, "we've been marked." 

Written and directed by Remi Weekes, His House has been compared to Babak Anvari's 2016 movie Under the Shadow, which is a bit lazy. While both films deal with the subject of people fleeing war and encountering the supernatural, the threat in Weekes's film is much more abstract; and, the odd well mounted scary shot aside, it fails to terrify. In fact it more closely resembles the 2018 South African movie The Tokoloshe with its migrant-community-meets-the-monster storyline, a film which, like His House, becomes mired in its own earnestness.

Dirisu and Mosaku both make rather unengaging leads; I got no real sense of their reality falling apart, and the experiences they've been through don't show in their faces. The later scenes of the movie, which border on magic realism, feel rather disconnected to the 'refugees in the UK' storyline; I felt that this was two separate films slightly at war with each other. Overall then, rather a disappointment.

Vengeance of the Leprechaun aka Vengeance of the Leprechaun's Gold aka The Leprechaun's Game (UK 2020: Dir Louisa Warren) Yes, Warren's back with her fourth (!) film this year, after Scarecrow's Revenge, Return of the Tooth Fairy and Virtual Death Match. The latest character to populate the director's low budget horror 'universe' is, as the title suggests, the leprechaun!

Warren reminds us at the film's opening of the familiar Irish folk story of the leprechaun, who guards the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and comes after you if you steal it. This is later supplemented by an update from Warren regular Shawn C. Phillips who tells us that the leprechaun is in fact a soul collector appointed by Leviathan.

And in a prologue we get a taste of this rather less jolly version, when two girls on the run from the leprechaun are murdered, one being turned blind and then hammered to death, and the second knifed in the neck; oh and this is a full-sized version of the character too, unlike the one featured in all those wretched 'Leprechaun' movies of the 1990s.

Carl (Daniel Sawicki), a bit of a grifter, is informed by his girlfriend Mischa (Warren) that she's pregnant; as a result they're going to need some money. 

Carl receives a call from his mate Marshall (Marcus Brooks-Henderson) offering him a job which, like all the other jobs they've done together in the past, is dodgy. John (Mike Kelson), a collector of odd folk artefacts, like Bigfoot's claw and the sack used by Krampus, is offering £100,000 to the person who can locate and bring back the legendary pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Carl is skeptical but needs the cash, so to speed up the finding process, employs four more people to help them on the hunt.

Mercifully there's not that much trudging around in the woods before Marshall finds a bag of gold. But the team get greedy and, instead of bringing it back to John, decide to split the loot and keep it for themselves. Which of course triggers the leprechaun to track down the thieves and off them (and their partners if they get in the way), announcing his arrival with a little chuckle.

One of the team, Ruby (Magda Vero), who also took her cut as she needs cash to help her sick partner, goes to her psychic to find out what to do, when she learns that her colleagues are ending up dead. "You've been dabbling in black magic!" the psychic says, and tells her that there's only one way to stop him; the four leaf clover. I kid you not.

I've enjoyed Warren's previous movies this year, admittedly some more than others. But this is not her best work. I can't help feeling it was completed in a rush (a laptop date shows late March so I think she probably finished the film in lockdown); lines are fluffed, actors look at the camera, and the visual FX are below average. As per her other movies, acting quality varies considerably, but at least the cast aren't required to adopt US accents this time round. The leprechaun itself (Bao Tieu) looks quite good, but his Irish accent makes it quite difficult to hear what he's saying, when he's not being drowned out by the soundtrack. I think the big problem with this is the whole concept of the movie; it's just rather daft, although Carl and Mischa watching one of Warren's films on TV, and Carl admitting that he didn't understand it, raised a smile.

Medusa, Queen of the Serpents (UK 2020: Dir Matthew B.C.) Although B.C. is a first time feature director, the person behind this is prolific UK producer/director Scott Jeffrey, who already has three features out this year. Apparently Jeffrey got the idea for the film after ordering a snake head mask by mail order; when it arrived it looked fairly unconvincing on screen so he reshot the scenes in which it featured. Jeffrey also maintains that the script folds in the myth of Medusa, the snake haired gorgon whose gaze turned men (and probably women) to stone. We'll see.

