MOVIEJOURNAL 2017 (PART ONE)

[smogo]

What follows is a list of all the films I've watched this year, excluding films that I'd seen before. My 4-star rating system uses * to indicate shite to be avoided, *** to indicate films worth seeing and **** to indicate works of brilliance. Everything else gets a "meh"-like **.

Index
*** Anaconda
*** Asylum [aka House of Crazies]
** Basket Case 2
*** Basket Case 3
*** Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2
*** Burning Bright
* Claws [aka Devil Bear]
* Creep
*** Dangerous Seductress
** Dogs [aka Slaughter]
*** The Expelled [aka F]
** The Eyes of My Mother
*** Femina Ridens [aka The Laughing Woman]
*** Frightmare [aka Cover Up]
** The Holy Virgin Versus the Evil Dead
*** The House of Exorcism
*** The Initiation
* The Killer Elephants [aka Rumbling the Elephant]
*** Lake Placid
*** Last Girl Standing
** Mamba [aka Fair Game]
** Martyrs
**** May
* The Midnight Swim
*** The Night Flier
** Nurse
*** One Missed Call
*** The Pit [aka Teddy]
* Planet of the Vampires [aka The Demon Planet]
*** Prevenge
*** Python
** Ratu Buaya Putih (White Crocodile Queen) [aka The White Alligator]
** Satánico Pandemonium (La Sexorcisto) (Satanic Panemonium (The Sexorcist))
** Scarecrows
* Serpent Warriors [aka Snake Inferno]
*** Seven Deaths in the Cats Eyes
* 666: Satan Returns [aka Shaolin vs. the Devil's Omen]
*** Snakes on a Plane
** Split
**** Tag
*** Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo
*** Tenemos la Carne (We Have the Flesh) [aka We are the Flesh]
*** Ticks [aka Infested]
*** T2: Trainspotting
*** Venom
** The Watcher in the Attic [aka The Stroller in the Attic]
** Wiener-Dog
*** The World of Kanako

All reviews


BASKET CASE 2 (USA 1990 / Frank Henenlotter)
**
This belated sequel isn't dissimilar to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, in that it swaps its long-ago predecessor's raw griminess and depravity for colourful gloss and its tongue in its cheek. The story picks up from where the original left off, except that everyone's suddenly inexplicably dressed like it's 1990, and Duane & Belial are trying to lay low in a big suburban house run by an old woman who cares for a whole coterie of extremely deformed people (yet she seems to mainly keep them locked in the attic and patronisingly calls them all "children"). Though, because this is a lighthearted film, they're deformed in a comically exaggerated way: a showcase for Gabe Bartalos's creature shop rather than anything actually disturbing. Likewise, the airy house is a long way from the original's scuzzy, roach-infested 42nd Street hotel setting. Largely a sad reminder of how bad much US horror was in the 90s, the old Henenlotter magic finally emerges in the third act, when we're treated to torn-off faces, mutant puppet sex and a long overdue sense of overblown ludicrousness, rather than mere jokey idiocy.

BASKET CASE 3 (USA 1991 / Frank Henenlotter)
***
The last thing I wanted from Basket Case 3 was yet more time spent with Granny Ruth and her crazy household of freaks. But that's the entire movie. This time round, though, Frank Henenlotter gives us a straight-up monster comedy rather than anything you could reasonably describe as horror, for the first two-thirds anyway. Belial's similar-looking girlfriend goes into labour, and so Ruth drives everyone down to a doctor friend in Georgia, where the sheriff and his deputies come to realise they've got a wanted killer in their jurisdiction. I was finding it all quite tiresome at first, with humour that just didn't work (what, for example, is Granny Ruth's condom purchase about? Is that supposed to be a joke in itself? There's no punchline!). Ruth even gets to perform a terrible musical number on the bus.... But things eventually pick up nicely with the absurdly lengthy birth scene, followed immediately by Belial's sex fantasy, and then it's all good from thereon out. We even get an unexpectedly splattery massacre that gorehounds will lap up. What a strange and tonally unpredictable trilogy of films this is.

PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES [aka The Demon Planet] (Italy/Spain/USA 1965 / Mario Bava)
*
"He was trying to disconnect the meteor rejector." / "Disconnect the meteor rejector?" / "I couldn't help myself. I fought out with all my power. But it was no use. I had to disconnect the meteor rejector." You'd think that, with dialogue like this, Mario Bava's sci-fi effort would be stupid and campy enough to overcome my dislike of the genre. But this is no Barbarella... it's not even a Starcrash. A group of space travellers run into trouble, fall unconscious, yet land safely on a strange, dying planet, where they immediately start fighting each other, and the dead among them rise again to possess their colleagues' bodies. But all in a really boring, staid way. Bava's stylised, colourful lighting is as good here as it ever was, but it certainly doesn't help the shoddy sets look any more lifelike: both spaceship interiors and extraterrestrial exteriors were very obviously done on a low, low budget; perhaps all the money went on the crew's expensive-looking leather uniforms. It's all very 1950s adventure serial, and while it may work as a drunken, ironic watch with friends, this is exactly the kind of stiff and straight-faced sci-fi that I truly hate.

LAST GIRL STANDING (USA 2015 / Benjamin R Moody)
***
Friday the 13th: Part 2 begins with Alice, the surviving Final Girl from Friday the 13th, at home, having evidently settled back into her mundane life, although very much still easily spooked by anything that might be a psycho killer (though is usually just a cat). This film takes that prologue and extends it to feature length - but will Camryn, like Alice before her, end up with a screwdriver in her head? She's the sole survivor of a campsite massacre, the ending of which we see in the authentic-enough opening, and years later is quietly working at a dry cleaners. But she keeps having visions of the Hunter that she supposedly killed back in the day, much to the consternation of her new layabout, Gen Y friends. The sudden change in tone from 80s-style slasher movie excitement to beige, washed-out 21st century slackercore is quite arresting, and note how the director has to relocate his characters to a much more vibrant and colourful location for the inevitable finalé. For, while the script keeps you guessing as to the Hunter's existence, you 100% know there's going to be some sort of carnage at the end; anything else would be super-lame.

