MOVIEJOURNAL 2017 (PART TWO)

[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
*** Adjust Your Tracking
** And Soon the Darkness
*** Beyond the Gates
** Birdemic: Shock and Terror
** Black Dynamite
*** Black Magic 2 [aka Revenge of the Zombies]
**** Carnage: Swallowing the Past
* Les Cauchemars Naissent la Nuit (Nightmares Come at Night)
** The Conjuring 2
**** Creatures from the Abyss [aka Plankton]
** Cry_Wolf
** Demon Witch Child [aka The Possessed]
** Detention
*** Elle (She)
* Evidence
*** La Fantasma di Sodoma (Sodoma's Ghost)
*** Get Out
*** Guilty of Romance
* The Horror Star [aka Frightmare]
*** Hostel Part III
*** I Am Not a Serial Killer
** Keanu [aka Cat Boys]
* Lake Placid vs Anaconda
**** Landmine Goes Click
** The Last of Sheila
* Lobos de Arga (Wolves of Arga) [aka Attack of the Werewolves]
** Lost Boys: The Tribe
* Lost Boys: The Thirst
* The Love Witch
** Mil Sexos Tiene la Noche (A Thousand Sexes Has the Night) [aka Night of a Thousand Desires]
*** Offspring
** Ouija
** Paranormal Activity 2
** Paranormal Activity 3
* Paranormal Activity 4
*** Personal Shopper
*** La Residencia (The Residence) [aka The House That Screamed]
** Rush Week
*** Shadow: Dead Riot
* Shadow of Death [aka Destroyer]
*** Strange Circus
**** Suddenly in the Dark [aka Suddenly in Dark Night]
** 247°F
*** V/H/S Viral
* Viva
* Les Week-Ends Maléfiques du Comte Zaroff (The Evil Weekends of Count Zaroff) [aka Seven Women for Satan]
**** The Woman

All reviews


LANDMINE GOES CLICK (Georgia 2015 / Levan Bakhia)
****
A phenomenal demonstration of how a movie can expertly shift between drama, comedy, suspense and terrible brutality, something I haven't seen since 2005's Hostel. Oddly, this too concerns three tourists in eastern Europe, though with this being a Georgian production you can't really accuse it of xenophobia when the local men they meet turn out to be absolute pricks. It's got one of those "What would you do?" premises that I find so enticing: in the middle of nowhere, our hero has inadvertently trodden on a landmine that's primed to explode if he steps off it, and only his best friend's fiancée can help. A middle-aged man appears and offers to assist, but he's a bit of a clown, with an obsessive panty fetish, though it's possible that both he and the script are keeping the sexual threat relatively silly at first, just so it can build into something much worse later on. Without giving too much away, the central predicament doesn't last as long as you might expect, before there's a genre switch which I can't say I enjoyed exactly - it's truly horrific - but it feels like a proper throwback to 1970s grindhouse exploitation nastiness.

DEMON WITCH CHILD [aka The Possessed] (Spain 1975 / Amando de Ossorio)
**
I like the idea of post-Exorcist possession movies, but sometimes they're pretty lame. I can't imagine that director Armando de Ossario saw the Turkish ripoff Şeytan (which was released the same year as this), but Demon Witch Child's talky scenes set in a woefully low-budget suburban home aren't a million miles away. What this copy does add is a bald wig and a wart onto its possessed girl, for she is taken over by a similar-looking old hag near the start of the film. You get the requisite furniture throwing, profane language and the occasional murder, as well as the obligatory attempt to put it all down to rational science, all of which does its job, and none of which offers anything original. I honestly feel like I've never had so little to say about a film - it ambles along in an acceptable way, there's nothing especially wrong with it, but neither is it particularly good... I'm just attempting to fill my self-imposed word count here. Blah blah blah. It's so much harder to write about a nothingy film than a properly bad one. Stop me before I say "meh".

MIL SEXOS TIENE LA NOCHE (Night Has a Thousand Desires) [aka Night of 1,000 Sexes] (Spain 1984 / Jesús Franco)
**
It's funny how the 1970s had sexploitation but the 1980s had erotic thrillers, and somehow in the eighties Jesùs Franco and Tinto Brass hadn't quite got the memo. So here - as with Brass's films of the same decade - what you get is Franco doing his same old soft porn schtick, a bit more classy and well-made than he used to do, but without actually having kept up with the times. And it feels like a real missed opportunity, because this film starts out so well, with Lina Romay's character performing a nightclub psychic act (shades of Deep Red) that had me thinking "wow" even though it's a scripted scene - it just reminds me of brilliant illusions I've seen in real life! But there's about as much dialogue in that opening as there is in the entire rest of the film, which largely consists of people looking at things silently, or getting off with other people moaningly. Whatever plot was brewing becomes unfollowable, and being shot in beautiful Gran Canaria, you don't even get Franco's usual, strangely ominous setting of Calpe (with its omnipresent overbearing massive rock) to set you on edge.

LAKE PLACID VS ANACONDA (USA 2015 / AB Stone)
*
Stupid title - how can a lake fight a snake? No, of course not, this is merely about anacondas pitching up in crocodile territory, though if like me you've skipped the three previous sequels in each franchise, it's surprising and sad to see what an enormous drop in quality this crossover movie is compared to the originals, in every department imaginable. Admittedly, this is the first Syfy "Original" I've ever seen, so I can't say if it's an unusually weak example of their output, or if all their films are this terrible, but this is jaw-droppingly bad. Anaconda-jaw-when-eating-a-full-sized-cow-droppingly bad, in fact, from the half-hearted acting, to the not-even-trying CGI FX, to the comedy-heavy script that substitutes relentless snark for actual jokes, and almost every attempt at humour falls woefully flat. I'm not convinced they even hired a director of photography: the whole thing has an extremely basic "point and shoot" feel. To be fair, there are some splattery moments that raise a smile, even though the CG gore lacks visceral impact, plus Robert Englund has a surprisingly prominent role, and actually puts some effort in.

