Dashcam (UK 2022: Dir Rob Savage) NEW WAVE OF THE BRITISH FANTASTIC FILM 2022

I'm assuming that, by swiftly relocating the action of his new movie from the USA to England, this isn't a coincidence but rather Rob Savage cheekily responding to those who wondered how the director might fare on the other side of the pond, courtesy of his lucrative three picture deal with US company Blumhouse.

Playing herself (albeit a more amped up version), Annie Hardy is a potty mouthed social media presence who runs a show called 'Bandcar', in which she cruises America's highways and byways in her vehicle while freestyling her decidedly unliberal views, and with her fans providing constant on screen responses. But with lockdown depriving her of much of the street based inspiration she needs for her rhymes, Hardy decides to relocate to the UK and stay with her ex show mate Stretch, presumably hoping that this country's attitudes to dealing with the pandemic may chime with her own mask swerving antivax views.

However it's not long before Stretch and his unforgiving girlfriend Gemma (Jemma Moore from Host) find Annie a little too much for them and ask her to leave. Our social media star decides to boost Stretch's car and resume operations, but before long the movie's narrative turning point arrives: entering a seemingly empty diner, she encounters an employee who asks, and then heavily bribes Annie to give a lift to Angela, an older woman who is apparently unwell. Pocketing a wad of notes for her trouble, Annie soon finds that Angela is both incontinent and, well, demonic. And so begins a long night of our obnoxious anti heroine protecting herself while the world turns to shit.

Watching Dashcam one longs for the more sober camerawork of his last movie. This is a full on first person shot film, stylistically in keeping with JJ Abrams' 2008 flick Cloverfield (but without the monster, well without such a big monster) and the glitch aesthetics of the 'V/H/S' movies, with the big set pieces always just out of shot. As with all such films, there's the constant question about why people are continuing to film in the face of mortal danger (answer: they have to or we don't get a movie); in Dashcam mortal danger seems to crop up almost every five minutes courtesy of yet another crashed car or blurred attacking entity.

Savage's choice of a lead is an interesting one. In real life Hardy, who in the movie is a MAGA hat wearing Libtard caller outer, is the in your face guitarist and singer in the two piece band 'Giant Drag', whose gobby stage presence isn't a million miles away from the motor mouther social media character who swears and staggers her way through Dashcam. Hardy is difficult to take seriously and a good indicator of how Savage would like audiences to view his movie (let us not forget that the genesis of Host was an online prank perpetrated by the director). It's devoid of plot and character development, but gets by on shaggy dog violent and gross out set pieces and a constant sense of rather inarticulate forward motion. It's not a movie one would rush to see more than once (even at 68 minutes plus some spoofy credits) and it's hardly breaking new ground. But Savage remains a director to watch.

NEW WAVE OF THE BRITISH FANTASTIC FILM 2021 #11: Reviews of Alien: Battlefield Earth (UK 2021), The Midwife (UK 2021), The Seed (UK 2021), The Mutation (UK 2021), The Haunting of Hythe House (UK 2021) and The Devil Came Home (UK 2021)

Alien: Battlefield Earth (UK 2021: Dir Andrew Jones) Prolific Welsh filmmaker Andrew Jones has, in his last few movies, broken away from the mould of his previous films, home grown supernatural horror dramas which have been well made but rather boring. But nothing prepared me for this: micro budget director goes seriously epic with his first big concept sci fi flick. It's also his Covid movie.

When two crew members from a distant planet crash land on earth, the US army capture them fearing they're the spearhead of an alien invasion. The aliens see this as a declaration of war and mount an attack on our world's cities, causing widespread destruction and, with their massive saucers hovering over key capital cities, force a political stand off. 

Being 'Jones the filmmaker' (hopefully that'll catch on) of course all this happens in the first ten minutes of the movie, leaving him free to do what he does best in his movies; have people chat. So as the aliens pontificate about what to do next, and the President of the USA seeks answers, the people of the world, well, sit about really, rather unperturbed by the chaos surrounding them.

Stirring it all up is internet conspiracy freak Saha (Peter Cosgrove) whose metaphysical ruminations set up the more chin strokey elements of the film. The aliens, a combination of people in suits and CGI, go by the names of Magon, Gweldor and Hagor; they're a range of shapes and sizes, and their slowed down voices can't disguise that one of our ETs has a Welsh accent. 

Elsewhere the human drama is largely rendered via some Zoom calls, the chat centring on the restictions placed on the people by the Government, which is a thin bit of narrative allowing the characters to talk about confinement and being cheesed off about being locked down. I suspect that Jones was having his Neill Blomkamp moment (the South African director's District 9 was clearly an influence) while working around, and incorporating the Pandemic.

I appreciate that this is a conscious step up for Jones, but while there'a lot more action here than we're used to seeing from him, and some admittedly creative use of stock footage, elsewhere he's still plagued by pacing (and script) issues, with talking heads carrying most of the narrative weight. But Alien: Battlefield Earth looks very good, I'll give him that (well done to funders 4 Digitalmedia!) even though the visuals sometimes part company with the logic of the thing (there's a scene set in Egypt that I'd love someone to explain to me), and you can't help like an earth huggy message, no matter how confusingly delivered. Nuts.

The Midwife (UK 2021: Dir Ryan Gage, Marta Baidek) Lissie (Lara Goodison) and Charlie (Jeremy Joyce) are living in a house way too big for them. It's a family house, but luckily Lissie is  pregnant. She's also incredibly superstitious and fanciful, a combination just made for an indie fright flick; it's not helped when Charlie, who may or may not be fibbing, tells her that the site of the house has a dark past. Money is tight and they're dependent for income on their new lodger, Kara (Ellie Morris), who's a bit of a nouveau hippie herself. Wendy (Adeline Waby) the assertive midwife arrives, unexpectedly, and takes over, but her efforts are made redundant when Lissie loses the baby, who they'd named Michael. 

Lost in grief,  Lissie becomes afraid and increasingly manic, convinced that there are shadowy things in the house, while Charlie and Kara seem to become close. Resisting Charlie's requests for Lissie to commit herself to hospital, the tension between them thaws somewhat when Lissie tells him she's pregnant. But Lissie is far from well, and the re-emergence of the creepy Wendy, ready to look after the new arrival, and the continued presence of the fruity loops Kara, suggest that Lissie's problems have only just begun.

