Threshold (USA 2020: Dir Powell Robinson, Patrick Robert Young)

Threshold is a part improvised film, shot on two iPhones with a crew of 3 over a twelve day period. No, come back! Threshold is really good; a funny, occasionally unsettling and deeply affecting movie.

Virginia (Madison West) is in trouble. Her history of drug abuse has made her vulnerable, and following a phone call her brother, primary school teacher Leo (Joey Millin), makes the drive across state to her home. Worried that she is using again, Virginia tells her brother that she’s clean, the result of participating in a programme organised by a cult; part of this ritual has involved a strange body transference which has taken place between her and another male cult member. Virginia quit the group but inexplicably she can now feel everything the other member can feel and vice versa. She begs Leo to drive across country to find the guy so she can get her life back.

Leo remains unconvinced but agrees to help Virginia with the proviso that if it’s all hogwash she’ll check herself into rehab. Threshold follows the pair across America, in Leo’s beaten-up car, on a bizarre journey to rescue his sister’s soul.

A few strange scenes aside, Threshold is essentially a 75 minute sibling road trip. West and Millin do a superb job of convincing the audience that they are related, and the movie’s success lies in the re-connection that occurs onscreen between the formerly estranged pair. You really enjoy being in their company, which helps make the weirder bits of the movie seem a lot more plausible; it helps that both are relatively unknown actors. 

The film is not without issues; scenes shot at a layover in an Air BnB with a Ouija board and an unwelcome guest feel intrusive and irrelevant, but that’s largely because we’re having so much fun watching Virginia and Leo riff off each other than anything else feels like interference. And if you don't dig the chemistry between West and Millin there's not much here for you; but I defy you to fall into that category.

Fear not, fright fans, oddness arrives by the end of the movie, and is all the more effective because it’s applied sparingly. Threshold is a winning film that I’ve seen twice now, and could happily sit through twice more. 

Threshold debuts on the Arrow channel from 3 May.

A version of this review was originally published on www.bloody-flicks.co.uk 

Forget Everything and Run (USA 2021: Dir Geoff Reisner, Jason Tobias)

Although Reisner and Tobias's debut feature sets its stall out as a post apocalypse zombie thriller, for much of its running time Forget Everything And Run (aka F.E.A.R.) is basically a contemporary (horse free) western with a family drama at its heart.

In true B movie style (ie using text crawl to describe events there isn’t the budget to depict) a viral sickness has spread across the country, forcing the military to build a wall to cut off the infected. Many families have fled to the snowy north to safety, the cold having a detrimental effect on the largely absent zombies, and the film focuses on one family, the Allisters, as they struggle to stay alive. 

The family are mum and dad, Josephine and Ethan (Marci Miller and co-director Tobias) and their kids Josh and his older sister Mia (Danny Ruiz and Cece Kelly). A series of flashbacks, from Josephine and Ethan meeting, to scenes depicting the family in happier, pre-pandemic times, contrast with the tired figures of mum and dad trying to protect the children; Mia has become infected and lies upstairs on a makeshift life support system in the Allisters’ squalid hideout, but the parents hope to find a cure.

The fragile life of survival carved out by the family comes under threat when a group of weaponed up looters attack them, and a tense stand off develops between the two parties. A captured military guy discloses that a corrective serum exists and that the infection is man-made; the quest is on to recover the drug and for the Allisters to stay alive.

While there are some intense performances on display which elevate the film above its flat made for TV look (like something the Syfy channel might serve up), particularly Ruiz as frightened son Josh and Susan Moore Harmon as the cantankerous looter Desiree, this is otherwise thin stuff that promises more than it offers; “They won’t stay dead” suggests the poster tagline, but the undead really only crop up briefly at the beginning and end of the movie. Otherwise this is best seen as an intense human drama, and the crises they face (a wall and a pandemic) suggest that some political points are being offered up as well, if not particularly subtly.

Signature Entertainment releases Forget Everything And Run on Digital Platforms from 26th April

NEW WAVE OF THE BRITISH FANTASTIC FILM 2021 #2: Reviews of A Little More Flesh II (UK 2021), The Burning Baby (UK 2020), Archive (UK 2020), The Owners (UK 2020), The Curse of Hobbes House (UK 2020) and Cupid (UK 2020)

A Little More Flesh II (UK 2020: Dir Sam Ashurst) Ashurst's last movie, the first A Little More Flesh, comprised a sleazy director's commentary for a fictitious film, 'God's Lonely Woman'. The star of that film (played by Elf Lyons) and co-star are subjected to a series of indignities, leading to a bloody and ignominious end for the man behind the camera.