ASYLUM (UK 1972 / Roy Ward Baker)
***
In lieu of a job interview, a doctor has to listen to the tall stories of four psychiatric patients and, if he correctly identifies which one is Dr Starr, the now-insane head of the asylum, he'll be given the vacant position. The tale of an adulterer under attack, opener FROZEN FEAR is the sort of simple, dumb short about a character being pursued by someone or something that should be lifeless, that usually comes at the end of horror anthologies, with varying degrees of creepiness (think Three Faces of Fear, Trilogy of Terror and Creepshow 2). Here, it's merely darkly amusing. Next, THE WEIRD TAILOR is actually about a weird customer (Peter Cushing, no less) who offers a debt-ridden suitmaker £200 to follow some very specific instructions, and is a little unspectacular. Class acts Charlotte Rampling and Britt Ekland aren't enough to rescue LUCY COMES TO STAY from its blatantly predictable split personality non-twist, but finalé MANNIKINS OF HORROR has a left-field trick up its sleeve, as well as a Herbert Lom-faced killer doll that would make Charles Band proud. And to be fair, while I thought I had Starr's identity nailed, I was wrong.

THE HOLY VIRGIN VERSUS THE EVIL DEAD (Hong Kong 1991 / Chun-Yeung Wong)
**
A barely coherent mix of comedy, exploitation, fantasy and kung-fu which begins when a teacher's late-night picnic with his female students comes to an abrupt end due to some kind of supernatural psycho turning up and slaughtering all the girls. Although suspected of their deaths, he's bailed out and tries to solve the case himself - a mission that eventually has him team up with a tribal princess whose magic sword makes a farting noise whenever it's pulled from its sheath. While I was on-board with the gratuitous sex, the occasional bursts of (unfortunately quite tame) gore, and the inevitable ineffectual comedy cops, minutes at a time are given over to martial arts fighting, which I personally tend to find very uninteresting to watch unless the stuntwork is exceptional - which it isn't here. Unfortunately, and in spite of plenty of weird tonal shifts, The Holy Virgin Versus The Evil Dead is neither wacky nor extreme enough for my tastes, with an overall feel that's closer to the lightweight magic of, say, Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain than the more gross-out fare that I enjoy.

SEVEN DEATHS IN THE CATS EYES (Italy/France/West Germany 1973 / Antonio Margheriti)
***
Set in Scotland, though with the weirdest range of fake Scottish accents you'll ever find, this somewhat surreal thriller is about a castle-dwelling family of lords and ladies, into whose realm a family friend arrives. She's played by Jane Birkin, whose mere pulchritudinous presence is enough to carry the whole strange film, and she finds herself in the middle of a load of bickering about the family's legacy and inheritance, a premise that lands like a lead balloon in the forefront of far too many Italian horror and giallo plots, this one included. And this does fall squarely between the horror and giallo genres: it's a murder mystery, but there's also a mythology regarding vampires, and the entire film is drowning in gothic dread. There's also a pet gorilla knocking around, or someone wearing a gorilla costume, but he's referred to as an orangutan, and I've no fucking idea why he's there or what he has to do with anything. It's a weird one this: quite boring, yet satisfyingly nuts. And it's funny whenever Birkin's then partner, Serge Gainsbourg, sleepwalks his way through a scene as the police inspector with a dubbed voice that doesn't match in the slightest.

BOOK OF SHADOWS: BLAIR WITCH 2 (USA 2000 / Joe Berlinger)
***
A surprisingly nasty and mean-spirited sequel that was massively slated on release, being seen as a step backwards after The Blair Witch Project's ground-breaking use of found footage and internet marketing. But Book of Shadows is the more entertaining film, even if it does replace the original's effective chills with something more visceral. A former psychiatric patient takes a group of tourists - two researchers, a Wiccan witch and a goth girl who has psychic powers whenever narratively convenient - on a trip around The Blair Witch Project's locations. While camping in the woods, though, they lose several hours and a rival group turns up disembowelled the next morning. Cue flash-forwards to police interviews, and flashbacks (or more flash-forwards?) to a gory massacre. It's very stupid at times, and requires you to buy into the idea that a woman who's been hospitalised following a miscarriage would happily rejoin the excursion as soon as she's discharged, but it all gets agreeably chaotic and nightmarish as recovered video tapes - or "found footage", if you will - reveal the truth about what happened.

DANGEROUS SEDUCTRESS (Indonesia 1992 / H Tjut Djalil)
***
The final film from the director of Lady Terminator is another, at times equally jaw-dropping mash-up of high-octane action, sexploitation, traditional Indonesian folklore, gory horror and terrible, terrible acting by people who've clearly just been dragged in off the street. After an exciting car chase through the streets of Jakarta, a magic severed finger walks (yes, really) into a magic locket that causes the resurrection of an ancient Queen of Darkness who, like the undead in Hellraiser, needs to drink blood for the flesh to reappear on her bones. So she transmits herself into a young American woman who's visiting her fashion model sister (having fled her rapist boyfriend), turning her into the titular killer nymphomaniac. The problem with an opening that eventful is that every minute of filler later on (the sister's interminable photoshoot montages, for example) feels like five. And fans of Lady Terminator will doubtless feel short-changed by the clearly much lower-budgeted finalé we get here, where the action is confined to some people in a blank room throwing things at a mirror.

THE WATCHER IN THE ATTIC [aka The Stroller in the Attic] (Japan 1976 / Noboru Tanaka)
**
Based on two pervy short stories from the 1920s that have been inelegantly smashed together (Stalker in the Attic and The Human Chair, both by Edogawa Ranpo), this film doesn't give the viewer an easy way in unless you're familiar with the source material. It doesn't help that the entire first half is wall-to-wall sex, to the extent that, when leading lady Minako starts her third or fourth wank, it's a bit "Bloody hell, here we go again...." But it just about transpires that she's a rich woman who spends a lot of time at the boarding house she owns, having it off with various weirdo tenants. She's watched by a voyeur in the ceiling, and when she realises this it only seems to fascinate her, and she ends up killing one of her partners, apparently for the voyeur's benefit. Also, her chauffeur likes to hide inside the upholstery of an armchair and finger her when she's sitting on it. But this is about the developing relationship between Minako and the voyeur, yet with only three dialogue scenes together, there's not much to get your teeth into. As for the ending, it reeks of "fuck it, this'll do". Still, it's a porno really innit, not the greatest love story ever told.