The title's all you need to know about this one; it, and the film itself, is a rather classy throwback to psychos-in-the-house movies of the 1990s; you know, the ones with the third reel twist. This is a four character movie where no-one can be trusted, with an ending that left this reviewer scratching his head. It's crisply filmed, well (and occasionally, justifiably, over) acted with an impressive score by Andrew Leung, and until the last ten minutes or so has a firm grip on its rug pulling narrative. At one point Charlie, Lissie and Kara are sitting down watching Gaslight, which is about right. Fun, though.

The Seed (UK 2021: Dir Sam Walker) In a recent interview Sam Walker said that with The Seed he wanted to make a "popcorn creature feature...and hide something in it". The 'something' in this case is the supposed vacuity of social media, and the "dark, nefarious algorithms" which are part of it. 

Three young women head off for a house in the Mojave desert, the perfect location to watch a promised 'once in a lifetime' meteor storm. The house is owned by the father of one of the girls, Heather (Sophie Vavasseur), the kind of spiritual soul who greets you with a 'namaste'. Deidre (Lucy Martin) is a social media star and their friend Charlotte is both technophobic (she still has a flip top phone) and social media unfriendly ("I don't want 'likes' - it's really invasive", she says). I'm not really sure why she's with them, but it makes for some interesting dynamics.

During the aformentioned storm something falls into the swimming pool. Initially thinking it's frozen, er, waste from a passing plane, they are surprised when the blob comes to life. The girls are, respectively repulsed with and fascinated by it, until the creature starts exerting its influence on them, first mentally and then physically; with very squishy results.

The Seed's last 15 minutes, a gross out fest full of lots of great practical effects, would have made a great short film. As it is the movie takes an incredibly long time to get to the action, and once you've familiarised yourself with the characters it's a case of sitting around waiting for someting to happen. The filmmakers do a pretty good job of getting Malta (and some stock footage) to stand in for the USA, and the three leads mainly pull off convincing American accents and do good 'going bonkers' (Ms Vavasseur even has to eat raw eggs, shells 'n' all, as shorthand for alien possession). But this is a film that wears its influences pretty openly - I counted ET, Eraserhead, Earth Girls are Easy, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Possession in there - but doesn't really have enough going for it to sustain interest over the movie's 90 minutes.

The Mutation (UK 2021: Dir Scott Jeffrey) At one point Jeffrey's gazillionth creature feature for 2021 was to be called 'Rats Reborn' which gives you a better idea of the beast in this movie. And considering the director's amazingly prolific output, you might think that the title change was intended to manage audience expectations; but really this is not a bad movie, showing the continuing improvement of a genre director whose cinematic offerings are growing increasingly watchable.

So in the film's now obligatory prologue a benign scientist, Peter Rowe (Nick Danan), is working on secret experiments while a large beast - actually a giant rat - is chained up; it later escapes. "Remember, you're home" the scientist tells it a little bafflingly, before the beast rips him to pieces (just one of this movie's effective pieces of effects work).

Meanwhile two timing Jenna (Jodie Bennet) is about to leave her zoologist husband Allen (Ricardo Freitas), but before he can respond to this news the local police, headed by Sergeant Chambers (Megan Purvis, spared the ignominy of attempting an American accent, like most of the rest of the cast, and given an Irish brogue instead) asks for his opinion on the type of animal who has ground up Peter, Allen's neighbour. Peter's wife Dr Linda Rowe (Amanda-Jade Tyler) knows what her husband was up to - using chemicals on rats - but wants to avenge her husband's killer anyway, forming an alliance with him and Allen's zoologist assistant, Julie (Abi Casson Thompson). So while the beast is on the loose posing a clear and present danger, the police want to sit on the story of a giant escaped rat so as not to scare the public and create panic; their inaction leads to the rat embarking on an orgy of destruction.

Jeffrey has decided to come off the fence with The Mutation and set his events in a version of the US, judging by the range of accents (and the odd US police car) on display, although the interiors are still clearly UK based, and a TV news strap reads 'Mutated Rat seen in English countryside'. Doh! But having nearly every cast member (all Jeffrey regulars and reliable at this sort of thing) pretend to be American is actually less distracting than his usual character blend of different nationalities. The good news is that Jeffrey seems to be getting better and better at this sort of thing. The Mutation has pace, a good plot, and is clearly in love with the monster movie genre; some of the set pieces, including a standout scene where the giant rat goes beserk in a packed restaurant, are some of the best I've seen from the director. My only concern is that one of my favourite actors from the Jeffrey/Matthews/Warren stable - Sarah Cohen - only has a cameo role in this. But I love the coterie of regulars who populate these movies and work incredibly hard for probably not much at all. Pretty good. 

The Haunting of Hythe House (UK 2021: Dir Steven M. Smith) Harsh critic Danny 'The Destroyer' (Luke Stevenson) takes enormous pleasure ripping into the independent horror movies he reviews. When he wishes in one particular savaging that the producers of a film should take their own life to save everyone's time, his words come back to bite him via an anonymous hacker, 'Control' who breaks into Danny's system and blackmails him, via threat of exposure, to spend 24 hours in an empty house while being filmed. The offer of £1 million is the sweetener that gets Danny out of his grotty flat and into the new location (the abandoned and boarded up Poltimore House in Devon, a regular Smith location).

Once inside, a series of digital clocks in various rooms begin to count backwards to mark his remaining time in the house, and the hacker voice welcomes him to "24 hours in hell". He's told about the mansion's history and the buried treasure hidden somewhere in the property; it's the rich pickings pilfered by the evil butler of one of the house's owners who, with his wife, allegedly haunts the house to protect it. So Danny has less than 24 hours to find the treasure and make his escape.

'Control' wants the movie it's making to be "a cult classic and not another micro budget piece of shit". With lines like that, and a central character who's obviously an amalgam of people like me who are public in my dislike of Smith's films, you better be pretty sure you're going to serve up something that exceeds expectations. Now I like trash, I love low budget films, and I'm prepared to forgive some indifferent acting if the overall project is worthwhile. But this is unintelligent, juvenile drivel, making not a lick of sense, without panache, style or wit. The people in front of and behind the camera have all made better films than this; hell Smith has made better films than this. But The Haunting of Hythe House is listless, dreary, poorly paced and just awful. Yes, even more awful than his 2019 movie Scare Attraction; and I thought that would be impossible.