A Little More Flesh II opens with Ashurst asking Lyons if she'd like to work with him again. "Just...fuck off," she responds. In the second instalment of this rather unusual and at times disturbing franchise Ashurst himself becomes the director both behind and in front of the lens, and he has a new production concept, borne out of pandemic restrictions. He has asked two people, the actor Harley (Harley Dee) and a poet Sean (Sean Mahoney), to separately record ten minutes of improvised footage at home every week and provide a voice over, which he will edit into a feature. Both participants are initially unsure but go along with it for the experience.

Harley's footage, shown to us alongside Sean's, shows her applying makeup, lying in the bath and later praticising yoga on the rooftop of her apartment. Sam confides to Sean that he thinks Harley's videos are thinly disguised come ons, which Sean clearly thinks are the musings of a fantasist; he eventually quits the project because of this. Harley is predictably shocked when Sam makes the same suggestion to her, but her protestations are cut short, as he invokes the small print in her contract. With Sean departed, Sam changes the rules of the game and begins to exploit Harley, filming her in a number of short movies for various unseen clients, and his demands become more and more disturbing.

A Little More Flesh II, its title alone an absurd take on exploitation movies, asks a number of questions of its viewing audience: why are you watching?; why are you continuing to watch when you know that the director is exploiting his cast?; are you any better than the clients paying to watch the acts that Harley is put through (the more excessive pixellated out, possibly unless we pay towards an 'onlyfans' account)? Ashurst placing himself in the centre of this, rather than deflecting the tawdriness onto a third person director character as he did in the first film, is a brave move, and he has no problems convincing us just what an odious person his alter ego is; that Dee and Mahoney co-wrote is rather a relief, and all three should be congratulated for turning a very simple - and cheap - set up into something truly threatening.

A Little More Flesh II is not yet available to stream or buy. Meanwhile in the last part of the film the introduction of Laren Ashley Carter (from Jugface (2013) and 2019's Darlin') signposts her involvement in 'ALMF III' - well good luck to her with that.

The Burning Baby (UK 2020: Dir Paul Kindersley) Paul Kindersley's third feature, which may or may not form a cinematic triptych with his previous films Das Spiel der Hoffnung (2016) and The Image (2018), is a sumptuous, surreal fairytale redolent of arthouse productions of the 1980s.

The plot is slender; this is all about the visuals and themes. Somwhere in a magic-realist land (The Burning Baby was filmed on location on the Scottish island of Eilean Shona, where JM Barrie wrote much of 'Peter Pan') an abusive mother (Jenny Runacre) keeps her adult son as a baby (Nick Patrick), aided by her two sadistic 'ugly sister' siblings (Kindersley and performance artist/dancer Kitty Ray Harper Fedorec). The close-knit family's intense world is disrupted when a quintet of free-living woods-folk are invited into their home for baby’s 'second' birthday. The two worlds clash with dramatic results when an alluring stranger upsets the group dynamics, exposing their difficulties in communicating verbally and emotionally, leading to murder and the continuation of a cycle of abuse.

The Burning Baby is filmed almost as a series of tableaux, and much of the dialogue feels improvised. The atmosphere is increasingly intense as the family dynamic is tested by the interference of the seemingly more worldy wise wood folk (apparently the cast and crew lived and worked together for the duration of the shoot), one of whom (Ellie Pole) 'successfully' courts and marries baby, triggering the (Greek) tregedic events that follow. All this would be too strange if not for the superb cinematography of Oscar Oldershaw, who manages to humanise the grotesque and lyrically capture the remote beauty of the Scottish locations. As the production notes suggest, the film 'is a surreal fantasy that investigates our relationship to landscape, identity, family, sexuality and death.' It's an impressive, often jarring work that recalls Derek Jarman as much as Jane Arden. Strange and beautiful, I really liked it. 

The Burning Baby currently remains unreleased. It is hoped to arrange a big screen premiere later in 2021.

Archive (UK 2020: Dir Gavin Rothery) In the mid 21st Century, George Almore (Theo James) is a robotics engineer who has invented, among other things, a self driving car. He's one of those hi tech guys who revels in nostalgia; he has a Bang and Olufsen music centre, on which he listens to old records, and a car from around 80 years previously is parked outside. 