MARTYRS (USA 2015 / Kevin & Michael Goetz)
**
It's quite impressive how precisely directors Kevin & Michael Goetz manage to replicate the oppressive, downbeat tone of Pascal Laugier's highly-regarded 2008 film in this US remake, at least until there's some Hollywood-friendly crash-bang action in the third act. But that just means that I was constantly reminded of the original, and that's not a good thing. Not because the French film is better - it isn't - but because it was just like sitting through that overrated pile of shite for an unwelcome third time. It's basically the same: a young woman takes revenge on the people who kidnapped and tortured her as a child, but it emerges that they were part of something bigger and even more sinister. But there are some improvements. Not only is the underground bunker - eye-rollingly vast in the original - much more believably proportioned, but the Koetz brothers alter the heroines' fates so that the scenes of torture and violence are more varied, exciting and pack a greater emotional punch than Laughier ever managed with his one-note bleak-fest. It's still ultimately a weak execution of an interesting premise, though.

THE INITIATION (USA 1983 / Larry Stewart)
***
Until the surprise twist ending, it seems that this college and shopping mall and Christmas slasher has spoilered itself by opening with a flashback showing what happened to heroine Kelly one night when she was nine. And yet the supposed "mystery" of what happened that night lingers over most of the movie as a researcher uses hypnotherapy to try and help her. Meanwhile an apparently easily-identifiable killer escapes from a sanitarium, decapitates the man Kelly believes to be her dad (a disappointingly short-lived turn from the great Clu Gulager), and then somehow knows to find Kelly and her friends at the shopping mall they've broken into as part of a sorority initiation dare. It's typical of a script that's all over the place: funny and clever at times (especially in the party scene), yet at one point having a PhD student use the word "fictitionalize", throwing in a total downer of a backstory for the "virgin" character, and largely going through the motions when it comes to the stalk 'n' slash stuff. But it does feature more than the average amount of gratuitous female nudity, plus a man dressed as a giant cock and balls.

666: SATAN RETURNS [aka Shaolin vs. the Devil's Omen] (Hong Kong 1996 / Wai-Lun Lam)
*
An incoherent mess of a movie that can't decide whether it wants to be a violent action thriller, a spoof of films like Se7en and The Silence of the Lambs (both of which are referred to by name at one point), or a supernatural horror flick. A serial killer claiming to be the resurrection of Judas is searching Hong Kong for his new master, Satan's daughter, whom he knows has a date of birth of 6 June 1969 and can survive having her heart removed. This Judas character also has the power to grant his victims their greatest wishes before he kills them, though not generally anything spectacular: the rallying of the financial markets, for example, or an expensive car that we don't even get to see. In charge of the police investigation, for some reason, are a young woman from the complaints department and her flatmate's comedy boyfriend. At least it's nicely shot, which is to say it looks like most Hong Kong horrors of the time - all coloured gels, dry ice, fans and tilted angles - though often it's visually confusing, with too many shifts into dream sequences or pointless black & white shots. Not nearly as much fun as it could've been.

WIENER-DOG (USA 2015 / Todd Solondz)
**
There's a point early in this four-part anthology comedy that reminded me that Todd Solondz's brand of humour was once ground-breaking and transgressive. But that ground was broken a long time ago, and the scene in question - pretty piano music playing over a lengthy tracking shot of a long, long trail of dog diarrhoea - just comes across as the director trying to do a John Waters. Yet by the end of the film, the lengthy dog diarrhoea tracking shot turned out to have been pretty much the highlight. Make of that what you will. For while the first segment, about a young boy and his new puppy, is fairly enjoyable, with a strong performance by Tracy Letts as the kid's grumpy dad, the rest of the film wallows in the fashionable "sadcom" style. Bleak comedy can be hilarious, but sadcoms are not just bleak, they're completely devoid of jokes, while looking as though they're supposed to be funny. If you do suffer through the other stories, which largely concern death, depression and doubt, the last few minutes contain the kind of surreal, inventive and funny ideas that the rest of the movie was crying out for.

TAG (Japan 2015 / Sion Sono)
****
After a supernatural force slaughters her schoolmates on a coach trip, sole survivor Mitsuko changes into a different uniform and stumbles into the nearest school, where she knows no one but they all know her. Her new friends are lovely, so it's quite tragic when they all become victims of the next bizarre massacre... but we'll see some of them again soon. It doesn't take a genius to notice that pillows are a recurring motif in Tag, and that pillows are associated with dreaming, so on top of there being a "surreal" character called Sur, who talks about how surreal everything is all the time, you may find it a bit lacking in subtlety. In addition, director Sion Sono packs so much in that, even at a slim 85 minutes, it feels perhaps as much as half an hour too long. Yet there's lots to love, not least that, when Mitsuko changes into another young woman, it's a credit to both Sono and Mariko Shinoda, the actor who plays her second incarnation, that the latter is totally believable as being the same character. It's a shame that so much of the bloodshed is done with CGI, but realism is hardly the movie's main concern. Definitely one of Sono's best.

MAY (USA 2002 / Lucky McKee)
****
Lucky McKee's breakthrough movie is a really nicely-made piece of lightweight comedy fluff, although bear in mind that my idea of lightweight comedy fluff includes a film about a fragile woman who suffers heartbreak on a daily basis, contains cartoonish takes on self-harm, and ends up with a mass murdering mental breakdown. May is a sad, lonely, kooky veterinary nurse, brilliantly played by Angela Bettis (the fact that she went on to star in the following year's Carrie remake should give you an idea of her brittle mousiness), and she's morbid too, something that ultimately drives away her first boyfriend even though he's supposed to be a horror fan. In the end, elements of May's childhood that we saw in prologue - eyesight problems, difficulty making friends, and a weird doll in a glass cage - all come together to culminate in a macabre climax. By rights this should be pretty terrible, given its indie-quirky trappings: lots of brown, lots of shabby chic, that kind of thing. But McKee manages to use that as an unpromising backdrop from which to hang a succession of larger-than-life characters and outrageous events.

CREEP (USA 2014 / Patrick Brice)
*
Bad found footage movies really, really suck. Perhaps there's a good film to be made about the slightly comically bumbling Aaron and the strange and suspicious Josef, the former a cameraman hired to shoot the latter's video message to his baby son, Josef apparently having not long to live. Josef spends the next few hours and days terrorising Aaron with psychological mind games, escalating to veiled death threats, but with no proper camera setups, minimal editing and no music score, this is not filmmaking at its full potential. The best bit is a scene in which Josef tells a disturbing story about a bestiality fantasy, but it's audio-only, playing out over a plain black screen: the antithesis of cinema. Mostly, though, it's just so mundane. There's a lengthy and inconsequential traipse through the woods that fills several minutes, and Josef has a habit of jumping out from around corners "as a joke", for which read: to attempt to spook the viewer with the cheapest jump scares possible. And though at one point I thought the film was about to pull an unexpected switcheroo, no such luck: this cat-and-mouse story is as predictable as it gets.