The Devil Came Home (UK 2021: Dir George McCluskey) McCluskey's gloomy but competent debut feature takes us into the lives of the Baxters, a West Midlands family where all is not well. Dad Tim (Greg Hobbs) suffers from PTSD, the result of 22 years in the army and a difficult time in Bosnia. Tim's increasingly disturbing nightmares - including visions of a goggle masked wearing figure - are affecting the rest of the family, namely Tim's long suffering wife Elaine (Diane Ellis) and step-daughter Mindy (Jade Callender), who had no say in the addition of Tim to the family unit.

Tim's condition deteriorates to the point where therapists are of little use, a straitjacket is purchased to afford protection to his family, and the stricken father begins speaking in a Romanian accent. A priest is engaged, followed by a psychic, and the reality behind Tim's possession is gradually and terrifyingly revealed.

The Devil Came Home's drabness of backdrop - its action largely confined to an anonymous semi detached house - is matched by rather prosaic performances from the cast, which is at odds with the increasingly surprising reveals of the plot. Ultimately this makes the movie both tense and uninvolving; a strange mix of dull and strange, with only Hobbs's committed performance leavening the proceedings. The production team's collective background contains a lot of TV experience, so it's perhaps not surprising that this feels like a rather small screen affair; it's a bold concept, but ulitimately didn't pay off for me.

NEW WAVE OF THE BRITISH FANTASTIC FILM 2022 # 2: Reviews of 60 Seconds to Live (UK 2022), Beyond Existence (UK 2022), As A Prelude to Fear (UK 2022), Homebound (UK 2022), The Haunting of Pendle Hill (UK 2022) and Exorcist Vengeance (UK 2022)

60 Seconds to Live (UK 2022: Dir Various) Tony Newton's UK Vestra Pictures have been behind the last three '60 Seconds to Die' movies and have decided to provide their latest with a more optimistic title. Never fear though, the contents are pretty much as you'd expect, drawn from the four corners of the countercultural planet. To be fair, apart from the British production team, this is only a borderline BFF as most of the micro shorts (and I do mean micro, hardly any of them scrape a minute in length) emanate from the US.

Blighty is prepresented in the opening and closing shorts: 'Snuff Film Part 1' and 'Snuff Film Part 2' feature a man in a mask, tied to a chair being cut up. People being cut up or taking cut throat razors to themselves is a bit of a theme here, although a paucity of budget means a minimum of gore. 

The best part of the film is the middle section. The demon baby of 'Comfort Him', the 70s look of 'Savior', the jump scare of 'Tricks or Treats' and the animated killer pumpkins of 'Toxic Pumpking' by Davide Pesca all stand out. Pesca's strange man birth short 'R.I.P. Angel' is one of a number of abstract movies, best of which is the nightmarish soundtrack of 'The Holy Woman'. I also liked both the revenge shark coming through the TV to get his trophy killer in 'Poltershark' and Tom Gores' 'Raising the Stakes', a colourful take on The Fearless Vampire Killers which even finds time for a blooper. 

It's always difficult to review things like this because nothing stays around for long enough to leave more than a passing retinal image. Perhaps that's the point, but the older viewer here can only conclude that there's some sick puppies in this world; and someone's given them some cameras.

Beyond Existence (UK 2022: Dir Stephen Hoque) For his first feature director Stephen Hoque has traded in his usual CV of commercials and short films in favour of an ambitious subject; the potential end of mankind’s existence. And, equally boldly, he’s decided to tell this story with just three main characters and a setting of the UK countryside.

The Professor (Gary MacKay) is a once brilliant, now washed up alcoholic scientist whose Nobel Prize winning days, at the age of 23, are well behind him. The Professor is also the guardian of a couple of secrets; his own and the cube he keeps locked in a secure facility which has enormous, far-reaching powers.

On his tail is Ellen (a Tilda Swinton like Amelia Clay), a professional assassin who has been instructed to capture The Professor and bring him in. And on both their tails is The Guardian (Vincent Vermignon) who has exited from a gigantic pyramid. But once the pair compare notes they realise that there’s more sense in teaming up than being at each other’s throats, and so begins a quest for survival and the outwitting of The Guardian.

There’s a few narrative reveals in this movie that would be unfair to repeat here, suffice to mention that as each brain boggling detail is revealed, the viewer becomes ever more conscious that this is a film of people talking about science and alien worlds rather ponderously, rather than one which has the budget to show them to any great extent.

So what we have is The Prof and Ellen on an extended road trip round the UK while they get to know each other, or at least suss each other out. But the setup isn’t hugely successful in that Hoque really doesn’t develop his characters.

I liked the concept of the story, but its scope is way too epic to be successfully delivered by a couple of ordinary souls in a hatchback (McKay and Clay being little more than serviceable in their roles), and so it’s left to the Indian VFX crew ‘Wild’ to pull out some modest topped and tailed set pieces which are more impressive than anything that occurs between them. I can’t fault the director’s ambition but Beyond Existence doesn’t really work either as sci fi or drama.

As a Prelude to Fear (UK 2022: Dir Steph Du Melo) Du Melo's second film out this year, after the disappointing C.A.M. (and you can read the review of that in issue #2 of the hard copy DEoL fanzine, details elsewhere on this blog) is apparently based on real events, and some statistics before the end credits suggest that AaPtF's story is intended to be a universal one.

Classical cellist Eve Taylor (Lara Lemon) is scheduled to meet up with a man who it is hoped will give her musical tuition but about whom she knows nothing. Dropped off by her boyfriend Jamie Harris (Jamie Langlands) at a local cafe - the agreed meeting point - she gets a call to rendezvous instead at a nearby, rather dilapidated building. On arrival she's promptly captured by a big hooded man with a Jigsaw like altered voice who imprisons her in the basement.

Harris reports Eve's disappearance to the police. The person in charge of the subsequent investigation is DCS Barnbrook (Francis Magee, who older viewers may recognise as Liam from Eastenders back in the 1990s) supported by DS Dobson (Lucy Drive), and suspicion immediately falls on Mr Corcoran (the movie's co-writer Roger Wyatt), a rather odd local music teacher who Barnbrook had interviewed in connection with three previous murders; all girls, all cellists.  

Back in the basement, Eve encounters other imprisoned girls who she can hear but not see. One fills some gaps in the narrative; mainly that the kidnapper has a track record of abducting and killing girls and is a bit of a musician on the side. As Barnbrook focuses his attentions on the admittedly shifty Corcoran, Eve fears that she's about to be the next dead cellist.