A group of prostitutes lives in a group of caravans somewhere outside Canterbury, run by a madam, Val (Nicola Wright). Addict Carly (Megan Purvis) is driven to the site by her pimp Jimmy (Thomas Beatty) where she reunites with her friend Simone (Sarah T. Cohen). Jimmy takes her to a client, and she's told to ask for Alexis, which turns out to be the client's snake. When they have sex the snake bites her; this soon brings about a bodily change. When she returns to the client's home to find out what happened, she meets Alexis in human form (Jamila Martin-Wingett), who appropriately enough offers her a cocktail; a 'Snake in the Grass.' Alexis tells Carly that she was chosen for a specific purpose. 

Back at the caravan site, a john has beaten another prostitute, Maura (Nicole Nabi) pretty badly. But Carly, who is swiftly changing into something quite powerful, is to be the salvation of the girls as her transformation completes.

MQotS is for the most part a social drama into which themes of horror are gradually introduced. Some time is spent establishing the characters, particularly Carly, whose descent at the dual hands of her drug addiction and her pimp seems unstoppable. But Carly's discovery of her own power, assisted by the enigmatic Alexis, gives way to a rousing final act and a satisfyingly redemptive conclusion. B.C. and Jeffrey have, to use a phrase I tend to employ often, done a lot with not much at all here. Some impressive rural photography and great turns from some of Jeffrey's regulars in unusual (for them) roles - namely Cohen and Wright - make this a slowburn delight with a solid heart. 

Redwood Massacre: Annihilation (UK 2020: Dir David Ryan Keith) This is a sequel to Keith's 2014 slasher movie The Redwood Massacre, which introduced us to a burlap bag headed killer who takes out a bunch of Scottish campers staying in the same area where he carried out a string of murders twenty years previously. RM:A starts much the same way the first one did; with the killer finishing off the last victim of his most recent spree. Pamela, the final girl from the first one (Lisa Cameron, uncredited). 

It's ten years after the events of the first film; Tom Dempsey is the father of Sarah, one of the missing girls, who has written a book about his search for the murderer. He's introduced to a guy called Max (Damien Puckler), who has  an interest in finding the original Redwood killer and has certain Redwood memorabilia as authentication; like a burlap face bag.

Dempsey's other daughter Laura (43 year old pint sized scream queen Danielle Harris playing a character about twenty years younger than her actual age) feels that her father's obsession is ridiculous. But Tom wants to trek out to an abandoned RAF base where he thinks they might find The 'Evil Highlander' from the first movie. Their trip is augmented with brick outhouse Gus (Gary Kaspar) and Jen (Tevy Poe) who has some practical skills; both are Americans and, apart from keeping their countrywoman company there's no reason why they're there at all. Laura thinks Max is shady and she'd be right: in reality Max is a serial killer (whose bonkers credentials are firmly established in a scene where he captures a married couple, kills the wife and has sex with her while her husband is tied up and forced to watch). His plan is to meet and possibly team up with the killer. 

It turns out that the military facility they're looking for is underground, which gives an awful lot of opportunities for wandering around corridors, flashlights cutting through the gloom. It also seems to have shifted continents; the entire second part of the movie loses any Scottish connections, passing itself off as a US based flick; very strange. It also turns out that the killer is actually an experiment in genetics, perpetrated by a scientist working deep in the bunker - American obviously (Stephanie Lynn Styles).

RM: A was the sequel nobody asked for. It's a well photographed, passably acted and painfully drawn out mess (105 minutes? Really?). Harris has obviously been cast based on her horror CV (including both of Rob Zombie's Halloween reboots) irrespective of her suitability for the role, but she at least shows off good fighting skills. Puckler is a serial killer who sort of forgets his motivation, but is no stranger than the whole movie morphing into something entirely different at the half way point. The gore scenes are very much of the practical Hatchet franchise variety; well done but impressive rather than horrifying, with some set pieces just aching to be included in the next 'Fangoria' issue. Sorry but this is terrible stuff, lacking both wit and imagination.