ONE MISSED CALL (Japan 2003 / Takashi Miike)
***
Coming five years after Ringu's haunted VHS scares, Takashi Miike gives us haunted mobile phones, in a great example of a cool little film that totally outstays its welcome. In a premise that doesn't make complete technical sense, teenagers are being phoned by their near-future selves with a voicemail that plays their final moments before death, and are subsequently warned not to answer these calls, even though as the title suggests, they weren't answering them anyway. A number of weird deaths occur, but the phenomenon culminates on live TV with a superbly staged attack on the predicted next victim by a bendy-boned ghost, which is the inarguable highlight of the film. With Miike being such a prolific director, it's hard to always know which films he's doing for love and which for money, but this belated lank-haired ghost-girl entry is like when de Palma did Mission Impossible or Scorsese remade Cape Fear: anyone could've had a go, but you feel like you're in the hands of a master filmmaker. Unfortunately it goes on too long, with last-minute attempts to rationalise the supernatural backstory that would be better unresolved.

SCARECROWS (USA 1988 / William Wesley)
**
The first half of Scarecrows is phenomenally boring, despite taking place largely on a hijacked military airplane, an impressive-looking location for a low budget horror film (although it can't be that hard to find an old fuselage and film inside it, pretending that it's airborne). But most of the dialogue in the early scenes is tediously delivered over crackly headsets, or else in voiceover as we actually hear the inner thoughts of one character, a technique rarely seen outside of comedy and for good reason. The plane has been stolen, along with $3.5m, by a not entirely convincing gang of thieves, but one of their number parachutes out with the cash and the others have to find him, which is how they end up in a rickety old house guarded by three violent, zombie scarecrows. This is where the movie gets a bit more interesting, going beyond merely wandering around in the dark with guns and flashlights, though by now the damage is largely done, because the characters are almost uniformly unlikable and the atmosphere is moribund. At least there's some graphic gore, and eye candy in the form of Victoria Christian, to look at.

RATU BUAYA PUTIH (White Crocodile Queen) [aka The White Alligator] (Indonesia 1988 / H Tjut Djalil)
**
A woman gives birth to a magical white crocodile - as you do - followed immediately by a human baby girl, before she and her husband are messily slaughtered by thieves. Years later, the girl has grown into a woman, as has, oddly enough, her reptilian sister, the latter in the form of a croc-goddess who seems to live in a different dimension, but can materialise in the real world and possess her human sister, and get her to avenge their parents' deaths by making actual crocodiles attack the perpetrators, and whatever else the bizarre screenplay requires her to be able to do. Bizarre it might be, but it's mostly pretty turgid stuff, even amateurish at times, with several sex scenes that are unnecessarily lengthy given how coy they are; you'd never guess that the same director would be responsible for the explosive, high-octane Lady Terminator the following year. But there are just about enough random, nutty moments to save this from being a total disaster: some business with a levitating bed, for example, or an unexpected Bollywood-style musical number, or even the world's most unconvincing man vs croc fight.

SERPENT WARRIORS [aka Snake Inferno] (USA 1986 / John Howard & Niels Rasmussen)
*
Some total dreck about a small group of Americans who take it upon themselves to destroy a snake-worshipping tribe, probably because they killed a Taiwanese friend's sister on a Pacific island 40 years ago, although it's not 100% clear, largely because that friend's scenes are spliced in from a completely different film, and so he never shares any screen time with the American characters. He is Chang from 1983's Calamity of Snakes, played by Yuen Kao and here renamed Jason King(!), and there are three key sequences lifted from that movie: Chang's discovery of the snake pit on his building site, the sorcerer-like Snake Master's battle with a giant python, and - right at the end - several minutes taken from the spectacular finalé in which hundreds upon hundreds of serpents attack the residents of Chang's housing block. In between, Serpent Warriors gives us Hollywood C-listers Clint Walker & Christopher Mitchum running around a rocky desert, shooting people with machine guns, for what feels like hours, and a couple of surreal sequences in which Eartha Kitt plays a snake cult priestess.

THE NIGHT FLIER (USA/Italy 1997 / Mark Pavia)
***
Proof that a good actor can play an arsehole character yet still make him likeable, Miguel Ferrer stars as Richard Dees, an unscrupulous reporter working for a total shit-rag of a shock news magazine, who's trying to track down a serial killer vampire pilot before the story breaks into the wider press. A typical 1990s US mainstream horror production, it's... fine, and that's the most enthusiastic I can get about it: it's nicely made, and KNB EFX ensure that there's lots of juicy gore, but it's more interested in characterisation and drama than actually being a "scary movie". (The exception is the final showdown, a nightmarish, black & white depiction of Hell, which is projected directly into Dees's mind by the vampire.) Based on a Stephen King story, this adaptation adds a young journalist rival for Dees, played well by flash-in-the-pan Phoebe Cates-lookalike Julie Entwisle, but it couldn't be more blatant that she's been crowbarred in as an afterthought. When she and Ferrer are on screen together, the movie comes alive, but she's barely in it at all. This really could've done with another few drafts.

THE KILLER ELEPHANTS (Thailand 1976 / Kom Akkadej)
*
Rural Thailand is like the Wild West, with a lone cop battling a huge, widespread gang of villains, although like a true cinematic hero, no matter how many bullets they fire at him, none ever hit. That's the premise according to the English dub of this film, anyway (the original Thai version isn't readily available). But to be honest, I'm not entirely convinced that the dubbers had a copy of the translated script to work from, because most of the time the characters just describe what they're doing or are about to do, in a range of stupid accents that suggest the voice artists weren't taking this at all seriously. I'm not even sure that the cop character is actually supposed to be a cop: certainly he has no uniform, boss or colleagues. The result is that the movie skips from one action scene to the next with no sense of why anything's happening. But worst of all, the title's a massive misnomer: at no point is anyone killed by an elephant. There are elephants, but they mostly just get in people's way - including one point where a guy knocks himself out by running head-first into an elephant's dangling dong! It should be called The Inconvenient Elephants.