While AaPtF is an improvement on the woeful C.A.M. it's still a pretty flat movie, strangely managing to generate lifeless performances from the cast's professionals (Magee and Drive) as well as the less seasoned newcomers. This movie comes across as half TV procedural, half Saw like thriller, mercifully without the torture porn. Du Melo turns in a score which works in parts but which you hope will shut up once in a while (silence is also good for drama). It's well shot and put together, but terribly uninvolving, a movie aiming but not succeeding in punching above its budgetary weight.

Homebound (UK 2022: Dir Sebastian Godwin) Godwin’s first feature (of sorts, it’s barely over an hour long) sees Holly (Aisling Loftus) travelling with her new husband Richard (Tom Goodman-Hill) to his family home in Norfolk. It’s a tense time for Holly – Richard’s first wife Nina will be there with his kids and it’s the first time she’ll be meeting teenagers Ralph (Lukas Rolph) and Lucia (Hattie Gotobed), and little Anna (Rafiella Chapman).

But when they arrive, Nina isn’t around and the kids have been left to fend for themselves. Holly immediately picks up an odd bond between the trio and Richard, something stronger than mere blood ties; a country family, she is aghast to see them catching and killing a goose for dinner, and Richard making liberal with the wine for all the family.

Holly initially decides to go with the flow and play along with the family’s odd lifestyle, but the longer she stays in the house the more she realises that nothing between them is quite right, including the man she’s recently married.

Homebound becomes progressively nasty as Holly struggles to understand the dynamics – and secrets – at the heart of her new family. It had the opportunity to be more unpleasant, but Godwin holds back on the shocks in favour of a growing unease, which can occasionally make the film feel a little undercooked.

The atmosphere is helped by some great performances, mainly from Richard’s three children (Gotobed in particular is subtly menacing) and Aisling Loftus is convincingly caught between love and fear; one also wonders whether this is another role for Goodman Hill which echoes his recent real life abrupt marriage walk out – he has famously said that the realities of his private life have helped him get into character for parts like these.

Homebound is helped no end by a script which avoids cliché even if the scenario is familiar, and an authentically jarring soundtrack from Jeremy Warmsley. It may be a little slight, but it certainly has its moments. And the atmospherically distressed Wiveton Hall in Norfolk is a great setting; property owner Desmond McCarthy, whose ebullient frame graced the recent BBC show Normal for Norfolk (in which he described the challenges of affording to keep a country house in order) has presumably seen the financial advantages of turning the gaff over to film crews, so expect more movies to be located there.

(A version of this review appeared on the Bloody Flicks website).

The Haunting of Pendle Hill (UK 2022: Dir Richard John Taylor) The true story of the 17th century Pendle witches from Lancashire, while not as famous as their Salem sisters, is a small but notorious part of English history. Originally novelised by William Harrison Ainsworth in 1849, and later by Robert Neill in 1951, the womens' story was televised by the BBC as a drama in 1976 and a documentary in 2011.

So now here's UK director Richard John Taylor, taking a break from his trademark gangster movies, to deliver his take on this bit of history. Mixing the real characters of the original account with a contemporary storyline, as the film opens, in 1612, John Law (James Hamer-Morton) leaves the home of Roger Nowell, JP and witchfinder (Noel Brendan Mcalley) and his daughter Maud (Lowri Watts-Joyce): encountering a mysterious figure in a cat mask in the woods, he promptly dies.

Flash forward to the present day, and Matilda, an American (also played, with a pretty good US accent, by Brit Watts-Joyce) is concerned about her father (also Mcalley). He has been in England researching a book (with the same name as the movie) concerning Nowell and the potenially supernatural events surrounding arch witch Demdike, and has gone missing. Matilda's uncle Alfred (played by Taylor regular Nicholas Ball, sporting a particularly bad American accent) fills her in on the Pendle witches and suggests she travels to the UK to look for dad; there is a suspicion that the evils of Demdike and her like may have travelled through time and put Matilda's father in danger.

On arriving in Blighty she teams up with another American, local guide Arthur (Brit Jeffrey Charles Richards) and the search is on. The movie's main shtick is moving backwards and forwards in time, with Matilda and Maud both searching for their respective fathers, and with the threat of the supernatural looming large. Taylor, who also wrote this, fiddles with history here by making the historical figures actual witches rather than subjugated working class women coming a cropper at the hands of powerful local men. 

But the director does deserve some praise for trying something a little different, and for disguising a story which combines lots of walking around in the woods while borrowing folk horror motifs from The Blair Witch Project with some interesting historical flavour and dialect (although one 17th character asking another "art thou ok?" did provoke a snort). Best line: "I'm an atheist"; "you're a millennial!"

Exorcist Vengeance (UK 2022: Dir Scott Jeffrey, Rebecca Matthews) This is the second of Jeffrey and Matthews's movies to utilise the, er, specific talents of Mr Robert Bronzi (following last year's The Gardener, which won't be covered as it falls outside the NWotBFF remit) ie that the Hungarian actor looks exactly like Charles Bronson, I'm assuming the pair got a BOGOF contract for his services.

Anyway in this one Bronzi is Father Andres Jozsef, priest, ex drug pusher, hardman, exorcist, religious pontificator, as handy with his fists as he is wielding the King James version, and mourning for his dead wife. His multi skilled talents are called into play fairly quickly, when he fells and shoots a fleeing killer on the mean streets of London town. But when an old possessed lady takes her own life, but not before transferring the demon inside to her maid Magda (Anna Liddell), Father J is appointed to the case via the Vatican in the shape of Bishop Canelo (Steven Berkoff). 

After consulting his dead wife's grave for advice, he arrives at the house, where the family remains in shock. They are grandma's children Patrick (Simon Furness) and Christine (Nicola Wright), Christine's kids Nick (Ben Parsons) and Rebecca (Sarah Alexandra Marks) who have returned from America - hence the dodgy accents - and Patrick's daughter Rose (Nicole Nabi). But Father J's talents are tested to the limit as, one by one, the family members start getting killed, presumably by the demonic entity; the same family who don't want him on the premises in the first place.