SUDDENLY IN THE DARK (South Korea 1981 / Young Nam Ko)
****
It's unusual for a horror film to focus so much on the sexual desires and jealousies of a married woman, but that's what keeps Suddenly in the Dark interesting for its long, quiet build-up before it suddenly - yes - gets dark, and goes quite mad. Said woman is happily married, until her husband - a university lepidopterist - returns home from a field trip with Mi-ok, an orphaned teenager, in tow, presenting her to his wife as their new live-in maid. When it turns out that Mi-ok owns the very doll - a weird, skinny, white-faced thing - that her husband had a photo of the previous week, our heroine suspects that they're having an affair. But of course, there's something more supernatural going on, and it's probably got something to do with that doll. Plus, for totally gratuitous psychotronic reasons, she occasionally sees things in kaleidoscopic vision. Set almost entirely in the couple's pleasant, peaceful home, the film does arguably come up short in terms of spooky atmosphere (at least until that climax), but I loved the way that the figurine appears in several different forms, some more creepy than others.

BLACK DYNAMITE (USA 2009 / Scott Sanders)
**
Black Dynamite, a rhinestone-suited, Cuban-heeled, vigilante tough guy with a moustache as big as his afro, has to track down and bust open a conspiracy to smuggle hard drugs into orphanages, in this blaxsploitation spoof with a load of kung-fu thrown in for good measure. Michael Jai White certainly has the screen presence to convince, and he and the rest of the cast no doubt had a whale of a time making this piss-take, but unfortunately the screenplay is way too weak. There's a funny monologue where Black Dynamite talks about a nasty experience in 'Nam, and the big reveal with regards to the drug-pushing conspiracy is agreeably puerile and satirical. It looks and sounds authentic enough too, shot on grainy 16mm and with a funky, brass-heavy score that invites unfavourable comparisons to the superior Police Squad!. But the real problem is that it's mocking a genre that rarely took itself seriously anyway. No one could watch, say, Foxy Brown and think that star Pam Grier and director Jack Hill imagined they were making anything but trashy entertainment. And that leaves this a redundant imitation.

BIRDEMIC: SHOCK AND TERROR (USA 2010 / James Nguyen)
**
A laughable attempt to remake The Birds on a $10k budget (and you'll wonder how it even cost that much), Birdemic spends the first half of its running time on the burgeoning romance between the world's least charismatic man and the beautiful(-ish) former classmate whom he follows out of a diner like a total creep. Then halfway through, and without any build-up whatsoever, their sleepy seaside town is suddenly attacked by dozens of clip-art eagles. I seriously haven't seen a movie so incompetent since we were lent camcorders at school and made our first effort at film-making. But unbelievably, this wasn't director James Nguyen's first effort; he'd been at it for years! The sound recording is terrible, the editor appears to be drunk (check out that boardroom round of applause, that goes on and on and on), and as for the acting... well, you can tell from the very first appearance of lead actor Alan Bagh that he isn't even capable of walking down the street on camera without looking incredibly awkward. The pace is too leaden for this to be truly so-bad-it's-good, but there's enough unintentional comedy for it to be surprisingly watchable.

THE HORROR STAR [aka Frightmare] (USA 1983 / Norman Thaddeus Vane)
*
Dead-on-arrival supernatural slasher in which Conrad, an ageing movie star a bit like Christopher Lee (although more one-dimensional and up himself) dies, and a group of unconvincing horror fans break into his mausoleum and steal his corpse so that they can party with him. But his widow telepathically brings him back to some sort of life, and he sets about slaughtering the kids one by one. It's the sort of premise that could've easily been set up in five minutes or so, but it takes half the runtime before the action gets going. The movie even has not one but two of those false starts where it looks like the story's begun, but it turns out that the characters are merely watching a film within the film. Usually those openings are used to throw some gore at us early doors, especially if it's going to be a while before people start dying for real, but those fake-outs are totally bloodless. Still, it's always fun to see Chuck Mitchell from Porky's - he has a small and pointless role as a detective - and there's a semi-interesting kill in which someone is repeatedly thumped in the face by a levitating coffin.

7 CASES (UK 2015 / Sean J Vincent)
**
The British gangster thriller meets the deadly traps of Saw in this halfway promising debut from Sean J Vincent. I always think that a movie director needs two broad skillsets: the ability to make your film look and sound good, and the ability to manage your cast. Vincent has a decent handle on the first one, but fumbles the second: you'd never know how low-budget this was, were it not for some really dodgy acting. Dali-'tached Paul Cooper is fine as Mitch, but Dave Vincent (hmmm) Phillips lets the side down as Floyd. They are former partners in crime ("literally") who, down on their luck since prison, get back together for one last major armed robbery. But their winnings get nabbed and planted around London by a Jigsaw-style arch-criminal who makes them choose between the money and the lives of people they know. Idiotic moments include the guys immediately re-hiring the getaway driver who blatantly set them up, and Mitch asking Floyd, "What did you do when you got out?", before adding, "Of prison, I mean" for the benefit of viewers unfamiliar with such obscure underworld slang. Ludicrous, but not always in a good way.

GUILTY OF ROMANCE (Japan 2011 / Sion Sono)
***
Bored, meek housewife Izumi takes up the offer of a modelling career, but it turns out that the job is in the porno side of the industry. But despite having been coerced into nudity and having sex on camera in front of several people, the experience unlocks her sexuality and she starts spending her days banging several strangers, first for fun and later for cash (despite being very much a kept woman with a wealthy husband). Aside from the uncomfortable, Emmanuelle-ish implication that rape is a legitimate way to liberate a woman, these scenes are very enjoyable, thanks to a believable and funny performance by Megumi Kagurazaka as a woman who's a maid in the home but a whore outdoors. But when things get darker, the film doesn't work so well, largely because everyone that Izumi meets is not only incredibly unpleasant, but unconvincing as human characters. Meanwhile the police are investigating an extremely gruesome murder, which adds little beyond gore and grotesquerie, and if you're supposed to assume that this is happening in the same timeline, it didn't have me fooled.