LAKE PLACID (USA 1999 / Steve Miner)
***
There are top-notch comic performances all round in this light-hearted creature feature about a 30-foot crocodile that's munching its way through people and animals in a New England lake. The script's backbone is pure Hollywood schmaltz, with four clashing personalities (Brendan Gleeson's sheriff, Bill Pullman's conservation officer, Bridget Fonda's paleontologist and Oliver Platt's millionaire eccentric) initially coming to blows, but learning to love each other by the end. Likewise, the snappy, whip-smart dialogue in the first half recalls your Bogart & Bacall-era movies, albeit with more sarcasm and swearing (and at its weakest points, lazy snark). So it's more of a comedy than a horror film, but there are some entertaining moments of gore - and gallows humour based around them - and, of course, a big fuck-off crocodile. It's annoying that the croc's full-body shots are rendered in CGI that's as unconvincing as Gleeson's American accent, because Stan Winston was on-hand to provide an animatronic head, and I'm sure he could've made the whole thing out of rubber. It's far from a deal-breaker, though.

VENOM (UK 1981 / Piers Haggard)
***
A chauffeur, a maid and their sinister German friend are plotting something at the Belgravia townhouse where the first two work for a Hollywood animal wrangler, his jet-setting daughter and her asthmatic young son. But things don't go to plan, thanks to various unexpected events, not the least of which is a mix-up at a pet shop which leads the boy to bring home a deadly black mamba instead of the harmless house snake he'd ordered. Based on a pulp thriller novel, what stops Venom from being too silly is the impressively classy casting of Oliver Reed, Susan George and Klaus Kinski as the would-be criminal trio. Most of the fun is in the set-up, whereas the bulk of the film is a surprisingly straight siege movie, in which you'll even come to forget that there's a dangerous animal in the house at all. Reed is similarly underused as well, as it happens. What is a bit stupid is that the snake only ever targets three villains, helping out the Metropolitan Police no end. But it's one of those early 80s films that feels more like it was made in the early 70s, and I always like that vibe.

T2: TRAINSPOTTING (UK 2017 / Danny Boyle)
***
Comedy is front and centre of this 20-years-later sequel to one of the most iconic films of the 1990s, or at least it is during its strong first 80 minutes or so. Renton makes a cautious return to Edinburgh, Spud is suicidal, Begbie is planning his escape from prison, and Sick Boy is just getting by, and their paths cross once again in a series of funny skits which are every bit what you want from a middle-aged follow-up. They've put heroin behind them, but they're still hopeless losers, and they still know all the same people: cue a string of cameos from the likes of Kelly Macdonald, Irvine Welsh and others. It trades on nostalgia big time - of course it does - but never in a lazy way. The last 30-40 minutes aren't so much fun, with the inevitable clash between Begbie and Renton forcing a shift into workmanlike thriller mode. But the real thrills come earlier, thanks to the film's innovative, free-wheeling style of editing (full marks to editor Jon Harris) which, among other things, seamlessly takes us back to 1996 on numerous occasions, and as you'd fully expect, a thumping good soundtrack.

SPLIT (USA 2016 / M Night Shyamalan)
**
Three teenage schoolgirls are abducted by a paedophile, but he is just one of 23 personalities inhabiting the body of a mentally ill man. The girls try to trick them and force their way out of their cells, while the man's psychiatrist tries to figure out why she's getting distressed emails from the patient despite him appearing calm and well-balanced in person. But will the victims escape before the feared 24th personality - The Beast - makes an appearance? Add to that intermittent flashbacks showing the childhood of one of the girls, and there's a lot going on here; probably too much, in fact. Just like James McAvoy's portrayal of the patient himself, the film never has the chance to dig very deep into its subject matter... and when it comes to McAvoy's performance, the various identities are generally limited to a silly voice and some mannerisms. It's an interesting enough premise, and it's unusual enough to keep you watching, but unfortunately M Night Shyamalan's direction is unimaginative and quite boring, favouring centrally-framed head-and-shoulders shots no matter what's happening. And the climactic scenes are plain underwhelming.

CLAWS [aka Devil Bear] (USA 1977 / Richard Bansbach & Robert E Pearson)
*
A forest town is being terrorised by a huge grizzly bear, and it's up to a group of middle-aged guys, including of course one native American stereotype played by a white actor in redface, to track it and kill it, in this tediously macho film from Alaska, where men are "men" and masculinity is measured in rifles. A horribly edited picture, with leaden, soapy interludes between the hero, his estranged wife and her new lover, it's often so inept that it's easy to forget that it was made to try and get some of that post-Jaws dollar. Part of Jaws's success was putting a total newcomer to shark-hunting - one who's afraid of the ocean, no less - at the centre of its story. But Claws's hero is first seen shooting bears in the woods, so when, five years later, he leads the devil bear mission, it's just back to business as usual. Unforgivably low on bear attacks, featuring some laughable stuntwork, and devoid of suspense (the directors give us a shit-load of slow-motion instead) the only things of interest are (a) the bit where the "native" goes mad and hallucinates a load of stuffed animals and weird priestesses, and (b) some cute baby animal footage.

THE PIT [aka Teddy] (Canada 1981 / Lew Lehman)
***
An overlooked little gem, The Pit is an oddity in the way that it throws (at least) two popular horror tropes into the same pot, without making much effort to link them together. Jamie is a socially isolated 12 year-old with an inevitable crush on his babysitter, who discovers a hole in the woods that's home to four hairy, flesh-eating humanoids. And also his teddy bear is alive and talks to him in a sinister fashion. No wonder the movie's known as both The Pit and Teddy: it's a two-for-the-price-of-one deal. Anyway, Jamie starts feeding his enemies and rivals to the monsters, in cheerful, almost comical scenes, although the film is played far more straight than the outlandish fantasy premise might lead you to expect. Had this been made at the other end of the eighties, it doubtless would've been packed with cheesy, OTT yucks, as in The Suckling for example. But not here. In fact, and as is so often the case when there's a young protagonist (and star Sammy Snyders was best known as Tom Sawyer in the Huckleberry Finn TV series), it feels like a PG-rated kids' film... which makes every moment of nudity and gore a lovely surprise!