The main takeaway from Exorcist Vengeance, apart from the extraordinary casting of Bronzi as the impassive, impenetrably accented Father Jozsef, is how Jeffrey and Matthews have upped their directing game for this film. The pair's CV, as covered extensively in these pages, has tended towards slower paced, social drama centred fright flicks. But no more! EV is, for them anyway, non stop action, cleverly combining possession drama with a whodunnit subplot. As Gavin Whitaker points out in his review, this may have something to do with the presence of US producers Jeff Miller and Mark L. Lester (the latter of whom had production duties on, among others, The Funhouse (1981) and 1990's Class of 1999). 

Plot wise there's still the usual amount of bobbins associated with this sort of thing, and scenes like Chrissie Wunna's police interview, where she's dressed like a stripper cop, complete with US badge, suggest that Jeffrey and Matthews haven't lost their sense of humour. But this is huge fun and the final scene, hinting at Bronzi's return in a sequel, prompted a small round of applause from this reviewer.

Dark Eyes of London - the Magazine!

I realise that I haven't posted up here that Issue #2 of my hard copy version of this blog, also called 'Dark Eyes of London', is now available (actually it has been for a few weeks and over half have sold already).

Issue #2 runs to 32 pages this time, but is still £3 each including postage (in the UK, outside there will be an extra charge, not much but need to cover postage costs). If you'd like a copy please email darkeyesoflondon666@gmail.com for details.

I'm aiming to have Issue #3 available in August to tie in with London FrightFest.

Davidxx

NEW WAVE OF THE BRITISH FANTASTIC FILM 2021 #10: Reviews of Jekyll and Hyde (UK 2021), Spider in the Attic (UK 2021), It Came from Below (UK 2021), Martyr's Lane (UK 2021), Bad Moon Rising (UK 2021) and A Curious Tale (UK 2021)

Jekyll and Hyde (UK 2021: Dir Steve Lawson) The third of Lawson’s treatments of classic horror stories, following on from Bram Stoker’s Van Helsing and Ripper Untold. Jekyll and Hyde traces a similar pattern to these movies: a kind of reimagining of the story with good attention to period detail and some spirited acting from his usual cast stable.

Lawson’s version of the famous Robert Louis Stevenson novella dances in and out of the original text. As the film opens Henry Jekyll (Michael McKell, who gets to sing a power ballad over the end credits) draws up a will with family friend and solicitor Gabriel Utterson (Tom Hendryk); in the event of Jekyll’s demise, the whole of his estate is assigned to a Mr Hyde. The morning after, Jekyll is chased back to his laboratory by the police, in the shape of Inspector Newcombe (Mark Topping) who have accused him of murder; on gaining entry they find that Jekyll, who has also been implicated in a number of other murders, has shot himself dead.

Most of the rest of the movie is told in flashback via a long letter from Jekyll delivered to Utterson, which describes his experiments, the existence of Mr Hyde and the trail of violence that follows. Convinced of Jekyll’s innocence in the face of almost incontrovertible evidence Utterson turns amateur sleuth; but the truth is stranger than anybody expects.

Lawson’s micro budget adaptation relies, for the most part, on accounts and descriptions of the action, rather than the action itself (although the final reel generates some excitement which is pretty amazing considering the paucity of the sets). There’s some rather ill-advised comedy in the form of the Enfield character (David Lenik) who has some entanglements with ladies of the night, but Sarah Utterson (Helen Crevel) is arguably the best thing in this, handy with her fists but looking the part as the normally demure solicitor’s wife. Slight, but not without appeal.

Spider in the Attic aka Spider from the Attic (UK 2021: Dir Scott Jeffrey) In the opening scenes of Jeffrey’s latest creature feature, scientist Dr George Zizerman (Chris Cordell) has been fired from his employer for unethical research practices (he’s been investigating ancient Nazi experiments into genetic mutations, possibly using alien life forms); which is a shame as he’s just perfected a growth serum which he’s used, successfully, on a spider. A side effect of the serum is that the treated subject becomes highly aggressive…and, of course, huge. I think you can guess what happens to the doc.

Radio host Linda Buxton (Nicola Wright), who runs a show devoted to the unexplained, is losing ratings fast, and vows to her station manager Shauna (Kate Sandison) that things will improve. Her daughters, heavily pregnant Belle (Chelsea Greenwood) and girl from the military Lucy (Sarah Alexandra Marks) rally round mum suggesting that she needs something new and exciting to enliven the show. And Lucy has the answer: an investigation into what happened to Dr Zizerman.

Linda, Belle and Lucy break into the scientist’s house and eventually find the good doctor, dead and cocooned in his bedroom, and one of the mutant spiders (actually they look more like a cross between a spider, a scorpion and the ‘facehugger’ from Alien); Belle’s boyfriend Dan (Clint Gordon) turns up, seemingly only to bicker and whinge with his partner, and they also come across Shauna, who’s been checking up on Linda, together with assistant Lorena (Danielle Scott). Whereas anyone else would do the sensible thing and exit stage right, Linda senses a story and suggests that everyone hangs around to get the scoop: big mistake.

Spider in the Attic is a little formulaic: like many micro horrors I’ve reviewed the horror is interspersed with scenes of domestic intrigue and of course the old B movie standby of wandering round an empty house. Jeffrey deserves credit for casting, instead of the usual YouTube teen, an older actor (Wright) who brings some gravitas to the role, and an all woman climax: and while some of the spider CGI looks a little hokey, in their smaller incarnations the creatures look quite scary, scuttling up walls or across beds.

The movie’s last half hour does mount some tension – despite the abrupt end – improved by Andrew Fosberry’s atmospheric soundtrack, in contrast to the rather talky first two thirds; Spider in the Attic isn’t great but, like a lot of Jeffrey’s movies, it has its heart in the right place and is definitely worth a watch.

It Came from Below (UK 2021: Dir Dan Allen) Allen’s second feature (after his 2017 remake of the 1982 Don Gronquist movie Unhinged) comes with the guiding hand of co-scriptwriter Sam Ashurst (A Little More Flesh) and producer Scott Jeffrey (ooh, everything!) but manages to be its own beast, a tense movie which rises above its low budget limitations.