Hosts (UK 2020: Dir Adam Leader, Richard Oakes) Leader and Oakes's debut feature, for its first half anyway, feels like a domestic TV drama, character rather than narrative driven. Jack (Neal Ward) and his partner, teacher Lucy (Samantha Loxley) are deeply in love and looking forward to spending Christmas together. Unfortunately, they've been invited to spend Christmas Eve at their neighbours, the Hendersons. But while they're exchanging presents, strange lights in the garden announce the presence of...something, which takes over the pair, making them the (undisclosed) entity's hosts.

The Hendersons function as you would expect a TV drama family to do; lazy dad Michael (Frank Jakeman) skips out of helping prepare dinner, his wife Cassie (Jennifer K Preston), who delivers a dinner table confession that she is in remission from cancer (just before the real violence kicks off), son Eric (Lee Hunter) and their other kids, young Ben (Buddy Skelton) and older sister Lauren (Nadia Lamin), who is hesitant about accepting her (unseen) boyfriend Matt's marriage proposal.

On the TV news the newsreader talks about the decline of the traditional Christmas and the rise of pagan beliefs, and also about fracking related electrical anomalies in the area. Jack and Lucy arrive, now taken over, but the Hendersons don't seem to notice or care. Michael shows them his workshop, including his late dad's old non-functioning television and, er, a shotgun. Lucy stows a borrowed hammer under the dining table. Cassie's declaration about her all clear seems to trigger a bout of violence in which the pair imprison the family in their own home while carrying out experiments on their human victims.

 

"Demons come as angels of light" is the explanation given when asked who Jack and Lucy have become. Lucy delivers a long speech about them being children thrown out of their father's house who have come home to wreak havoc; it's an explanation that has a Biblical, or a Greek tragedy whiff to it. Are their controllers aliens or something closer to home? We never know, but frequent shots of an open maw in the ground suggest the latter. 

Hosts is a very impressive feature debut, morphing from its strange domestic setup to something infinitely darker at the click of a trigger. It certainly doesn't stint on the gore - one scene is truly shocking both for its ferocity and its suburban backdrop - and the film is all the better for not providing easy explanations. Good work.

The Ringmaster (Denmark 2018: Dir Søren Juul Petersen)

Opening with a warning, parodying Edward Van Sloan's fourth wall breaking caution to the audience at the beginning of Frankenstein (1931), I found myself wondering whether to expect a film as shocking as the audience of nearly one hundred years ago found James Whale's breakthrough horror movie. And presumably that's the effect that Søren Juul Petersen wants to achieve here; nice try.

While the entire population of Denmark gets ready to stay home and tune into to a football match, one where the country have made it to the final, two girls of very different backgrounds staff a petrol station night shift. Agnes (Anne Bergfeld), whose father owns the station, is a diligent student hoping to sneak in the back and work on her college thesis, having been dropped off by doctor boyfriend Benjamin (Kristopher Fabricius), leaving Belinda (Karin Michelsen) to front up the counter, text her disinterested petty criminal boyfriend Kenny and deal with being thrown out of her mother's home for continuing to be support her bloke.

But the quiet shift is about to change for the worse; flash forward scenes showing the women being abused confirm this. A series of shady looking customers come into the station at intervals; they're not bad as such but they're clearly up to something; and Belinda thinks she sees a woman in the back seat of one of the cars entering the station, possibly drugged, her mouth sealed with duct tape.

The growing unease of Agnes and Belinda, clearly vulnerable in their remote outpost, takes up most of the first half of the film; it's handled well and Bergfeld and Michelsen, both making their feature film debuts, are appealing leads, with Agnes as the cool headed psychology student attempting to understand why people like Belinda are attracted to bad boys like Kenny.

The movie's second half sadly reverts to that rather tired old standby, t*rture porn. The setup is familiar; a 'Ringmaster' (sleazily played by Icelandic actor Damon Younger) streams a live show, 'Escapismus', to an internet audience, while a group of elites behind a two way mirror get their kicks viewing the action. After a first act, watching Benjamin get tortured and eventually killed, the Ringmaster turns his attention to Agnes and Belinda; will they have the strength to survive his ministrations?