THE MIDNIGHT SWIM (USA 2014 / Sarah Adina Smith)
*
Three half-sisters gather at the lakeside home of their mother - missing, suspected drowned - to try and figure out what happened. But moderately strange and - to them, at least - unnerving things happen, including that overused cliché of dead birds appearing on their doorstep overnight. We see everything through a camcorder lens, as one of the women has taken it upon herself to document the whole thing, even though it makes other people uncomfortable (reasonably so, if you ask me), and yes this is one of those POV films where you'll frequently wonder just why the camera's still rolling. It even has one of those scenes where the subjects ask for it to be switched off, so the character with the camera just puts it down but leaves the audio recording so that we can still hear what's going on. If that wasn't bad enough, the dialogue is mostly improvised, but without any spark or the slightest element of wit coming from the permanently glum cast. It's unusual for a film to lose me in its first minute, but this starts off dreary, and never picks up, not even during an out-of-the-blue musical number, which is actually just excruciating.

SATÁNICO PANDEMONIUM (LA SEXORCISTA) (Satanic Pandemonium (The Sexorcist)) (Mexico 1975 / Gilberto Martínez Solares)
**
Satan's up to his old tricks again, attempting to lead the devout Sister Maria into temptation via his usual methods: apples, hunky topless men, erm... predatory lesbian nuns. At first Lucifer simply seems to be trying to get his leg over, but as the slight story unfolds, it seems he has a greater plan for Maria. The thing about Sister Maria, though, is that she never learns, which makes for a somewhat repetitive movie. That said, it never stops being amusing when she falls, yet again, for Satan's latest con. Clearly this is nunsploitation, which usually delivers a reasonable amount of naughty, church-baiting fun - presumably even moreso if you live in one of the overwhelmingly Catholic countries that specialised in the style - though in general I find that weirdo horror movies from Mexico (as this is) to be somehow less joyously uproarious than their Eurosleaze counterparts, and Satánico Pandemonium doesn't even get that wild, not even during the climactic convent orgy, which only offers the softest of softcore thrills. It still scores points for exploitation value, though.

TICKS [aka Infested] (USA 1993 / Tony Randel)
***
Script-wise very much a by-the-numbers teen-friendly campsite horror flick, Ticks is populated with stock characters who'll feel familiar to anyone au fait with the various Friday the 13th sequels: the shy boy, the project leader's stroppy daughter, the horny rebellious couple, the streetwise token black guy, and all the rest of them. Here, of course, they're not being stalked by a masked psycho, but by a swarm of big mutant bugs. Aside from having such predictable characters, the movie suffers from a reluctance to kill any of them off, at least until the chaotic, all-action third act, in which Hellraiser II director Tony Randel once again gets to show off his skills at shooting effects-heavy horror action. For despite the lack of deaths, there's plenty of gore to enjoy, and what's more, this must have been one of the last Hollywood creature features to be made without CGI at its disposal, meaning the insects are rendered with a satisfying combination of animatronics, puppetry and stop motion. We even get one of those splatter movie highlights, the transformation scene, as a giant tick breaks out of a human corpse.

MAMBA [aka Fair Game] (Italy 1988 / Mario Orfini)
**
Aside from the opening scene, which features a guest appearance by Bill Moseley as a snake expert, this is a near real-time two hander starring the ever-sinister Gregg Henry from Body Double, and Trudie Styler from... well, from Bromsgrove actually, though her accent is all over the place in this film. They play former couple Gene & Eva, who've recently split up, but because he's a total cunt, Gene releases a lethal mamba into Eva's sprawling but curiously windowless loft apartment, and then waits 53 minutes for the snake to die of "auto-intoxication" - but not before, he hopes, it kills her first. The thing with this simple "one woman vs an animal" premise is that it could be a brilliantly suspenseful thriller, or it could just be a bit dull, given on the abilities of the writer-director. Spoiler: it's the latter. To be fair to Mario Orfini, he's not solely to blame, because Styler doesn't have the acting chops to carry the movie. (Henry spends most of the running time sitting silently in his SUV, where he's somehow got a high-tech snake tracking/aggression meter device.) The twist ending is not only very guessable, but makes no sense!

PYTHON (USA 2000 / Richard Clabaugh)
***
By rights, this ought to be total dogshit. The monster is a 129-foot CGI python, the effects work on which is so crap that its scales actually get less detailed in close-up shots - pixelated, even! And it has a voice actor credited, because snakes are well-known for all that growling they do. The appearances by big-name(ish) stars Robert Englund and Casper van Dien are largely confined to a slow and lengthy conversation they have in a room, which the film keeps cutting back to. In between the attack scenes and Englund & von Dien's sinister chat, the bulk of the movie feels like a cheap and breezy teen comedy played by actors in their 30s, with terrible, inappropriate music cues. Even the funky opening credits were designed with no thought given to whether they fit the film in question. But you know what? It's undemanding, trashy fun; a true modern-day B-movie. It's the supporting cast that saves it, with Gary Grubbs (perhaps best known on the big screen as the goofy-looking assistant DA in JFK) excellent as the sheriff, and a thoroughly enjoyable comic scene between Scott Williamson and Jenny McCarthy.

THE HOUSE OF EXORCISM (Italy/West Germany/Spain 1975 / Mario Bava & Alfredo Leone)
***
Following a strange encounter with a man who may be Satan, a tourist collapses due to a case of demonic possession, and is carted off to hospital where she - perhaps - dreams about a bizarre gothic mystery in a mansion. If parts of this sound familiar, it's because the beginning and the gothic parts are taken from Mario Bava's earlier film, Lisa and the Devil. It's extremely impressive how seamlessly the opening segues into the first bit of new footage (Lisa's collapse). It's far less impressive, though, the way that the original film is integrated into the new possession sequences. At first it looks like something Lisa's dreaming while unconscious, but as time goes on, sections from Lisa and the Devil just keep appearing without any context. It wasn't Bava's most exciting film, but it had a watchable enigmatic quality. Here, what's left of it is incomprehensible, baffling and, compared to the hospital scenes, boring. But I love a good demonic possession, and Elke Sommer's possessed and sweary Lisa is just as much fun as Regan from The Exorcist and Ippolita from The Antichrist.