Home is a former industrial facility deep in the snowy forests of Japan, where the engineer works on a project to develop increasingly sophisticated and sentient AI. He's in regular contact with his wife Jules (Stacy Martin) via video link; the only odd thing about this is that she died several years previously. In Archive's world, technology allows the dead to live on through up to 200 hours of analogue communication with the deceased, to pass on messages, tie up loose ends etc (an idea given a more supernatural spin in Hayden J. Weal's 2020 movie Dead). 

George's two robots, versions 1 and 2 of the same model, have attained increasing 'human years' intellectual activity. J2 in particular can reason, has dreams and fusses after George, a sort of father figure to them (reminiscent of Bruce Dern looking after the droids in 1972's Silent Rinning).  His experiments are conducted under the watchful eye of his supervisor, Simone (Rhona Mhitra). But George has a secret from the rest of the world; he's hacked in to the secure feed from his dead wife and re-routed it to inhabit a third robot, his most sophisticated model yet, with both the body and mind of Jules.

Archive successfully melds an austere but impressive mis en scene with a very human take on the Frankenstein story; Jules's death is so tragic and unexpected that he is unable to move on, and the development of his robots creates a family around him that are all connected with his late wife. This may be Rothery's first feature - he was creative consultant on Duncan Jones's Moon (2009) - but he gets the balance of style and substance just right. I'm guessing he also saw a few episodes of HBO's Westworld for tips too, and the snowy backdrop (with Hungary standing in for Japan) is very effective.

If the final scenes of the film gave us a surprise ending we maybe didn't need, I'm prepared to overlook that. Archive is controlled, haunting, sad and superbly rendered, with a cool as ice score by Academy Award-winning composer Steven Price. Strongly recommended.

The Owners (UK 2020: Dir Julius Berg) Based on the 2011 French graphic novel 'Une Nuit de Pleine Lune', which translates as 'Night of the Full Moon' (created by legendary comic artist Hermann Huppen and writer Yves H), Berg's feature debut has three local lads breaking into the house of a country doctor. The trio, Terry (Andrew Ellis), ringleader Gaz (Jake Curran) and Nathan (Ian Kenny), have been tipped off by Terry's mum (who cleans at the doctor's house) that there's a safe in the basement. With Terry's on off girlfriend Mary (Maisie Williams) also involved, against her better judgement, the break in reveals little of value and a safe which can't be unlocked. So the group decide to wait for the doctor and his wife to return. Once arrived Richard (Sylvester McCoy) and Ellen Huggins (Rita Tushingham) are tied up and tortured to reveal the whereabouts of their valuables. But when a tussle between the group gets out of hand, with Terry stabbed by Gaz, the young criminals are about to have the tables turned on them.

While home invasion movies are a bit de rigeur these days (Don't Breathe from 2016 and 2018's Breaking In, for example), The Owners provides a neat spin on the set up by having two older middle class characters facing off against the working class burglars; I'm sure I'm not spoiling anything if I mention that McCoy and Tushigham - both excellent, by the way - have more than a few tricks up their sleeve, from the psychological manipulation of the young people to the house modifications that trap their victims. The gore is brief but occasionally shocking; most of the violence here is of the mental variety. The fact that a group of local kids would try to rob someone in their village without being recognised (and despite the stockings over their faces they fail) underlines the stupidity of their plan, and it's fun watching the oldies get the upper hand again and again.

The Curse of Hobbes House (UK 2020: Dir Juliane Block) Block's sixth feature kicks off with a bit of made up history (delivered in portentous narrative tones) about the tyrant king Dormant who kills the owner of a house - called Hobbes - and takes over occupancy, only to have the undead hordes rise against him courtesy of Hobbes's witchcraft. We're then quickly plunged into the modern world, and meet Dormant's descendants.

Specifically we're introduced to Jane Dormant (Mhairi Calvey), who's a bit down on her luck, reduced to sleeping on her clapped out car and being fired from her bar job. So when she gets a call telling her that her Aunt Alexandra (Emma Spurgin Hussey) has died, she feels she has nothing to lose when summoned to a will reading at Hobbes House. 

Once there, she meets Syrian groundskeeper Naser (Waleed Elgadi) who immediately arouses suspicion because a) he's the only one who was around when Alexandra died (by shooting herself) and b) he was recently added to Auntie's will as a beneficiary. Also at the reading is Jane's half sister, social media queen Jennifer (Makenna Guyler) and her awful Tory (and therefore bound to be trouble) boyfriend Nigel Thatcher (Kevin Leslie).