Based on the novel 'Finale' by Steen Langstrup (and the title under which the film originally played festivals) The Ringmaster has a lot of very well done elements - it's crisply photographed and its fracturing of the narrative is intriguing - but honestly we've seen it all before, and basing a story around innocent women suffering at the hands of men is very much last decade's thing, even if the point is to show how much people can endure pain, and also what we as an audience are prepared to call 'entertainment.'

An opening narration disabuses the audience of any thoughts that Denmark is just a land of fairy tales and happy people in terms of what we're about to see, but to me it merely informed the fact that Danish filmmakers need to find less tiresome subjects for their movies, no matter how well their product may be put together.

The Ringmaster will be available on DVD & Digital Download from 30th November and may hit cinemas when they re-open.

Possessor (Canada/UK 2019: Dir Brandon Cronenberg)

A black woman, Holly (Gabrielle Graham), enters a bar and kills a man, brutally stabbing him multiple times, after which she says, seemingly to no one, "Pull me out" and turns a gun on herself. Unable to fire it, she is taken down by cops who storm the bar. In an austere medical facility a woman wakes up; she is Tasya Vos (Andrea Riseborough), a 'possessor' employed by a company to interface into other people's minds to carry out assassinations on behalf of rich clients who have paid handsomely for the service. But, as would be expected in such a risky undertaking, it is not without emotional and physical consequences; Vos has to be tested to ensure her own memory has remained intact (involving her naming objects from her past).

But the signs of Tasya's mental unravelling are clear; when she meets up with her husband Michael (Rossif Sutherland) and son Ira (Gage Graham-Arbuthnot), from whom she is separated, we see her rehearsing the words of greeting she'll use when she meets them, like trying on real life for size. Michael, not knowing of Vos's vocation, wants her to rejoin the family, but it already looks like it's too late; she's almost a dead woman walking.

Vos's boss Girder (Jennifer Jason-Leigh) presents her with her next project; the company's biggest yet. She is to 'possess' the mind of Colin Tate (Christopher Abbott), an ex drug dealer who has hooked up with money; his girlfriend Ava (Tuppence Middleton) is the daughter of John Parse (Sean Bean), CEO of a very powerful data mining company; John has grudgingly given Tate a shop floor level house surveillance job, which is as sleazy as it sounds. The client commissioning the work is John's stepson, Reid (Christopher Jacot), who wants to take over the company. Vos, as Tate, is to kill John, Ava and then himself, allowing Reid to assume control. But there's a bigger plan; the company Vos and Girder work for then want to 'buy' Reid, giving them access to that company's data resources.

Vos accepts the job. The interface is successful, but either Tate has a stronger mind than her other jobs, or Tasya is losing control. So while she moves to complete her mission a battle of wills commences, which could have fatal consequences for everyone involved.

I wasn't too enamoured with Brandon Cronenberg's feature debut, 2012's Antiviral, and on the surface his follow-up revisits the same near future territory of science deployed cynically into a narrative that fuses dream and waking states. But where that movie somewhat aped Brandon pere's similar obsessions, Possessor finds him truly branching out, making a humane and touching film, full of WTF moments and with an impressive visual palette which belies the movie's modest budget.

The film is elevated to greatness by two actors with a reputation for subsuming themselves into their roles, physically and emotionally. As Girder, Tasya's exhausted but ultimately benevolent boss, Jennifer Jason Leigh gives a subtle and care worn performance as a scientist whose whole life has been devoted to perfecting the process of 'possessing', and losing her moral compass along the way. But the real star here is Andrea Riseborough; as the ethereal Vos it's one of the standout performances of the year, her bland face a tabula rasa for other personalities. It's a difficult role to pull off; for much of the film she's in the body of Colin Tate (also a fine performance from Christopher Abbott) but Vos's non-personality - she's a cipher for the bodies she inhabits - and her desperate need to cling to her own identity are powerfully rendered.

The tussle between Vos's identity and those of the bodies she inhabits is apparent from the get go. When Girder asks her, when 'possessing' Holly, why she chose a knife to kill her victim rather than the pistol provided, Tasya responds that she thought the knife would be more in character. "But whose?" Girder responds. And it's at this point that the viewer realises that it's Vos who is the assassin, not those whose bodies she occupies.