PREVENGE (UK 2016 / Alice Lowe)
***
The prospect of Sightseers star Alice Lowe directing herself as another darkly funny serial killer is an irresistible one, but the end result is a real mixed bag. She plays Ruth, a heavily pregnant woman whose partner has died in a climbing accident and, in a premise that may have been cribbed from 1990's Baby Blood, her foetus speaks to her and has her track down and murder those she holds responsible. These victims are played by instantly-recognisable comic actors such as Kayvan Novak, Tom Davis, Dan Renton Skinner, Mike Wozniak and Gemma Whelan, all of whom it's a joy to see on the big screen. But the casting of comedians doesn't help with the film's wobbly, uncertain tone. Lowe seems unable to commit to either gritty realism or arty fantasy, so her movie keeps bouncing from one style to the other, never truly finding its feet. Similarly, Ruth adopts a different persona for each of her murderous encounters, which is fun but means we never really get to know the real her, and that makes it difficult to connect with her as a character. So Prevenge is a bit of a misfire, but it's an enjoyable enough watch.

DOGS [aka Slaughter] (USA 1976 / Burt Brinckerhoff)
**
David McCallum, best known as Robert Vaughn's suave co-star in The Man from U.N.C.L.E., is inspired casting as the dishevelled British professor in a California university's science faculty who, together with a colleague, come to realise that a spate of deadly attacks on cattle and, latterly, people is the work of dogs. Pet dogs, in fact, for some reason prompted by pheromones into packing together and going on the rampage. It's funny to think that this was made in the wake of Jaws, the first summer blockbuster, because it's laughably small and low-rent in comparison. McCallum and his colleague don't even get to do anything to help stop the killer dogs: aside from giving the viewer a biology lesson, their role is largely to stand around wide-eyed and helpless. Perhaps this could've been a really good movie, but the all-important dog attack scenes aren't directed particularly well. Chances are you'll be more likely to remember the human bantering than the animal action. And isn't it remarkable how people's arms suddenly grow all thick and padded-looking when they're being bitten by a crazed dog?!

THE EYES OF MY MOTHER (USA 2016 / Nicolas Pesce)
**
There's nothing wrong with a director eschewing the conventions of horror cinema and bringing his or her own artistic style to the genre. And as such, I can find things to admire in The Eyes of My Mother. But very little to enjoy. It seems to be part of a new wave of subdued "horror dramas" with a hard, unwavering focus on their outwardly fragile but inwardly tough female leads, at the expense of any secondary characters; see also A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night and Under the Shadow, both of which also left me fairly nonplussed. Francisca is a young serial killer, but it's unclear why she became one because her backstory - which takes up the first 25% of the running time - is an incredible feat of alienating one's audience. As a young girl, she witnesses her mother (whom she loves) being murdered by a stranger, but neither Francisca nor her father seem to give the slightest shit about it. I get that their subsequent abduction and torture of the stranger - which continues for over a decade - is their way of dealing with the killing, but their lack of emotion is utterly bewildering, and, for me, killed my interest in Francisca from the start.

FRIGHTMARE [aka Cover Up] (UK 1974 / Pete Walker)
***
Frightmare is a terrible title for this film, promising all sorts of scary terrors, when it's actually a fairly cosy middle-class chiller, a tall tale that could just as easily have been made for British television in 1974 as for the cinema, give or take a bit of gore. Indeed, some scenes were even filmed at BBC Television Centre. The American release title of Cover Up is much more appropriate, as it concerns the secrets about their parents that a pair of sisters keep from each other. Sensible Jackie thinks that her juvenile delinquent sister Debbie believes that they're long dead, to protect her from the truth that they were sentenced to time in a psychiatric hospital (together, unbelievably) following a shocking killing spree in the 50s. But Debbie not only knows that they're alive and living in the countryside, but that her mother is having a homicidal relapse. Sheila Keith's performance as the murderous fortune teller has rightly been praised, but Deborah Fairfax, who stars as Jackie, is awful, her soap opera-style acting ensuring that any mild tension that's been built suddenly dissipates whenever she appears.

TARANTULAS: THE DEADLY CARGO (USA 1977 / Stuart Hagmann)
***
Tom Atkins makes his horror debut as a pilot who's trying to fly $31,000 of hooky coffee beans from Ecuador to California, but he has several eight-legged stowaways. And when his plane lands outside a small town, they escape and start getting all bitey. There's oodles of community spirit and everyone muscles in to help out, but the screenplay has a take-no-prisoners approach to who gets killed off, which is good, though it's a tad undermined when we're told they're not tarantulas at all, but deadly banana spiders (no, they are definitely tarantulas), and some "Arrgh! Spiders!" acting. Ultimately this is a small-scale disaster movie, but a very handsomely-mounted production, considering that it was made for TV, with lots of extras and aerial action. In fact, at one point the heroes fly their light aircraft over the town to see if the spiders are travelling in any particular route, when real people would just figure it out by looking at a map. Complete with the obligatory post-Jaws ethically-dubious mayor, this is inoffensive PG fun for all, though if you think that tarantulas are frightening rather than floofy, you'll likely find certain sequences creepy.

THE WORLD OF KANAKO (Japan 2014 / Tetsuya Nakashima)
***
Akikazu, a grizzled and permanently angry maverick cop, finds out that his daughter (whom he hasn't contacted in ages) has gone missing, and suddenly his paternal instinct kicks in, and he smashes his way through everything and everyone on his journey to discover some dark truths about her: drugs, prostitution... the usual good-girl-gone-bad clichés. Akikazu is perhaps cinema's most unsympathetic protagonist ever; even the term "anti-hero" is too honourable to describe him: he beats up women and girls, even rapes his ex-wife at one point - yet Kôji Yakusho's brutal, award-winning portrayal of him ensures that his quest remains compelling, even as you feel he deserves to fail. From the director of the enigmatic Confessions, this is way more high-octane, but it can be similarly difficult to follow at times, frequent flashbacks again meaning you're constantly having to get your bearings to figure out which timeframe we're in, and even then it's often unclear how exactly what we're watching is relevant. But the relentless violence keeps your eyes glued to the screen, and there's a diverse pop soundtrack that would do Tarantino proud.

ANACONDA (USA 1997 / Luis Llosa)
***
Like a version of Cannibal Holocaust where everything only goes wrong in a PG-13 way, a documentary film crew are happily trundling down the Amazon in search of a lost tribe, when they pick up a stranded sailor and before long are having to avoid being killed by a 40-foot anaconda. Apart from having an impressively star-studded cast (including Jon Voight, Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube and Eric Stoltz), this post-Jurassic Park creature feature does the bare minimum to be a just-about enjoyable-enough entertainment product. The story - and particularly the order in which the characters die - is predictable, the dialogue is functional, the action is... just sort of there. The CGI FX are, of course, terrible, but most of the snake shots use animatronics instead, and they're acceptable, if a little plasticky - although I'm not sure what a "realistic" 40-foot anaconda would look like. I'm guessing Stoltz was the highest-paid actor in the cast, because he's all-but written out early on, spending most of the running time laid up in bed. Really, it's the presence of Lopez and bought that save this from total "meh"diocrity.