CREATURES FROM THE ABYSS [aka Plankton] (Italy 1994 / Al Passeri)
****
Five friends get into trouble at sea but find refuge on an abandoned high-tech ship where dubious scientific research has been done on several mutant fish, leading to the following bizarre exchange: "Professor, how long have you been fucking fish?" / "They were old enough, they were old enough." / "I understand - these things happen." That comes moments after one guy has read in a textbook that plankton enjoy jacuzzis and travel in stretch limos, a line that I think may have been included by the dubbing actor to make sure that you're still paying attention. But that's the kind of movie this is: mid-90s Italian horror with a wonky, not-all-there atmosphere similar to that of Alien 2: On Earth, starring actors with no other credits, edited by a maniac, and wonderfully bad at every single turn. While the hilarity seems unintentional at first, I suspect it's really a knowing spoof, but it works either way. It's also packed with inventive and frequently disgusting horror sequences, fantastic and varied special effects, and the crass character of Bobby is genuinely funny at times. An instant bad movie favourite.

SHADOW OF DEATH [aka Destroyer] (USA 1988 / Robert Kirk)
*
I'm not sure that there's ever been a really good horror movie set in a prison. I think part of the problem is that they're not nice places to begin with, so you don't get the "pleasant calm, violated" aspect that many horror flicks play with. But the setting is the least of this film's problems. Its prison is actually closed down, but being used as a location for an exploitation movie (just like in the previous year's comical Return to Horror High; here Anthony Perkins plays the director). Unfortunately for all concerned, a mass murderer - the last inmate to be sent to the electric chair - is still knocking around, for some reason. Deborah Foreman gets top billing as someone in the stunts or special effects department (you'd think a horror film would know that they're not the same thing), but her scenes seem very disconnected from the Perkins', and it's never very clear what's going on, or why. Certainly the killer's motivation is a mystery (why's he obsessed with Foreman's character?), as in fact is his very state of existence: is he real, or a ghost, or what? This film is a totally garbled, confusing mess, which lacks suspense, shocks, focus or sense.

DETENTION (USA 2011 / Joseph Kahn)
**
A profoundly annoying high school comedy with slasher and sci-fi elements, where the jokes come so quick and fast that it can be exhausting to watch. It would probably be even more exhausting if any of them were actually laugh-out-loud funny, but most of them elicit a small chuckle at best, with the humour never matching the peak of the loveable opening sequence, where all the funniest stuff is front-loaded. It's a movie that desperately wants to be as sassy as Heathers and Scream rolled together, but is too pleased with itself to compare with their effortless cool. Your mileage may vary, of course, but fortunately there's enough energy on screen - courtesy of both the youthful cast and their apparently ADHD writer-director Joseph Kahn - to keep things watchable enough. I did enjoy the way that the millennials' obsession with the 1990s is explained late in the plot, though that doesn't stop it being patently obvious that the real reason is that it's the era that Kahn grew up in, which probably also accounts for his characters' dreadful taste in music: Hoobastank, Hanson, ... STING??!

OFFSPRING (USA 2009 / Andrew van den Houten)
***
A pleasant Maine couple are visited by a friend and her two young children, but they soon become the next targets of a family of forest-dwelling savages with razor-sharp teeth and a taste for human flesh. These human monsters are vicious: their attacks are speedy, brutal and extremely bloody, and the movie doesn't pull any punches in throwing gore around the place, or subjecting major characters to an early death (or near-death). And once the bloodshed starts, it barely lets up; there's not a lot of substance to the movie beyond: set-up ---> lots of violence ---> the end. And I don't have a problem with that. It's far from perfect, though. That set-up has all the atmosphere of a cheap daytime soap, so the film fails to ratchet up tension in the way that, say, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre manages (but then, what does?), and Art Hindle - who plays the detective pulled out of retirement to help the local sheriffs - makes an unconvincing and lumbering hero. But never mind that: just revel in the nastiness.

THE WOMAN (USA 2011 / Lucky McKee)
****
This sequel to the home invasion splatterfest Offspring takes an entirely different approach, and manages to be a very tense domestic drama while simultaneously being a really rather clunky allegory for The Horrors of the Patriarchy. Chris is a man with a middle-class profession (he's a property lawyer) and standard nuclear family, but working-class interests (such as hunting and keeping vicious, caged dogs). While out in the woods with his rifle, he spots the surviving member of Offspring's cannibal clan bathing in a stream, and later abducts her and keeps her chained up in his barn, where he plans to "civilise" her. And he doesn't even keep it a secret from his family. It's clever the way that the movie establishes Chris as a reasonable guy (said abduction notwithstanding), before slowly uncovering the dark underbelly of his character. This does mean that his plan, and his family's response to it, seem barking mad at first, but it all makes a shocking kind of sense later. The film does drop a bollock with a late, untelegraphed revelation, plus the twee indie soundtrack is a tad irritating, but the structure and performances are on point.

ADJUST YOUR TRACKING (USA 2013 / Dan M Kinem & Levi Peretic)
***
I only had a brief period of scouring second-hand shops, jumble sales and boot fairs in an effort to find rare VHS cassettes before DVD - and international online shopping - came along and made it much easier to get hold of obscure movies. This documentary is about several American men who've never stopped collecting the oversized media, even spending over $700 on a tape of Tales from the Quadead Zone (£5 on DVD at Amazon.com). They're an interesting group, although not all of them are particularly eloquent (a lowlight being one Joe Clark's strained effort to describe how watching I Spit on Your Corpse, I Piss on Your Grave leaves you a changed person (slightly more bored than you were before, in my experience). Their homes are invariably a right state, although I did appreciate the guy who's turned his basement into an approximation of an actual video store. Given the thousands of tapes they own, the number of clips we see is disappointingly limited, and even the cover art is only shown fleetingly. Worth a watch, though it only scratches the surface of various, erm, "issues" (social, psychological, etc) that it raises.