Thematically Possessor is a game of two halves; the first plays almost like an entry in the 'Mission: Impossible' franchise, with Vos being given a role to play, a pre-planned endgame (the pick up zone, if you like) and the elaborate scientific preparations for her interfacing. We learn that the longer Vos occupies the body the greater the negative impact on her own body and mind, and after five days of occupation she will be irrevocably trapped. The second half, with the unravelling of the Tate mission, takes us into more abstract territory, and the identity crisis subplot positively reeks of the writings of Phillip K. Dick and, to an extent, the memory politics of the films of Christopher Nolan. There's also a moment in the film, when Ava's friend Reeta (Tiio Horn) comes onto Tate and Vos realises that they've been sleeping together (a fact that wasn't in the mission plan) which reminded me of Jennifer Garner finding out, as a child in a woman's body, that her adult self wasn't very nice in the 2004 age swap comedy 13 Going on 30.

The 'scuffed future' of the movie may be a familiar one - prosaic locations against shiny almost but not quite familiar technology - and the mission concept a sci fi/action movie staple; but Cronenberg is also happy to step outside the norms of this type of movie. At one point for example Vos, as Tate, travels across town to watch Michael and Ira, desperate to re-connect with them, and there's a realisation that although Vos has inserted herself into her host/victim with a mission to fulfil, these stories are playing out in the same city (Toronto) at the same time; it's quite the moment.

Ultra-violent, mind-messy and unflinchingly sad: in Possessor Brandon Cronenberg has made a sci fi movie for the 21st century that he can be truly proud of. See it.

Possessor is released on digital platforms on 27 November from Signature Entertainment.

Game of Death (France/Canada/USA 2017: Dir Sebastien Landry, Laurence Morais-Lagace)

Not to be confused with the 1978 Bruce Lee movie of the same name, Landry and Morais-Lagace's film joins a select group of flicks including 2000's Battle Royale, The Belko Experiment from 2016 and 2012's The Hunger Games, featuring stories where people are pitted against each other in a fight to the death.

Game of Death serves up a gaggle of young people hanging around the pool, drinking and kvetching with each other, as young people do; they all seem pretty disposable characters; of which more later. When pizza - and drug - delivery guy Tyler (Erniel Baez) turns up, the group turns on, and discover an octagon-shaped video board game from the 1980s called, appropriately, 'Game of Death.' In a sort of ouija board set-up, the players place their fingers on paddles arranged in a circle around the board, with a video screen in the middle giving instructions; handily there is a perfect match of people to paddles, so everyone gets to play. There is also a written guide to playing the game, which of course is only read after they've started. When the machine is turned on, each of the players gets a pinprick in their fingers; the blood from the prick enters into the machine, and the central screen shows the number 24.

Pretty soon the group realise, after reading said instructions, that they've entered into a devilish contract with the game; the number 24 relates to the amount of people they need to kill to stay alive. And to start things off one of their number, Matt (Thomas Vallieres) suffers the indignity of his head blowing up, Scanners style; if the group don't start killing others, this will start happening to them, one by one.

Game of Death is, at face value, a pretty simple 'kill or be killed' movie, but look beneath the surface and there are some interesting things going on. Much like the aforementioned movies, it's a discourse on how quickly humans can tap into their basest survival instincts when faced with extinction (a running gag, a nature programme playing on various TVs showing the fate of the manatee, suggests that what we're seeing is just another species' fight for survival). The humans in this case show different levels of willingness to clock up the death numbers until they realise that the killing of others is the means of their own continued existence; and a scene towards the end of the movie, where some of the group enter a palliative care hospital to increase the kill count, feels like a humane conclusion to their plight, only to watch them execute both staff and patients alike, randomly.