TENEMOS LA CARNE (We Have the Flesh) [aka We are the Flesh] (Mexico 2015 / Emiliano Rocha Minter)
***
Homeless brother and sister duo, Lucio & Fauna, take shelter in the smashed-up home of a weird and unpleasant little homunculus of a man. He puts them to work in some sort of unspecified building capacity, feeds them dubious food and drink, and tries to convince Lucio to have sex with Fauna. Once that happens, things get really strange. Fauna's insatiable sexual desire is unlocked, the action suddenly shifts to caves that are lit red and blue, everyone's wanking all over the place, there's necrophilia, a resurrection, a murder, a lesbian rape and eventually a cannibalistic sex orgy. And I didn't understand a single fucking minute of it. A piece of Mexican surrealism, the obvious reference point is the work of Alejandro Jodorowsky, though this film doesn't feature his joyously creative and playful attitude at all, instead focusing on more base matters, with plenty of genital closeups and bloody moments. And although the point of the film is a complete mystery (to me, anyway), it's very watchable, it looks and sounds great, it's never boring and it's satisfyingly nuts.

THE EXPELLED [aka F] (UK 2010 / Johannes Roberts)
***
Britain's right-wing tabloids managed to keep their "hoodie" moral panic (ie the fear of young people in hooded tops... yeah I know) running from 2005 to 2008, which means that the brilliant Eden Lake was made just in time to cash in on it, whereas F arrived too late. Also, while Eden Lake gave its villains suitably threatening personalities, in this film they're literally faceless items of clothing, like something from sci-fi or a ghost story. It's probably supposed to be an impressionistic metaphor, but it looks daft. Another misstep is that, despite essentially being a school slasher, there are only actually two schoolkids on site, with most of the victims being members of staff. Still, red-blooded males ought to appreciate the presence of Eliza Bennett and Roxanne McKee, two particularly attractive and nubile young women, while everyone can get a kick out of seeing a serious actor like David Schofield playing the lead in a slasher movie. Special make-up effects guy Dan Martin provides some very grisly corpses, so there's that too. But it's very downbeat, and the lack of any resolution is an obvious let-down that really should have been rewritten.

SNAKES ON A PLANE (USA/Germany 2006 / David R Ellis)
***
Who knew that, behind such a dopey, attention-grabbing title would be hidden such an entertaining and well-made movie? Okay, so at first it does seem to be funded entirely by product placement, given that so many brands are prominently positioned that it becomes a distraction even before the opening credits having finished rolling. But once Samuel L Jackson turns up, as the FBI agent who needs to escort a murder witness from Honolulu to Los Angeles, his sheer screen presence ensures that you won't be distracted for the rest of the running time. Of course, as the title suggests, the jumbo jet they take has a serious serpent problem, resulting in much carnage. Most of the animals are, unsurprisingly, unconvincing CG animations, which means that while the film is good at conjuring a sense of chaos, it's not so good at creating a sense of danger, which is something I like in my animal attack movies. The script's a bit racist: while 80% of the characters are caricatures, the non-white ones tend to be racial stereotypes to boot. But if you can overlook that in the name of comedy, then there's very little here to dislike.

FEMINA RIDENS (Italy 1969 / Piero Schivazappa)
***
Featuring a lead character who Oklahoma state legislator Justin Humphrey would get on well with, this stylish, sexed-up satire is remarkably ahead of its time, and very, very daring for 1969. Largely a two-hander between Phillippe Leroy and Dagmar Lassander, he plays Sayer, a wealthy executive who believes that women exist purely for men to fertilise, and she is Maria, the press officer whom he abducts and tortures on account of not being able to get turned on any other way. With his short blond hair and swanky pad, at times Sayer comes across like a pervy version of Diabolik from Mario Bava's comic book thriller. But after a while, Maria starts to react positively to his torments; whether it's her masochistic side coming out, or just Stockholm syndrome, isn't clear, but it's unnerving and quite something to observe. There comes a point when their relationship becomes more romantic, consensual and vanilla, and without any hint that she's got ulterior motives, these late scenes are disappointing on a first viewing. But rest assured that the outcome is quite satisfying. Not amazing, but certainly amusing.

BURNING BRIGHT (USA 2009 / Carlos Brooks)
***
Almost exactly like a big cat copy of the Italian film Mamba (aka Fair Game), Burning Bright is about a woman who finds herself deliberately trapped in a house with a tiger, and just like Mamba is virtually a two-hander except for the scene at the start where the villain obtains the dangerous animal from a nefarious dealer. Oh, and also there's the fact that she's also trapped in the house with her severely autistic kid brother, but he's worst than useless and contributes nothing to the action, though he does of course give the heroine's predicament some extra weight. I always think that stretching out such a wafer-thin premise to feature length is a real test of a film-maker's talents, and writers Christine Coyle Johnson & Julie Prendiville Roux, and director Carlos Brooks, don't do a terrible job here, though it's blatant that the reason the opening and closing credits run for a combined 12 minutes is because a movie with a sub-80 minute run time looks a bit embarrassing. But it packs in a fair amount of excitement, making this a decent enough quickie.

NURSE (USA 2013 / Douglas Aarniokoski)
**
Nurse - this movie needs its pulse checking, stat! Because despite what the throbbing rock of Ida Maria's "I Eat Boys Like You for Breakfast" - which pops up a couple of times - might suggest, this film, or about 75% of it anyway, has a really sluggish pace, in no small part thanks to star Paz de la Huerta's sleepy line delivery, especially in voiceover. She plays Abby, a self-confessed "slutty"-looking hospital nurse with a sideline in serial killing, her main targets being the married men who come onto her in bars and at work. Most of the storyline, though, focuses on the abusive relationship she forms with a new colleague, which culminates with Abby attempting to frame her for her crimes. The scenes in which she tortures and kills the cheating guys are undeniably thrilling, particularly the one set in an operating theatre. Unfortunately, though, there are only three of them, when Abby as murderer really ought to be the main focus: she has great franchise potential. The finalé is action-packed, at least, and also finally gets round to justifying making you sit there wearing those silly stereoscopic glasses for 85 minutes.