Megan Purvis, sporting the by now obligatory but largely redundant American accent required for at least one character in these things, is Jessie Harper, a woman grieving her father (grief is often a narrative device in micro horrors I've noticed), a potholer who came across a certain something in some local caves and died as a result (Purvis can do good ‘moody’ and is a natural for parts like this). Jake Watkins is Sam Harper, also sporting a US accent (and who is possibly Jessie’s brother, or half-brother; it isn’t that clear), and together they’re on a journey to reclaim dad’s honour; he died a laughing stock, full of stories about underground monsters. In their revisit of the same caves that took his life they’re accompanied by their English friends Joanna (Georgie Grace) and Marty (Tom Taplin), the latter of whom has a past with Jessie. Dad left behind a comprehensive handwritten journal of his sightings, which the English pair dismiss as nonsense although recognising the potential for profiteering, furthering rattling Jessie’s cage; she wanted to travel alone.

Their descent into the caves is despite warnings from the camp rangers; “Don’t go in the caves,” they advise, but Jessie’s full of purpose. Pretty soon the party are without Marty who swiftly loses it and runs off to the interior; somewhat inevitably he’s victim number one, and it’s not long before the (rather impressive) beast emerges, first seen crawling along the roof of one of the caves. Jessie and the rest of the gang become trapped in the stony netherworld, and the rampant beast isn’t their only problem.

Despite the rather undercooked script there’s a lot to like in It Came from Below; it really only gets going once the party descend into the darkness, helped by some stunning photography from Dominic Ellis and Allen’s tense direction. The creature’s pretty good value and although it doesn’t feature in the movie that much, this is probably for the best. Domestic disputes (another hallmark of UK low budget horror flicks) are kept to a minimum, and Purvis makes for a convincingly terrified protagonist. I’m going to guess from some of the exterior shots that the shoot was a cold and damp one, which really adds to the atmosphere of dread. It’s not The Descent, but then what is?

Martyr’s Lane (UK 2021: Dir Ruth Platt) Seen through the eyes of 10 year old Leah (Kiera Thompson) the world is a mysterious and often frightening place. With dad as the village vicar (the family live in a Victorian rectory) her life revolves around stressed mum Sarah (Denise Gough) who suffers from night terrors and wears a mysterious amulet containing a lock of blonde hair, and Leah’s bullying older sister Bex (Hannah Rae) whose unbridled anger is clearly overcompensating for something. Things get odder when Leah meets Rachel, a strange, ethereal little girl in the woods (Sienna Sayer), complete with broken angel’s wings, who she invites home.

I’m not really giving the game away to confirm that there's a connection between the lock of hair and Leah’s strange nocturnal visitor. Actor turned director Platt conjures up a beautifully framed, almost overly polite ghost story, where the central tragedy is discovered clue by clue (stray buttons, a doll, loose teeth), with Rachel and Leah at the centre of the mystery. Things only threaten to transform to full on genre movie at its climax; for the most part the story is happy to move slowly towards its dramatic conclusion.

Martyr’s Lane would be a lesser thing without the twin talents of Thompson and Sayer, the latter particularly achieving a delicate balance of prosaic and mystical, quite a feat for someone so young. Thompson’s Leah is a child adrift in a world of adults whose motivations remain a mystery to her (scenes shot from her height emphasise this) and her parents’ staunch Catholic faith runs at odds with Leah’s encounters with an increasingly strong Rachel, who may or may not be real, but is the closest thing Leah has to a friend. Martyr’s Lane may be a very mannered ghost story, but it’s one with a lot of atmosphere, topped off with Erased Tapes collaborator Anne Müller’s haunting score.

Bad Moon Rising (UK 2021: Dir Alasdair MacKay) Lucy (Dani Thompson), Jordan (Loren Peta, Sean Young’s performance double in 2017’s Blade Runner 2049) and Pip (Honey Holmes) make up ‘Scream Team’, a trio of fun loving TV ghost hunters whose ‘structured reality’ show in under threat of cancellation. Apart from gullible Pip, the girls don’t believe in the supernatural. So when slimy manager James (David Curtis) books them a gig in Bulgaria to investigate a real haunting, they’re a bit perplexed, but are pressured into accepting it to keep the show going.

Arriving in a quiet part of the country they end up in a small village. There’s one bar and a creepy graveyard with cages over the graves. To keep something in, the girls muse? And they might be right; a local woman is mauled by an unseen beast, and when the team are filming in the woods, they’re approached by a local man (and ferret) who tells them that the area is unsafe. As the team put their report together, things are gathering outside, waiting for the moon to rise.

Put out by the re-energised Vipco label (which is currently giving lifeblood to a number of recent UK fantastic titles), Bad Moon Rising is, sadly, just bad. Hampered by some poor sound, indifferent acting and an almost indecent lack of plot, at 75 mins this is a real chore to get through. Some of the footage has obviously been kicking around for a while; the late Richard Gladman, who died in 2016, plays himself as a journalist in one scene, and internet sources make mention of filming an earlier version of the movie back in 2015.

I’m all for low budget enthusiasm but Bad Moon Rising feels lazy, derivative and pretty pointless. A credit for the ‘Essex Ferret Welfare Society’ is about the only thing to commend it.

A Curious Tale (UK 2021: Dir Leigh Tarrant) In 1588, the film's prologue tells us, the Spanish armada invaded the shores of England; the Sussex heritage, in the shape of three buried crowns, aimed to protect the country from further invasion. The crowns’ powers meant that while one was still in existence, no foreign army would invade.

Hang on. Isn’t this the plot of M R James’s story ‘A Warning to the Curious’? Why yes it is, and although director Tarrant does  acknowledge the source text in the end credits of his 50 minute short (mistakenly referring to it as a novel) it’s still a bit of a cheeky move. So we open with a man digging in a coastal location for the remaining crown who gets bumped off by a fearsome cove who tells him (altogether now) “no diggin’ ere!”. 12 years later there’s a new treasure hunter in town: Pete Rattlebone (the oft used character name of Australian actor Pete Tindal, 60s musician turned TV personality and podcaster) who seeks the crown for himself, only to come across the ghostly protector of the antique, a Mr Hagar, as opposed to the story’s ‘Ager’ (Noddy Holder-esque Ian Kear).

Tarrant lifts stylistic chunks of Lawrence Gordon-Clark’s 1972 BBC adaptation of the story but adds a few ideas of his own, namely a female ghost and a dream sequence in the hotel where Rattlebone stays. Jeff Crampton’s score is sufficiently atmospheric, but there’s some ‘local’ acting which rather lets the things down and the budget forces some awkward compromises (word processed texts inserted into old books for example); it's ok but I would have preferred Tarrant to create a story of his own.

A Curious Tale can be rented via Vimeo.