The 'villain' within this bunch of the terminally unlikeable people is undoubtedly Tom (Sam Earle), a preppy looking guy dressed in white, who is the first to 'get' the rules of the game, forcing Tyler to drive his pizza delivery van over a pedestrian, only for Tom to finish off the victim himself. Later Tom and his friend Beth (Victoria Diamond) separate from the two other remaining survivors , Tyler and Ashley (Emelia Hellman), with both couples determined to remain alive at the expense of the others. The violence here is graphic and mostly achieved via practical effects, but the overall tone borders on the comic (one victim, a park ranger, is played for laughs); as the deaths increase, there's a growing feeling of participating in a live action video game; indeed an 8 bit animated interlude underlines both that feeling and indeed the way in which we're supposed to view the movie.

Game of Death is undoubtedly scrappy and tonally uneven, but at 73 minutes it knows not to outstay its welcome, and its audacious style and queasy gag violence makes it a strange viewing experience. I actually really liked it. Not quite sure why it's taken so long to get released though, in that it already played two UK film festivals in the last couple of years.

Game of Death is released on digital download from 26 November.

Blood Harvest (Canada 2020: Dir Thomas Robert Lee)

Blood Harvest sets its stall out by way of a pre credit crawl: in 1873 a group of families branched out from the Church of Ireland and set up shop in an isolated forest area in North America, eschewing all scientific progress. In 1956 an eclipse presaged a pestilence which spread throughout the community, killing both crops and livestock: only one homestead remained immune, owned by Agatha Earnshaw (Catherine A Dark Song Walker). Earnshaw has remained relatively prosperous, much to the annoyance of the local townsfolk, from whom she is several miles removed. And there's a reason for her continued isolation; she has a daughter, Audrey (Jessica Reynolds), who no-one knows about; Audrey is kept out of sight and hidden in a box loaded on to her wagon, when Agatha needs to go to town.

As the film opens, it's 1973 (and it's quite an M. Night Shyamalan touch to see a village dressed in the clothes of two centuries previously, knowing that elsewhere the Vietnam war rages and there's a crook in the White House); Audrey is 17, growing in independence and becoming tired of being kept out of sight, for example when a local man, Lochlan Bell (Tom Carey) comes to the farm to (unsuccessfully) barter for goods. Later, while guiding her cart through town, Agatha is confronted by angry villagers who have gathered for a funeral. Audrey, in her box, witnesses the confrontation and her mother being struck by one man, Colm Dwyer (Jared Abrahamson) who with his wife Bridget (Hannah Emily Anderson) have just buried their baby boy Liam. But worse is to come; when Audrey is briefly let out of the box she is seen by one of the villagers, Bernard Buckley (Don McKellar); although, in return for the donation of produce by Agatha, he promises not to tell, both women realise that the secret about Audrey will soon be public knowledge.

Audrey is incensed that Agatha wants no revenge against those who have slighted her, as she can draw on great powers; for Agatha is a witch, and the reason for her prosperity - as the villagers gradually starve - is entirely down to supernatural reasons. And so Audrey, who also has powers, possibly even stronger than her mother, takes it upon herself to wreak that revenge, slowly contaminating the villagers, turning them against each other, while all the time becoming more confident and subversive.

I'm guessing that the title Blood Harvest was forced on the film to make it more appealing to VODers scrolling through viewing choices; its original titles 'The Ballad of Audrey Earnshaw' and later 'The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw' are perhaps more descriptive of the slowburn lyrical nature of the movie. And Blood Harvest is a considered piece; while it has moments of violence, much is not shown and the audience has to work to join some of the narrative dots. The themes of an isolated religiously ostracised rural community trying to eke out a living surrounded by towering dense forests, and a whiff of witchcraft, both bring to mind Robert Eggers' 2015 film The Witch (although Lee's movie is far more upfront about the uncanny elements).

The sense of a once God fearing community feeling that the same God has abandoned them, and their lack of salvation once Audrey's revenge takes hold, is occasionally very painful to watch, particularly as the 'justice' is unrelenting and sometimes savagely drawn out. Splitting the film into four sections: Incantation; Descent; Fallout; and Spring encases the story in ritual, much as the village farmers have geared their lives, with ever diminishing returns, to the cycle of the seasons. I really liked this movie; full of passionate and impassioned performances, by turn quiet and nuanced and shocking and ugly.

Signature Entertainment presents Blood Harvest on DVD and Digital HD from Monday 16th November