Will executor Euridyce Saul (Jo Price) is keen to kick things off, but the reading is interrupted by a flare up between the two half sisters. Before you know it Saul is dead (skewered on a pair of antlers following an accidental fall), but fear not because she's soon back, angry as hell with glowing blue eyes, joining the legions of the undead as they collectively sense a challenge to the house of Hobbes and must kill all the interlopers.

While The Curse of Hobbes House looks very good, is well cast and benefits from some very good perfromances, it's probably best seen as some allegory around class and race (although the handling of the Naser character, who surprise surprise suffers at the hands of Nigel, is rather clumsy) rather than a straightforward horror film, because believe me in this it doesn't succeed. There's a slight fairy tale aspect to the story (there's a big moral payoff at the end) which would probably make it more suitable for a YA audience. Best line: "There was something uncanny about her" says Jane at one point, observing the recently re-animated will executor; oh and the movie scores extra points where the half sisters escape on a tandem, laughing. Bizarre and silly.

Cupid (UK 2020: Dir Scott Jeffrey) The creative triumvirate (and yes I know that two of them aren't men) of Scott Jeffrey, Rebecca Matthews/Hirani and Louisa Warren have been responsible for some rather bold UK filmmaking projects over the past few years. Many of their movies revolve around curses or an ancient revenge, and Cupid is no exception.

Technically this movie was made in 2020 (and released in the USA that year) but has only had a physical UK release this year. Like The Curse of Hobbes House this starts with a bit of history, but unlike that film this tells the story of Cupid, son of Venus and Mars, and his relationship with Psyche. But the spin on the story is that there was no happy ending, Cupid died, killed by a poison arrow primed by mum, descended to hell thereafter to be summoned by those affected by abuses of love.

With that out of the way, we're in modern day UK leading up to Valentine's Day; well, a version of the UK full of people with fake American accents (about 70% of which are successful, but I still don't know why filmmakers do this). We get an immediate taste of how Cupid, now a kind of winged demon, doles out his punishment. A distressed woman confesses to her father that she summoned Cupid because of the way he treated her mother. The creature arrives, plucks out dad's heart and impales his daughter on an arrow.

At the local high school, it's a hotbed of jealousy and rivalry, principally between two students; goth lite Faye (Georgina Jane) and uber bitch Elise (the always dependable Sarah T. Cohen here at her Mean Girls best). Mr Jones (Michael Owusu) is the lucky teacher who gets to deal with the girls; unfortunately Faye has a crush on him. Elise exploits this, nicking Mr J's phone and sending fake texts to Faye inviting her to meet him and asking for some suggestive photos, a request which she obliges.

Thinking that Mr Jones is sweet on her, a fake meet up is organised, and when Faye turns up to see him after school, kissing him in the mistaken belief that he's been sending the messages, both realise what has happened; and Elise is there to film the whole thing and show it to the class. Faye, incensed, goes home and opens her book of spells (seems she has some Wiccan in her) at the page that contains the summoning spell for Cupid. Asked what she wants Cupid to do about the school and anyone in it, she replies "I want it destroyed."

Sadly the budget doesn't allow for the scenes of catastrophe that the above setup suggests, and the mayhem is restricted to a few stray arrows in the face and infected limbs as a result of the poison. The 'Cupid' creature is actually quite effective with his emaciated look and empty eye sockets, and the shots of him descending from the heavens rather eerie. Look, this won't be to everyone's tastes, but I like what Jeffrey does with the subject matter, and he gets some good performances from his cast, especially Cohen, who improves with each role.

I Blame Society (USA 2020: Dir Gillian Wallace Horvat)

"I guess the best way to make life like a movie is to film it." So states Gillian Wallace Horvat, playing a version of herself in this arch life-imitates-art-imitates-life feature debut mockumentary. 'Gillian' (Horvat) is a struggling filmmaker, finding out the hard way that the movie business is still largely a man's world; an extended scene featuring her in the office of two douchebag producers who want to make films about womens' experiences but have already written the scripts clearly demonstrates what she's up against.

And then men closer to her in life aren't any great shakes either: her obnoxious film editor boyfriend Keith (Keith Poulson) who is, shall we say, less than supportive of her ambitions and calls her "my little psychopath"; and her slightly better but still wishy washy friend Chase (Chase Williamson) whose girlfriend she thinks is so obnoxious that she'd like to kill her, a confession that causes a rift between the two of them.