247°F (Georgia/Ukraine 2011 / Levan Bakhia & Beka Jguburia)
**
This small-scale thriller is watchable enough, but ultimately delivers an unsatisfying narrative. Four friends are on holiday in a lakeside cabin, but three of them get trapped inside the increasingly hot sauna when the fourth one goes AWOL. They're a fairly annoying yet anonymous bunch, only one of whom has any sort of backstory, and even that's only used to fill out some pages of script because apparently it can't all be about their dilemma. Having seen director Levan Bakhia's subsequent film, the stunning Landmine Goes Click, it's frustrating how straight 247°F plays its storyline, whereas Landmine starts from a similarly simple, unfortunate situation but spins off in directions you couldn't ever predict. Here it's just the three trapped young people, trying to get untrapped, which makes for a repetitive and undynamic series of events. Worst of all, Bakhia doesn't even do a particularly good job of conveying just how oppressive the heat is, something that's been done brilliantly by movies like U Turn and A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2.

LOBOS DE ARGA (Wolves of Arga) [aka Attack of the Werewolves] (Spain 2011 / Juan Martínez Moreno)
*
There are few things worse than enduring a feature-length comedy that you're just not finding funny in the slightest. This one's about a hapless author who thinks he's going to be given the freedom of the village he grew up in, but it's a trap and the locals actually want to sacrifice him so that a 100 year-old gypsy werewolf curse will be lifted. Teaming up with his former best friend and his literary agent, he attempts to save the day. Long, long stretches of this movie feature the trio comically dealing with the situation, but there's something about the similarity between them - just three cynical, middle-aged white guys - that meant the humour did nothing for me. (Actually, while I say they're middle-aged, the two leads were actually in their early-to-mid 30s, but look much older - clever make-up, or just tough lives?) The horror side of the story isn't much better, though there is a well-crafted jump scare early on, and the scene just over an hour in where it looks like everything is finally about to kick off was at least dramatic enough to make my eyelids feel a bit less heavy for a few moments.

CRY_WOLF (USA 2005 / Jeff Wadlow)
**
British actor Julian Morris is quite poor in the lead role of Owen in this American boarding school slasher, in which he and his new friends decide it would be funny to create a hoax serial killer scare off the back of a recent local murder. But, following several days' worth of threatening behaviour that may or may not be mere student pranks, Owen finds himself chased across campus by someone dressed as their fake creation... on the night of a Halloween party, no less. And as the title suggests, no one believes him. This is quite a stylish movie; I particularly liked the way on-screen text is used to depict what the characters are doing on their computers - something that seems par for the course now, but must've been quite innovative in 2005. And the multiple twists and reveals leave you feeling that at least the last 90 minutes were spent in the company of a writer who'd put some real thought and planning into his work. But unfortunately, it never really grabbed me, and I think that's largely down to Morris's dopey performance, and the fact that the teenage characters are all pretty horrible people.

HOSTEL PART III (USA 2011 / Scott Spiegel)
***
The prospect of a Hostel sequel without any involvement from Eli Roth isn't a particularly enticing one (at least from this Roth fan's perspective), but then you spot that his replacement in the director's chair is Scott Spiegel, who made the superior slasher Intruder, and things are looking up. This time the setting is a Las Vegas branch of the Elite Hunting Club, which is a strange decision given that the original premise worked so well by exploiting a fear of the (eastern European) unknown, whereas Vegas is anything but. But with the new location comes a new direction for EHC, who've added gambling and theatre elements to their murder scenarios, along with a slick professionalism and dozens, if not scores, of complicit employees to help run the operation... all of which requires an unattainable suspension of disbelief. That said, believability went out the window somewhere in Part II, so it's not a deal breaker. What is bad is how unsympathetic the protagonists (four typical stag weekenders) are, making it hard to care about their fates. However, merely getting another instalment of this mean-spirited concept is enjoyable enough for me.

LA RESIDENCIA (The Residence) [aka The House That Screamed] (Spain 1969 / Narciso Ibáñez Serrador)
***
Surprisingly lurid for a General Franco-era Spanish movie, this is an early, giallo-ish horror-thriller set in a 19th century finishing school for girls and young women. And yes, there is a shower scene, although because their headmistress is so formal and uptight, everyone has to wash while wearing their nightdresses. She also has a pubescent son, whom she keeps locked up away from the pupils (it seems she may want him for herself, the old perv), while the girls draw lots each week to decide who will get serviced by the firewood delivery man. And there are a couple of quite graphic murders (though we later learn they're merely the two most recent in a string of them). As a murder-mystery, it's a bit lacklustre, and director Narciso Ibáñez Serrador is no master of suspense. But unusually for an olde worlde period picture, I actually enjoyed spending time in this setting. You can virtually smell the hormones and sexual frustration at times; look out for the very effective sewing room scene, in which all the students appear to have a psychic link with the girl who's getting laid in the woodshed.

RUSH WEEK (USA 1989 / Bob Bralver)
**
In this very average campus slasher, a journalism student gets distracted from her rush week assignment when first one, then a second female student go missing (the first one's even called McGuffin!). Their disappearances seem to be connected to the nude, necrophilia-themed modelling work they're doing for the college cook, who has a sideline as a pornographer for a mystery client. But the real culprit is so obvious that the movie doesn't even deem it unnecessary to unmask him once he's been decapitated in the only moment of on-screen violence in the whole damn running time. An overlong running time at that; I've seen enough slasher flicks to be able to tell that, 40 minutes into Rush Week (the point at which all the clichéd, though moderately entertaining frat house bantz first starts to drag), there was still going to be nearly an hour's worth of formulaic plotting and super-tame kills to sit through. And given that the murder weapon is a medieval axe, you'd think there'd be some blood... but no. Copious nudity takes the place of gore, which is fine, except it's a bit like eating a plate of cream without any cake to go with it.

EVIDENCE (USA 2013 / Olatunde Osunsanmi)
*
The charred and mutilated corpses of a disparate bunch of victims are found in the desert on a dirt track into Las Vegas, and it's up to a group of forensic detectives to sift through hours of camcorder evidence (aka found fucking footage) to find out what happened. This is a film where no one can get any signal on their phone, and the woman doing the filming says at one point, "I have to film everything", so if you've got an understandable aversion to those clichés, then steer well clear. Otherwise, it's not too bad at first. Caitlin Stasey's character of the documentarian seems like a safe pair of hands, and it's basically a slasher movie whose killer both looks cool (boiler suit and welding mask) and has a terrifying weapon (an oxy-fuel cutter). This makes up the bulk of the running time, interspersed with the cops saying things like "zoom in, overlay, enhance". But once everything has to be explained, it gets monumentally stupid. One of the seven characters is largely absent and unmentioned, as if that's going to trick the audience into forgetting that he exists, and that's only the half of it....