Top 10 Films of 2021

So this year I doubled 2020's figure by getting to see 32 films at the cinema (last year it was only 16), and watched 384 overall, including 45 movies reviewed for the Bloody Flicks website. My Top 10 of the year, in no particular order and with no explanations this year, are:

Promising Young Woman

The Sound of Metal

Summer of Soul

Zombies in the Sugar Cane Field

The Velvet Underground

The Eyes of Tammy Faye

Last Night in Soho

The French Despatch

Shiva Baby

The Sparks Brothers

Honorable mentions: 

Sweetheart, The Mitchells Vs the Machines, Undergods, My Heart Can't Beat Until You Tell it To, Lapsis, Werewolves Within, The Night House, Candyman, Night at the Eagle Inn, The Ghost of Winfred Meeks, Slumber Party Massacre, Annette, Don't Look Up, 7 Days, Censor, Acting, The Deep House, Freaky, Wyvern Hill, Don't Look Up

Scary Christmas Round Up of New (ish) Holiday Themed Horror Movies 2021: Reviews of The Advent Calendar (France/Belgium 2021), Red Snow (USA 2021), Puppet Killer (Canada 2019), Black Friday (USA 2021), Christmas Zombies (USA 2020) and Silent Night (UK 2021)

For the fourth year running, here are some reviews of Christmas/holiday themed movies to inspire some seasonal watching.

The Advent Calendar aka Le calendrier (France/Belgium 2021: Dir Patrick Ridremont) Eva Roussel (Eugénie Derouand), an ex dancer now paraplegic following a road accident, is hardly living her best life, stuck in a crappy insurance job with an equally crappy boss intent on belittling her and hiring others with a view to forcing her out of the business. Her father has Alzheimer's and her stepmother is pretty awful too.

Her friend Sophie (Honorine Magnier) gifts her a wooden box from Germany, a handcrafted advent calendar with 'the miracle of Christmas' written on the front, 'Dump it and I'll kill you' on the back, and a set of rules governing its use. Each of the locked doors must be opened at midnight, with a sharp rebuke from the box if Eva doesn't comply. Inside the box a trickster demon lurks, just waiting for the latest player to open door number one.

Some of the boxes contain chocolates, others objects or messages like "to cure hurt, destroy what hurt you" and "Jesus said to the cripple, get up and walk". Eva gradually understands that the box is exerting a force on her which allows her to control her environment. When she influences a rapey trader guy to die in a car crash, following a disastrous double date with Sophie and her latest beau, she also gets him to send a link to his phone stock market app, which immediately starts bringing in the Euros for her. But Eva also realises the Advent Calendar might have a higher, and deadlier purpose; to help her walk again.

Ridremont's modern fairy tale follows the 'be careful what you wish for' moral of Jacobs' 'The Monkey's Paw' story but the logic is skewed; Roussel is offered a miracle at huge cost, and it's the realisation that her dream of walking again could be realised, and the human cost of that dream, that turns her from an angry and embittered woman into something much darker.

For my taste The Advent Calendar is a little too tricksy to satisfy, but there's no doubting that it's a clever, uncomfortable film and Derouand turns in a fine, anguished performance which grows darker - and richer - as the film progresses.

Red Snow (USA 2021: Dir Sean Nicols Lynch) Struggling horror author Olivia Romo (Dennice Cisneros) is spending Christmas in a Lake Tahoe cabin, left to her by her late mother. In truth Olivia, broke and with her ‘Twilight’ style undead novel ‘Touched by a Vampire’ not setting the publishing world alight, she’s left to spend the holidays alone while the book’s rejection letters stack up.

When a bat flies into a window of the cabin one night, Olivia is minded to rescue the thing from the snow and restore it to health. Leaving it overnight in the garage, the following morning she is surprised but more than a little delighted to see that the bat, which was actually of the vampire variety, has changed back to naked male form in the rather buff shape of Luke (Nico Bellamy).

But when Julius King (Vernon Wells), a private investigator, turns up at the cabin, he’s in search of three vicious vampires, of which Luke is the most dangerous. Olivia finds it hard to reconcile the rather friendly guy she has in her garage with the concept of a murderous bloodsucker, but when Luke’s friends Jackie (Laura Kennon) and Brock (Alan Silva) turn up, she sees a different side of the vampire she thought was going to be useful in helping fine tune the details of her novel.

Red Snow is a comedy that raises smiles rather than belly laughs, and if you don’t warm to the kooky Olivia you may find it hard work. But it’s well cast and the snowy scenery is a bonus. There are some great lines (Luke describes the movie Nosferatu as the Birth of a Nation for his kind, and likens the pigs blood procured for him, rather than the human plasma he requires, as the difference between “craft beer and warm piss”): it’s also surprisingly gory and the effects are good for something that was probably pretty small budget wise. And Timothy Lynch’s soundtrack does a lovely job of sinistering up some Christmas standards; honestly you’ve never heard ‘The Coventry Carol’ sound more chilling.

Puppet Killer (Canada 2019: Dir Lisa Ovies) At first glance, Lisa Ovies’ debut directing feature shares a similar setup to Ben Holt’s Benny Loves You; both date from 2019 (Ovies’ film is only now getting a UK release) and concern childhood attachments to a puppet with murder on its mind. Coincidence, surely?

As a child young Jamie, a horror movie obsessed little boy, has a tough time. Losing his mother to cancer, he’s now caught in the middle of heightened bickering between dad and his new wife, with only a bright pink puppet (a favourite of his mother’s) for company. Bickering has escalated to separation status, and as Jamie’s stepmother makes arrangements to leave the family home, she is knifed to death by an invisible assailant; the body is whisked away and she is deemed to have gone missing.

Ten years later Jamie, now a young student (and in audacious bit of casting, his part is played, not by a teenager, but 50 year old Aleks Paunovic, possibly a nod to all those teen slasher movies where the students are actors in their 20s and 30s) has gathered his schoolfriends together for a weekend at the home where he grew up, now abandoned.

Once they arrived the gang settle in for the usual blend of beer, drugs and pre marital sex, with Jamie more keen to access a stash of VHS tapes in the basement and organise a horrorthon. But the movies aren’t the only thing from the past that’s rediscovered. His pink puppet is also unearthed, and before long somebody, or something, is offing the partying kids.