And it's this thought that crystallises into the revival of a planned but unfulfilled project that she feels can be realised without male interference. Called the 'I, Murderer' project, it casts Gillian in the central role of initially idealised, later actual killer and documenter, and her first victim is Chase, although his death is much less pre-meditated than later victims. Gillian warms to her subject matter, staging deaths and writing often hilarious 'goodbye' notes in the style she thinks her victims would use. As the police start to see a connection between the deaths, although mistakenly ascribing them to a male killer, Gillian finds her personal and stylistic feet. "What are you?" she is asked. "I'm a strong female lead," she replies.

The layers which operate here are a dizzying mesh of truth and fiction. Horvat, whose background is in oftern idiosyncratic short films, has a career which echoes Gillian's, and it's pretty clear that the director's experiences in a male dominated industry have driven her story. I Blame Society is as darkly funny as you like (starting with its very knowing title), and while on occasion scenes layer meta-ness and cineaste tendencies which almost threaten to strangle the narrative (a description of Gillian as like a "weird Frances Ha" is pretty spot on), the second half is a wild and sometimes pretty shocking ride.

This year's rather more lavish Promising Young Woman offers a sort of higher class counterpoint to this movie; Gillian is the more awkward younger sister of that movie's Cassandra character and, like Cassandra, uses sex to achieve her aims, but very much on her terms. But Horvat's film is a more raw, urgent and up close and personal experience, and she pulls off the difficult act of having a pretty unlikeable central character who you end up rooting for all the way.

I Blame Society will be released by Blue Finch Film Releasing on Digital Download from 19 April.

For the Sake of Vicious (Canada 2020: Dir Gabriel Carrer, Reese Eveneshen)

When nurse Romina (an excellent visceral performance from Lora Burke) returns home, with nothing on her mind but preparing to celebrate Halloween with her young son, she doesn't bank on finding a just breathing body in the living room. Said body is, she works out, her landlord Alan (Colin Paradine); also in the house is the guy who laid him out, Chris (Nick Smyth). He wants Alan kept alive so he can extract a confession from him about raping Chris's daughter; and Romina's connection to this is that she was the nurse on duty when his daughter was brought into hospital.

From its early scenes, with Alan tied up in a chair, Chris trying to force the truth (or his version of the truth) out of him and Romina stuck in the middle, things slowly escalate when Alan manages to phone for help. He's clearly a shady landlord, whatever else he may or may not have done, for the assistance summoned is very much of the hired thug variety (all wearing fright masks, because it's Halloween) and also includes a biker gang called, appropriately enough, 'The Skull Splitters.'

But, and somewhat confusingly, the assembled assistants he summons have their own beef with Alan, and pretty soon the whole house is turned into a makshift battleground, with kitchen and bathroom equipment (including shower curtain and cistern lid) being utilised for weapons, in a free for all fight to the death.

From its faux Grindhouse title onwards, For the Sake of Vicious seems little more than a well directed exercise in choreographed and increasingly over the top violence, soundtracked by a very Carpenter/Howarth-esque synth score by Carrer under the 'Foxgrndr' monicker. Narratively there's little else going on other than the description above (apart from a couple of flashback scenes), which really only serves to get a bunch of people into one (domestic) location for an extended pitched battle. There's more than a streak of dark humour to this, of course; the deployment of any and every household item, from kitchenware to flat screen TV to the aforementioned WC components (there are guns available but they're not always the weapon of choice) acquires a kind of slapstick intensity, and there's a bizarre moment of kitchen carnage camaraderie when Romina, using a half bottle of vodka to disinfect one of her wounds, takes a swig and then offers it to Alan.

For the Sake of Vicious is definitely a movie to see with a crowd; it's the kind of Festival pleaser that doesn't ask that much of its audience but ramps up the pace satisfyingly and delivers enough gruesome set pieces - and an up for it final girl (or woman in this case) - to tick all the right boxes.

For the Sake of Vicious will be released on DVD and digital platforms from 19 April.

Portal aka Doors (USA 2021: Dir Saman Kesh, Jeff Desom and Dugan O'Neal)

The genesis of this film came from a 2019 movie called Portals, created by Chris White, which told the story of the arrival of alien entities on earth via four separate but interconnected stories, all by different directors. That movie adopted a fairly straightforward sci fi approach and, apparently, wasn't a great success.