LOST BOYS: THE TRIBE (USA/Canada 2008 / PJ Pesce)
**
Supposedly a sequel, this is actually an awkward remake-cum-piss-take that hits a parodically high number of the exact same story beats. So, two siblings move to a shitty coastal town, into a house owned by an obstinate older relative that reminds them of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, on the first night one of them hooks up with a sexy girl who hangs out with the local motorcycling vampire gang (the leader's played by Kiefer Sutherland's brother), one of them drinks blood disguised as wine and becomes a half-vampire, and Edgar Frog is on hand to help out. Early on, they even walk past a topless, muscular sax player, except this time he's comically fat. It's got one of those scripts where the brother's first line is "Hi, little sister" so that we know the relationship between them, although of course that's also a reference to the theme song, "Cry Little Sister". There's less (successful) comedy, but a lot more gore (CGI is thankfully used only sparingly), the opening scene with Tom Savini is cool, and the last 20 minutes with all the vampire slaying is fun, but there's a near-fatal lack of ambition and originality throughout.

LOST BOYS: THE THIRST (USA/South Africa/Germany 2010 / Dario Piana)
*
Initially, it's nice to see Edgar Frog getting promoted to the lead in this South Africa-lensed (though still California-set) threequel. His latest mission revolves around a vampire DJ who's about to bring his rave - complete with vampire blood disguised as a party drug - to town. But it's unbearably awful. All of the cast, from Corey Feldman down, sound as though they're A-C-T-I-N-G acting, complete with unconvincing voices and accents, the storyline sort of ambles along from one lacklustre incident to another with no sense of rhythm or energy, and instead of some vampires exploding, some imploding, etc, they all just disintegrate in a boring spray of glittery pixels. Every so often, a clip from the original film will be dropped in, and every single time it feels like an unimaginative way of paying tribute to the late Corey Haim, rather than doing anything to propel the plot forward. And this time round, the jokes undermine the horror rather than enhancing it, with several lampshading lines in which it's pointed out that the bloodsuckers in this series look like "emo goths". Tiresome shite from start to finish.

THE CONJURING 2 (USA 2016 / James Wan)
**
Silly as it was, whereas The Conjuring worked as scary supernatural horror, this sequel doesn't. It's not the familiar English setting and London accents, nor even the fact that the haunted house in question is unrealistically Tardis-like for a pebbledashed Enfield semi. It's not even the unusually long running time - there's enough going on for that not to be an issue. I think the problem is a lot to do with the lack of silence; overbearing, well-worn "spooky" music on the soundtrack prevents tension from building. Also, the main ghost is a 72 year-old cockney sparra spirit called Bill, and I'm sorry if old blokes who remind me of every London grandad going don't freak me out. As for the American Christian paranormalists who turn up, just as in the first film, they're far too credulous, at least behind closed doors, whereas in The Exorcist even Father Karras was a sceptic, and that's partly what made the truth of Regan's possession so frightening. What's left is a drama that's no better or worse than Sky's more grounded 2015 TV mini-series based on the same "case", and at least the fucking Warrens weren't in that.

VIVA (USA 2007 / Anna Biller)
*
Artificial sets, intentionally bad acting and full-frontal nudity abound in Anna Biller's silly tribute to the harmless American sexploitation movies of the late 60s and early 70s. And I was totally onboard with it at first, the opening scenes of suburban couple Sheila & Mark and their neighbour Barbi being an absolute joy to watch (in particular, Jared Sanford, who plays Mark, seems utterly authentic). It's an exaggerated take on sitcom characters, as they spend their Sunday sitting around the outdoor pool getting smashed on scotch from morning til night. The next day, Barbi even gets comically chased around an office desk by her lecherous boss (who then fires her for not putting out). And so, bored, Barbi & Sheila decide take advantage of women's lib and become call girls. But the joke wears thin very, very quickly - after about the length of a sitcom, in fact: 25 minutes or so. And for some reason this movie runs for over two fucking hours. When the comedy turns to drama, it's impossible to care about these characters, because they're just cartoons really. Such a shame that something that starts so well ends up as such a drag.

ELLE (She) (France/Germany/Belgium 2016 / Paul Verhoeven)
***
Paul Verhoeven returns with a picture that proves he's still interested into eroticism and brutality, but here it's hidden inside an exceedingly French and very adult drama. Michèle, a middle-aged company director, is raped in her home by a masked intruder, but mistrustful of the police, she just picks herself up and gets on with her life. Until, that is, her attacker starts sending her taunting messages, and she realises that she has to discover his identity. Elle is adapted from a novel, which explains why Michèle is a character with a hell of a lot going on in her life, including a casual relationship with her best friend's husband, issues with her own ex, an embarrassing old mum, an imprisoned and infamous dad, a feckless son and a deep lust for the guy across the street. All this makes her an unusually well-rounded person for a film character, though arguably it leaves little space for the main storyline. That plot goes to a very dark, rarely discussed area of psychosexuality, but with The Piano Teacher's Isabelle Huppert in the lead role (excellent, of course), I couldn't shake the nagging feeling that I've seen this sort of thing before.

THE LOVE WITCH (USA 2016 / Anna Biller)
*
Having killed her last partner, a modern-day young witch pitches up in a new town and sets about looking for love. But if the men in her life can't keep up with her desires, or if they're simply overwhelmed by her affections, then they end up dead. Anna Biller clearly has talent in abundance: she doesn't just direct, but writes, edits, designs and composes the music for her films. She's clearly a technical marvel - there's absolutely no question that The Love Witch looks gorgeous, with its warm, Technicolor-like colours that will convince anyone entering the room that this movie is 40 or 50 years old, and impeccable costumes and sets. But on the basis of this and her debut, the sexploitation pastiche Viva, her stories are dull, and she has no idea how to tell them at anything like a sensible pace. Everyone takes ages to do anything in any given scene, and when what they're doing really isn't that interesting anyway, it makes for an excruciatingly boring two hours. Samantha Robinson is good in the lead role, and a medieval reenactment scene is nice and lively, but I think Biller is not for me.