You have to take a pretty big leap of faith to go with the plotting of this frequently hilarious homage to/send up of classic horror movies. But it wins because the script is smart, the cast are great value, and the puppet gets all the best lines. It’s often pretty gory too; the addition of filmmakers Jen and Sylvia Soskia about half way through, in a plot device which intrigues rather than annoys, displays not only their acting chops but a film which isn’t afraid to chuck everything into the mix. Good work.

Black Friday (USA 2021: Dir Casey Tebo) It’s Thanksgiving (which Americans always conflate with Christmas) and the superstores of the USA are preparing for, as one worker puts it, the “friggin’ vultures” who queue outside at silly o’clock to snap up those Black Friday bargains.

Over at We Love Toys store manager Jonathan Wexler (a bowtie and cardigan sporting Bruce Campbell) is preparing his workers for the busiest night of the year. The staff include Ken (Devon Sawa), who is pissed that he has to work on the night of the holiday while his kids get to have a slap up Thanksgiving dinner at home with his ex-wife and her lame boyfriend; tough final girl in waiting Marnie (Ivana Baquero), with whom Ken is having a bit of a thing despite being twenty years older than her; cleanliness freak Chris (Ryan Lee); employee of the month Anita (Celeste Olivier); and uber bossy bitchy team leader Brian (Stephen Peck).

But this shopping event is going to be rather different. In a neighbouring warehouse a gigantic blob, presumably alien but unexplained, overcomes and mutates some of the workers there. And by the time We Love Toys is open for business the whole district has been overwhelmed with infected shoppers. And they’re headed for Jonathan and his team.

“There’s something wrong with the shoppers” remarks a character at one point, which is probably the understatement of the year. Director Casey Tebo (who seems to have cut his teeth directing Aerosmith promotional videos) has great fun pitching the mutated hordes (well twenty or so of them anyway, the budget’s pretty slim) against the disparate and disgruntled staff of the toy store, who predictably overcome their differences, utilising pretty much anything in the store in the fight against the infected townsfolk.

The practical effects are the star here, a homage to DTV 1980s latex FX classics (and the Dawn of the Dead nods are clear and present), and if the script and overall narrative are sometimes a bit scrappy and inconclusive, the film is saved by some dry performances and an increasing sense of mayhem, building to an impressively fiery climax.

Christmas Zombies (USA 2020: Dir Ashley Hays Wright) OK, here's what you need to know. Ashley Hays Wright is, and I quote, "a home school mother of three daughters...married to David Owen Wright, an 'actor' (my inverted commas)...a multi talented craftsman with many gifts from God". So the Wright family, good Christian souls all, decided to add to their skillset the art of filmmaking, as 'Wright Family Films'. And boy did they go at it, with thirteen shorts, TV slots and features completed in 2020. What, with a pandemic raging, I hear you cry? Fear not, pilgrim, for the Wright family make all their movies at home, and the cast are, you guessed it, mainly members of the Wright family!

So now we're all caught up, let me introduce you to Christmas Zombies, one of the lamest, most atrocious films I've brought you in all the four years of this seasonal post (although have a read of the user reviews on IMDb, particularly the one who writes "I am sure the people that rate this low are upset that this was not a film full of blood, foul language, nudity or the usual horrible things in these type of films." Yep!

On the night before Christmas, dad (David Owen Wright) reads a story to his three daughters (Cadence, Scout and Jaina Wright). Ostensibly it's 'The Night Before Christmas' but dad changes it, narrating instead the story of 'Snuffy' (also dad Wright) a disgruntled elf who gets kicked out of Santa's workshop by Big Red himself and wages war against Santa with an army of robot zombies.

At 66 minutes this feels a lot longer. Through a combination of green screen and video editing, Mr and Mrs Wright do at least manage to make it look like there's a full cast, instead of the family and a couple of hangers on in multiple roles. But oh god it's so terrible. I mean, if their mission was to make a good, clean, family film which won't offend the congregation of their local church, but you have no talent at comedy or even telling a story properly, then this is what you get. On a more sinister note, Snuffy's revenge and the combined opposing forces of the North Pole relies on a proliferation of guns, most of which don't seem to be real, but even so, I'm going to guess that a family whose kids are home schooled to protect them from 'adult content' are possibly well stocked in the gun department. Awful and just a little sinister then (but for all the wrong reasons).

NEW WAVE OF THE BRITISH FANTASTIC FILM 2021 Silent Night (UK 2021: Dir Camille Griffin) And so we end this year's coverage with, if not a classic film, an odd and very moving one.

Nell (Keira Knightley) and her husband Simon (Matthew Goode) are hosting a Christmas day get together, at their huge house in the country, for a group of old friends, a quirky mix of vaguely posh people whose affability suggests we're about to watch a witty social comedy; and indeed swirling strings on the soundtrack signify the lightheartedness and opulence of the setup.

But there are some chinks in the overall levity. One of the guests, Sandra (Annabelle Wallis) has splurged her daughter Kitty's (Davida  McKenzie) university fund on an expensive party dress, and Nell's own kids, Art (Roman Griffin David, JoJo Rabbit) Hardy (Hardy Griffin Davis) and Thomas (Gilby Griffin Davis) are collective potty mouths."God we're getting old," says Nell to one of the group, James (Sope Dirisu); "were getting old," he corrects her.

For this is a party with a difference; it's an end of the world bash. A toxic cloud, the results of global warming, is moving around the globe, killing the world's population. The UK Government have provided a human solution for its people; a pill which kills instantly. Nell and her friends and kids have gathered to take the pill together before the cloud arrives, saving them from an agonising death by poisoning. 

But as the movie progresses and the toxic cloud slowly approaches, doubts are expressed about the veracity of the tablet; also James' 15 year old gilfriend Sophie (Lily-Rose Depp, daugher of Johnny and Vanessa Paradis, celeb fans) is pregnant and having second thoughts about joining them in the pill popping party.

Silent Night feels a bit like Richard Curtis remaking Lars von Trier's 2011 movie Melancholia. There's an off feeling about the whole thing (and not in a bad way), which gradually transforms into full on pathos. The disclosure of secrets among the group, which in any other film would be the dramatic climax, here occurs half way through the movie but becomes inconsequential; these people have bigger concerns than human frailty. And while the details behind the catastrophe are only hinted at, one character opines: "We should have voted Green..fucking Conservatives".

This really is quite an extrordinary film, strange but unusually truthful, shot through with mordant humour: and if the final piece of music, Lorne Balfe's beautiful reworking of the carol that provides the film's title, doesn't move you, then nothing will.