So White started again, with the same basic format and a different set of directors, and two years later came up with Doors, a version of the same story, but with a rather different approach. For its UK release Doors has been retitled Portal (singular not plural this time). OK, so now we're all caught up.

In the three stories comprising the movie the first, 'Day 01 Lockdown', deals, as its title would suggest, with the arrival of strange alien monoliths all over the world. The 'lockdown' of the title also focuses on a group of schoolkids in detention, who are literally locked in when their supervising teacher goes to check what's happening and doesn't return. One of the kids, the trans student Ash (Kathy Khanh), starts to receive messages from a shimmering portal that has appeared in the corridor outside their classroom (a subtle but ingenious effect achieved by close up photography of magnet agitated iron filings). The kids tune into a radio broadcast that fleshes out what's going on; the portals -  or 'doors'  - have appeared worldwide and are gradually absorbing the planet's citizens.

The second story, 'Knockers,' is set 15 days after the alien arrival; the term refers to groups of people who volunteer to step through the doors to investigate what's on the other side. Three intrepid scientists, Becky (Lina Esco), Vince (Josh Peck) and Pat (director O'Neal), are preparing to venture into a portal that sits over a house; once in, they have twelve minutes to explore and leave, otherwise they risk developing permanent 'door psychosis'. But their visit demonstrates that not only is the alien being sentient, it has the power to control memory too.

The final story is 'Lamaj'. Set 101 days into alien occupation, Jamal (Kyp Malone), a man living alone in the forest, has found a door and has conducted successful experiments to communicate with it via a rickety electronic setup. He invites his friend Kathy (Kristina Lear) over to share the experience but she brings her hapless friend Leo (Bira Vanara), who tips off the authorities, with tragic consequences.

Apart from the framing theme, each of the stories are very different in tone, but share a more languid, blissed out feel than the previous movie (I can't help thinking that Denis Villenneuve's 2016 alien encounter movie Arrival may have been an influence). The segments are interspersed with shots of abandoned cities, and a talk radio DJ, Martin Midnight (David Hemphill), fills in the blanks narratively.

Apart from a rather brash end segment, which I could have done without (and the rather odd interstitials whose function seems to be the translation of the alien voices for the audience), I really liked this somewhat abstract approach to the alien invasion theme, and the three stories show, subtly, the development of earth's occupation. Granted there probably wasn't a lot of budget on the table, but here the truism that 'necessity is the mother of invention' is very much in evidence. Pretty good.

Signature Entertainment releases Portal on Digital Platforms and DVD from 19th April.

Supermarket Sweep #21: Reviews of Abigail Haunting (USA 2020), The Last House (USA 2019), Skin Collector (USA 2012), Crone Wood (Ireland 2016), The Odds (USA 2018) and You're Not Alone (USA 2020)

So as the 'Sweep' moves into its 21st edition, there are still plenty of rich pickings available on the supermarket shelves if your tastes run to the dark and dangerous, although one chain in particular seems to be flying the flag for horror these days (I can't name it for reasons of commercial competition, but let's just describe it as an anagram of  'daAs.' Anyway, here are six more offerings from the company who also bring you baked beans and tea bags:

Abigail Haunting (USA 2020: Dir Kelly Schwarze) Young Katie (Chelsea Jurkiewicz) rolls out of Reno with a fitstful of cash courtesy of a robbery and a murder rap thanks to the bullet she's just fired into the body of her abusive ex-boyfriend.

Seeking to hide out, she hot foots it to her foster mum's trailer house on the edge of what looks like the Nevada desert. But Marge (Brenda Daly) has gone downhill since Katie last saw her, and sits in a chair all day watching TV. Stashing both the gun and loot safely away, Katie quickly reconnects with former boyfriend, now single dad Brian (Austin Callazo) and his son Gavin (Zander Garcia). 

Brian looks like he's happy to pick up where things left off, but Katie is understandably rather jumpy. She's jumpier still when strange things start happening around the trailer, including someone mussing with her stuff and, more worryingly, Marge getting attacked, strangled by an unseen pair of hands. Marge's kindly neighbour Walter (Michael Monteiro) offers Katie a warning: "nothing good ever came out of this place," he counsels, and when Katie finds a skull in the garage, and witnesses the ghost of a tortured woman, she begins to see his point.