LA FANTASMA DI SODOMA (Sodoma's Ghost) (Italy 1989 / Lucio Fulci)
***
It's always funny when instantly-recognisable dubbing artist Ted Rusoff - nearly 50 years old at this point - is heard voicing a character in his early 20s, and in fact the whole English voice cast here does a particularly cheesy, laughable job on this film, especially when they're clearly ad libbing inanely over sections where the on-screen actors have no scripted lines. Six American friends who don't actually seem to like each other get lost while driving in France, and because their headlights don't work (neither does their "emergency brake", whatever one of those is on a car...), they have to take refuge in a mansion that turns out to be occupied by the ghost of a sex-obsessed Second World War Nazi officer, whom the prologue showed participating in a wild orgy that's perhaps the most crazed scene Fulci ever shot not to feature any gore. Will the men be able to resist the lure of hot titties and avoid a grisly fate...? "Nazis: A Porning from History" is exactly as daft as it sounds, entertainingly so, with a smattering of icky splatter and the world's stupidest cop-out ending: "That was some adventure!"

LES CAUCHEMARS NAISSENT LA NUIT (Nightmares Come at Night) (Liechtenstein 1970 / Jesús Franco)
*
I don't care who you are, a film that's 80-90% made up of nudity and shagging is going to be a bit dull, especially when it's shot so artlessly. And this was made by Jesús Franco at his absolute laziest; it's seriously one of the shoddiest pieces of film-making I've seen from him, and that's saying something. Even that dopey title reeks of a throwaway, "that'll do" attitude. The film is vaguely (very vaguely) about Cynthia & Anna, two lovers and nightclub strippers, the former who seems to have controlling tendencies, while the latter is concerned that she might be a murderer because she may or may not have woken up next to a corpse. But any intrigue is lost beneath endless scenes of tits, bush and unerotic writhing around. Apparently something of a cut-and-shut job, one lowlight is an eight-minute static camera sequence of Anna's cabaret act, which looks exactly like an old stag reel with a voiceover added in an effort to provide narrative context. Even worse is the murkiest sex scene ever filmed, a two-minute threesome in which the only discernable thing behind all the haze is an otherwise heavily-tanned man's bright white arse.

KEANU [aka Cat Boys] (USA 2016 / Peter Atencio)
**
In their first big-screen starring vehicle, Comedy Central sketch duo Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele play two middle-class suburban cousins who have to act gangsta in order to retrieve a stolen pet kitten from a drugs lord and LA gang leader. I'd never heard of their TV show, Key & Peele, but one would like to think that, to have run for over 50 episodes, it was significantly funnier than this movie, which has to get by on force of personality alone, because its jokes - which are based almost exclusively on the worst black stereotypes - although good-natured, rarely elicit more than gentle smiles. Whenever there is a cleverer, funnier moment (eg the strip club's neon sign or the "little penises" line), it's immediately explained out loud for stupider viewers. I often have problems with comedy movies that turn into action flicks, but to be fair, the screenplay of this one manages to keep things lighthearted even as the plot, and the seemingly endless gunplay, are taking over. And as for that titular tabby cat? It's just a maguffin, really. He doesn't even end up saving the day. Cute though.

AND SOON THE DARKNESS (UK 1970 / Robert Fuest)
**
Two young women on a cycling holiday in rural France get into a convincing strop with each other and go their separate ways, only for Cathy - the more fun, chilled-out one of the pair - to vanish, leaving her somewhat uptight friend Jane to investigate. Immediately her suspicion falls on a mysterious and sinister moped rider who seems to have been following her and Cathy. Unfortunately for the viewer, it becomes clear very quickly (because this is a mystery thriller and there will obviously be a twisty-turny plot) that he's harmless, so Jane's relentless focus on him - and her efforts to avoid and evade him - aren't as tense as director Robert Fuest seems to think. Instead, he should be giving us more info on the series of potential suspects who keep cropping up, but with most of their dialogue delivered in unsubtitled French (reflecting Jane's unfamiliarity with the language), we're given very little to go on (much like the continental toilets that Jane & Cathy don't want to use). I can't help feel that this would be more fun if the ever-watchable Michele Dotrice had been cast as the girl who doesn't go missing, rather than the one who does.

I AM NOT A SERIAL KILLER (Ireland/UK 2016 / Billy O'Brien)
***
This unusual low-budget horror film is about a morbid, small-town American teenage boy who's worried that he's going to become a serial killer. But his position as the local mortician's son and assistant gives him a unique insight into the methods of an actual serial killer who's murdering his neighbours. The culprit is not quite human, though: when in killing mode he looks like a cross between Michael Foot and the Oily Maniac, but this is also the point at which the movie abandons most of its fun and funny subplots, and drifts into earnest mumblecore mode - a style that I find rather annoying. It's surprising too, because things like the copyright notice appearing below the opening title, and a lax attitude to hairs in the camera gate, suggest that director Billy O'Brien (who I know from the hard-to-watch farming splatterfest Isolation) was aiming for more of a 70s vibe. (These guys never quite manage to pull that off though, do they.) Still, there's a fair amount of horrible gore on the autopsy table, and the music - from Adrian Johnston's drone-laden score to existing rock songs - is used very well.

LES WEEK-ENDS MALÉFIQUES DU COMTE ZAROFF (The Evil Weekends of Count Zaroff) [aka Seven Women for Satan] (France 1976 / Michel Lemoine)
*
You've always got to be suspicious of a director who gives himself the lead role in a movie where the main character gets to cop off with a lot of naked beauties. By the time he made this film, Michel Lemoine was an old hand at that game, though this is his first horror-themed effort. He stars as Count Boris Zaroff, the name a deliberate reference to the villain of 1932's The Most Dangerous Game, since it's implied that Boris is a descendent of the count in that film - a man who is seen here on his death bed asking his butler to ensure that Boris follows whatever the opposite of the straight and narrow is (the bent and wide, presumably). And the opening few minutes aren't bad, with Boris picking up a woman in his car and then running her down with it the following morning, while a cool theme tune by Guy Bonnet plays. But after that, it just becomes yet another dull Eurosleaze plodder, with all the usual, well-worn ingredients: a torch-lit castle, soppy light jazz on the soundtrack, an bored playboy anti-hero with Donald Trump's method of seduction, minimal plotting and little action beyond a load of nudity and writhing about.

PERSONAL SHOPPER (France/Germany 2016 / Olivier Assayas)
***
The best thing about this inconclusive slow-burn of a psychological thriller is Kristen Stewart's relentlessly moody performance as an interesting, contradictive character. She plays Maureen, a dowdy and downbeat young woman who nonetheless works in high-end fashion, visiting haute couture designers and selecting clothes and accessories for Kyra, a famous model. But she hates her job and is only sticking around in Paris while she awaits a from-beyond-the-grave message from her late twin brother Lewis. All this information is seeped out slowly, a technique that doesn't tend to give a film great rewatch value. Exposition done, the chills begin when Maureen starts receiving creepy text messages (of the "Hey what u wearing?" kind) from an unknown number, and the culprits seem to be Kyra's pushy ex-lover, the ghost of Lewis, or some other, malevolent supernatural force. These texts are strangely compelling, if not particularly cinematic. Best approached as a character study rather than a horror film, Personal Shopper offers only the very mildest scares, though it'll be a treat for fans of topless Kristen Stewart.

GET OUT (USA 2017 / Jordan Peele)
***
City-dwelling photographer Chris has been dating Rose, the daughter of a well-off upstate family, and is about to meet her folks for the first time, at their place. But he's a bit apprehensive because they're white, and he's black. Yet when the house fills up with people for an annual gathering, Chris finds that, while the whiteys treat him as an exhibit to admire, it's the way that the minority of black people talk to him that really freaks him out. Add this to the fact that Rose's hypnotherapist mother has created a mental trigger that sends him into a trance, and things get increasingly surreal as the family's bizarre background starts coming to light. Essentially this is yet another version of The Wicker Man, with an innocent schmuck being lured to his probable fate by a strange cult, which means that a lot of the long build-up feels redundant. So hooray for the comic relief character of Chris's airport security friend, brilliantly played by Lil Rel Howery, who brightens the movie up whenever it's starting to sag. Look out also for several Cronenbergian influences, not only the Videodrome-like TV that Chris is forced to watch.

SHADOW: DEAD RIOT (USA 2005 / Derek Wan)
***
You don't seem to get so many women in prison movies these days, which is odd because, assuming you've got access to a suitable location, it's a cheap way to flood the screen with sex, nudity and violence. Here a supernatural zombie killer is added to the mix, with Tony Todd's titular Shadow brought back from the dead thanks to all the blood spilled in the jail following the arrival of tough new inmate Solitaire. It takes a while for him to turn up and cause chaos, but when he does, I was pleasantly surprised to find that his zombie incarnation was still played by Todd, rather than a cheaper actor in crusty make-up. Before then, there's nearly an hour of the usual WIP business, with Solitaire getting on the wrong side of a three-strong gang, and corrupt staff - both male and female - abusing their positions to get sexual favours. At one point there even seems to be a cameo appearance by the mutant, killer baby from It's Alive! So, it's derivative, basic stuff, and when Shadow finally shows up, the carnage is non-stop but similarly unoriginal: a lot of biting but little else. You can't fault the enthusiasm of everyone involved, though.

BLACK MAGIC 2 [aka Revenge of the Zombies] (Hong Kong 1976 / Meng Hua Ho)
***
This standalone sequel, set in Singapore (or "A tropical city", as a caption has it), sees a doctor welcome his two friends over, where he tries to convince them that there's some bad black magic shit going down. They're skeptical, to the point of volunteering to pay the local evil sorcerer to cast a spell on them, to prove that black magic doesn't exist. Of course, it does exist, which is unfortunate for them. This is a diverting and amusing load of nonsense, in which the magician keeps a chamber full of zombies to help him out; he drives massive nails into their brains to keep them under control, which is agreeably brutal. It can be quite confusing on a first watch, though, thanks to a couple of subplots that don't initially seem connected to the main storyline, and really undistinctive characterisation: all the innocent people act the same; they're not so much characters as pawns. There's also a fight in and on top of a moving cable car towards the end, the supposed danger of which is 100% undermined by dreadful blue-screen work. Not the best of its genre, it's fun and icky enough to be worth a viewing or two.

BEYOND THE GATES (USA 2015 / Jackson Stewart)
***
Probably a victim of having too low a budget, this nostalgic horror adventure skirts close to brilliance, but falls short by a killer set-piece or two. A pair of chalk-and-cheese brothers, whose father has been missing for seven months, find an interactive VHS game in his office, and when they press Play it turns out not only to be quite spooksome, but it offers them a chance to save his soul by finding four keys. Unfortunately to do this, they have to inadvertently kill various people they know, using basic voodoo-like magic. It takes a while for anything like that to happen, but it's worth the wait because there's some great gore here, including a fantastic head explosion. It's all very watchable, it's just a shame that they only have to find four keys rather than, say, six. The finalé to their quest is over in a flash, and when the movie ends with lines like, "Is that it?" and "Thanks for helping with all that stuff", you know that you've just witnessed a true anticlimax. Their dad's store also contains a real, actually existing game called Book of Mormon Quest; maybe they should've played that instead.

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 2 (USA 2010 / Tod Williams)
**
It's funny that Paramount decided that the follow-up to their sleeper hit should be a prequel, as if audiences were clamouring for more Katie & Micah action, and given that they ended the first film dead and/or possessed (depending on which ending you saw), rewinding a few weeks was the only viable option. It's not as if they were particularly interesting characters, and even if they were, then the found footage format is surprisingly inefficient at getting that across. They only make brief appearances here anyway, because the focus here is on Katie's sister and her family, which only meant that I spent most of the film wondering what could possibly happen that was interesting enough to put on the screen, yet not devastating enough for Katie to be a total wreck at the start of the original movie. A standalone story may have been better, as the demon has to act in much the same ways as in the first film. And so, you just get more of the same: one really effective jump scare (as per normal for these things), but otherwise it's the law of diminishing returns in force. Plus, it's hard to sympathise with a couple who've named their son Hunter.