Abigail Haunting has a slight Stir of Echoes (1999) feel, with blue collar communities encountering the supernatural. Bit Schwarze's movie never seems to decide whether it wants to be down at heel urban drama or fright fest, and therefore fails to fully deliver on either side. It certainly has a lot of dowdy atmosphere, and Jurkiewicz is effective as the troubled Katie, but the final reel rush to explain everything away, and the explanation itself, feels overfamiliar and drab. The movie is best when it's subtle and unsettling, which it achieves excellently in its early stages. 

The Last House aka Cry for the Bad Man USA 2019: Dir Sam Farmer) More small town entertainment, with Camille Keaton (who had recently cameoed the same year in one of the many sequels to the 1978 original, I Spit on Your Grave: Deja Vu) starring as Marsha Kane. 

Seems everyone wants the widow Kane to take some money and leave the family home following her husband's death; even the local police are in with old man MacMohan, whose sons are exerting pressure for Marsha to move out, including pinning a contract to the front porch with a knife. But the lady's not for moving, much to the chagrin of her daughter Helen (Karen Konzen). "This is my house," she says, giving her daughter a quick one across the chops, and her intransigence gives an indication of what's to come: well that and the endless shots of Ms Keaton tooling up for the night ahead.

There really isn't very much to this beyond the setup described. Marsha hunkers down with an arsenal at her disposal, and the bad guys steal into the house to get what they think is theirs. One guy gets his entire hand blown off, shouts a bit then continues like nothing's happened. There's some tension in the stand off (well sit down off actually) between Marsha and the brothers, and it's tightly shot, effectively covering up for the lack of budget. At a slim one hour and fourteen minutes it knows exactly how to stay its welcome, but unless you're a Camille Keaton completist I can't really recommend this.

Skin Collector aka Shiver (USA 2012: Dir Julian Richards) Quite why this 2012 movie is being passed off as a new release I'm not sure, but Julian Richards' films are generally worth seeing (I really liked his last feature, 2018's Reborn), even if his output can be rather uneven.

A killer is stalking Portland, Oregon, who calls himself 'the Griffin' and whose MO includes taking parts of women's bodies and having sex with them post mortem. Detectives Delgado and Burdine (Casper van Dien and Rae Dawn Chong respectively) are tasked with catching him. Quite slowly as it happens.

Into the story steps Wendy Allen (Danielle Harris, who we last saw looking rather out of place in last year's Redwood Massacre: Annihilation). Wendy's having trouble asking her boss for a raise, but that's about to be the least of her problems, as 'the Griffin' is about to make her his next victim. Plucky Wendy stabs him in the leg and makes her escape, but the killer develops a fascination with the one that got away and begins his creepy stalking, and entrapping, of his new quarry, leading to a succession of scenes where's she's caught, escapes and gets caught again.

Skin Collector is, sadly, truly abyssmal. At nearly ten years old, I'm hopeful that mysoginistic rubbish like this would not get green lit these days. It doesn't help that the killer is a man of manners who appreciates women (he just has a funny way of showing it), which is supposed to make him extra creepy but instead just becomes cartoonish; a redemptive ending doesn't cancel out the poor taste of including a serial shooting scene in an enclosed space either. Apart from the subject matter, there's just no style, tension or characterisation to fall back on (the killer driving past the school where he was once bullied and having flashbacks is the nearest we come to gaining any insight into his psychosis - yes it's that bad). It's just empty, unpalatable nonsense.

Crone Wood (Ireland 2016: Dir Mark Sheridan) First time feature director Sheridan is a brave chap to make their debut a 'found footage' movie. Was that still a thing even four years ago? Well that's what we have here, anyways. Danny (Ed Murphy) and Hailey (Elva Trill) are out on a first date and getting on like a house on fire. They don't want it to end, and the fun never stops as the couple use Danny's video camera to film each other. 

Hailey makes the rather rash suggestion that they should go camping - in November - prompting a trip to a shop for useful things like, you know, a tent. Hailey, clearly full of good ideas,  thinks that travelling to out of the way Crone Wood, a place associated with a coven of witches, would be a good idea. The place has since been renamed but for locals it's still a spooky area. Danny's all for sticking to the paths, but Hailey wants to go rogue. She's from round these parts apparently so knows what she's doing. 

On the first night their bickering and occasional lovemaking is interrupted by a creepy looking guy with a mask. Giving chase, they lose him, but also mislay their tent. Seeking help at a nearby house, occupied by a group of women, they're welcomed in until help arrives. But strangely Hailey seems to know them. 

Crone Wood is a movie of two halves; the first being the standard lost in the woods story, with Danny and Hailey taking it in turns to assume the lead, but both getting nowhere. The second half moves into folk horror territory and it's here that the FF format starts to strain at the edges. There's a point beyond which the utilisation of a stand alone camera - apart from filming events for the audience - seems totally pointless. It's a different kind of fourth wall which, once broken, ruins the illusion.

Sheridan's movie is ambitious for the resources on hand but doesn't really break new ground, and at nearly an hour and half is simply too drawn out to sustain any tension. Not awful then, but a little unnecessary, and it's been done better before by more skilled directors.

The Odds (USA 2018: Dir Bob Giordano) A 2018 movie only now getting a UK DVD release, the premise of The Odds is pretty simple: at twenty undisclosed locations around the world, a game is being played simultaneously, involving six rounds of personal endurance. The winner will be the last person standing who doesn't either quit or die; the prize money of one million dollars is the lure, and various unseen people bet on the outcome.

The unnamed 'Player' in the room (Abbi Butler) has literally nowhere else to go. Her daughter has been taken away from her, apparently for being an unfit mother, and she wants the prize money to make things right between the two of them. The only other person in the sealed room is the 'Game Master' (James J. Fuertes) whose role is to mentor the Player and administer the punishments required in each round (from putting one foot in a box full of rats to nailing screws to the other one); he's done this fourteen times before and has, we assume, never been successful at producing a winner. 

The first test is for the Player to hold her hand over a lighted candle until three players drop out. The rounds progress in degress of cruelty but the woman remains resolute. A kind of weird master/servant relationship develops between the two of them; the Player has to administer some of the tortures to herself, and the Games Master acts as a kind of trainer/suitor. But gradually the Player realises that things may not be as they seem; and then it's time for Russian Roulette.

Anyone expecting classic over the top tort*re p*orn from my description will be disappointed; I was, but not for that reason, as it's a sub genre that does nothing for me. The Odds has some wider pronouncements to make about the relationship between men and women and human endurance, with the two main characters signifying an eternal struggle. And while the developing caustic relationship between the Player and the Games Master is well done for much of the film, the problem is that the movie runs out of steam with an extra half an hour to go and becomes, literally, a battle of the sexes.

Butler's turn as the slightly older, care worn but defiant heroine of the piece recalls Betty Gilpin's bravura performance in 2020's The Hunt, but where that film was rather sly and subversive about its politics, this movie remains po faced throughout, and therefore very one dimensional. To paraphrase slightly, The Odds was not in my favour.

You're Not Alone (USA 2020: Dir Eduardo Rodriguez) 

When Emma (Katia Winter) is bequeathed her former martial home following the death of estranged husband Patrick, she also gets custody of daughter Isla (Leya Catlett), who's previously been living with her grandmother. Emma has clearly seen some tough times and has a suicide attempt under her belt (grandma calls her an 'unfit mother' and she was asked not to attend Patrick's funeral) but she has support from gothy sister Ashley (Emmy James) and old flame local guy Mark (Zach Avery). But strange things begin to happen in the house: Isla sees someone in the house's upstairs window; a photo of Patrick flies off the wall; and Emma's online therapy session gets cutoff mid way through.

Emma installs CCTV for protection, and attempts to re-bond with her daughter despite her continuing fragile mental health. But when people start disappearing, starting with Ashley and nosy neighbour Mrs Willis (Lane Bradbury), she becomes convinced that there is something in the house.

Filmed in 2016 under the title of 'Unwanted' (ahem) but shelved for the next four years, watching You're Not Alone it's not difficult to see why. To be honest it's no worse than a hundred other 'woman-on-the-verge-of-a-nervous-breakdown' movies where the explanation for events is more prosaic than supernatural, but my goodness rarely have I seen a film that wants to have its cake and eat it so much in the audience hoodwinking stakes. First we're given to believe that the incidents in the house are of a ghostly nature (some of them happen without any possible human agency; what else are we expected to believe?) then it looks like one of the distinctly human characters is in the frame, then they get despatched, the real killer being someone we've barely seen! Bodies go undiscovered, almost forgotten about, and Emma's last reel final girl performance is stretched to incredulity by the amount of times she is stabbed, but still manages to get on her feet. "Nightmarish" states the quote on the cover art; yes, but for all the wrong reasons.