STRANGE CIRCUS (Japan 2005 / Sion Sono)
***
A strange circus indeed, featuring a camp cabaret, jolly accordion music, graphic dismemberment and a ton of child sex abuse. The first third of the film is the relentlessly horrible story of 12 year-old Mitsuko, who's groomed and then raped by her dad until she enjoys it, to the extent that, when her mum Sayuri dies, she's all too happy to replace her in the bedroom. Because you can't really put underage actresses in sex scenes, the film cleverly switches Mitsuko for Sayuri at times, visualising how the situation makes the girl feel like her mother. We then catch up with the story years later, where Mitsuko - appropriately enough played by the same actor who played Sayuri - now seems to be a successful writer of secretly autobiographical misery-porn novels (under an assumed name), wheelchair-bound since a teenage suicide attempt. But what you see isn't exactly what you get, and the climactic 20 minutes or so expose the truth in a gobsmacking, grand guignol cavalcade of outlandish revelations that feel like they've fallen out of one of Takashi Miike's wilder scripts, rather than Sion Sono's. Ain't nothing wrong with that, though.

V/H/S VIRAL (USA 2014 / various directors)
***
Easily the strongest of the V/H/S found footage horror anthologies, the thing that unites the four short films here is that they'd all be better without the first-person technique. The first segment - the Faustian story of an illusionist with a genuinely magical cloak - even shamelessly abandons the conceit altogether for its exciting climax. Timecrimes director Nacho Vigalondo delivers the best entry, in which an inventor creates a portal to a parallel universe, only to discover that his alternate self and his alternate wife are some sort of satanist swingers. Last up is the unusual combination of black magic occultists and zombies under a blazing Mexican sun, and fortunately the splatter and creature design is good enough to overcome the obnoxiousness of its teenage skateboarder "heroes" and their shaky helmet-mounted cams. As per tradition for this series, the wraparound story, which concerns a young man on a bicycle trying to catch up with an evil ice cream van, is smothered beneath artificial video glitches which just leave you wondering why everyone doesn't take their cameras back to the shop already.

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 3 (USA 2011 / Henry Joost & Ariel Schulman)
**
We rewind 18 years to when Katie and her sister Kristie were children, which I think makes this the first prequel to a prequel that I've ever seen. I've always said that the best thing about the found footage horror format is the fear of what's happening outside of the visible frame, and this movie exploits that when their dad mounts one of his many camcorders to the mechanism of an oscillating fan, which, again, is something I've never seen before. So that's all well and good, apart from the fact that nothing ever comes of it because the family gets way more scared than the viewer ever has a chance to, and they soon move to a different house that doesn't have any mounted cameras at all, so we have to see everything through the lens of a camcorder that the dad is unaccountably holding the whole time. Admittedly, it's a spookier house, with weird paintings and stuff, and there's clearly something else going on that, presumably, we have to wait until Paranormal Activity 4 to understand, but what happens there in this episode is a whole bunch of nothing.

CARNAGE: SWALLOWING THE PAST (UK 2017 / Simon Amstell)
****
If veganism is politics correctness gone mad (and I'm not saying it is), then this puts paid to the lie that politically correct comedy isn't funny. Because it's a genuinely hilarious mockumentary, set 50 years in the future, about how Britain became a vegan society. One of my favourite forms of comedy is found footage humour, as in taking the piss out of old documentary stuff, and Carnage does that brilliantly, mixing film of our meat eating lifestyle, a bit of abattoir reality, and creator Simon Amstell's withering commentary. Once the narrative moves beyond 2017, you might expect the film to struggle, yet it gets by on superb predictions of what the news is going to end up looking like - I particularly enjoyed the truth meter in the corner of future BBC News bulletins, a seemingly inevitable riposte to Donald Trump's bandering of the "fake news" meme. It's all a bit Brass Eye, a bit Time Trumpet, and those aren't bad influences to have at all. If Amstell continues to do more things like this, then he could be the next generation's equivalent of Chris Morris and Armamdo Ianucci, and I'm not going to argue with that.

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 4 (USA 2012 / Henry Joost & Ariel Schulman)
*
Five years after a possessed Katie abducted her baby nephew and vanished, a strange young boy appears in a suburban neighbourhood and Alex, a 15 year-old girl, comes to believe that her house is haunted. Unfortunately, I just couldn't believe in Alex, or her boyfriend Ben, as actual people. Firstly, this film has some of the most egregious examples of "Why are you filming this?!" that I've seen. Early on, Ben is trying to get intimate with Alex (their relationship has been chaste thus far), but he does so while pointing a camcorder at her the whole time, which doesn't strike me as particularly seductive. Later, he reveals that he's hacked her MacBook and has been recording footage of her bedroom 24/7, and her reaction isn't "WTF? You're dumped, you fucking creep", but "Oh cool, let's do the same to all my family's computers". And it's all because this series won't let go of its stupid found footage conceit. Who are these people who never close their laptop lids anyway? And quite why or even how Alex is able to film the final sequence is inexplicable, unless her iPhone can do night vision. Besides all that, this film is boring as hell.

THE LAST OF SHEILA (USA 1973 / Herbert Ross)
**
I don't know who wrote this whodunit's lame poster tagline ("Who done it?"), but the movie itself was written by the unlikely pairing of Psycho star Anthony Perkins and musical theatre composer Stephen Sondheim. Quite how that collaboration came about may well be a more interesting story than the one they've given us here, though it does have its moments. A year after his wife Sheila was killed in a hit-and-run, obnoxious film producer Clinton invites six of his Hollywood friends aboard his yacht of the same name, where he's devised a week-long parlour game that will identify the guilty driver. It's an interesting premise, but all seven characters are unsympathetic at best, and downright annoying at worst. Good cast, though, with James Mason, Raquel Welch and Ian McShane among the suspects, though I found James Coburn, who plays Clinton himself, almost unbearable, and for the first hour, no one talks like a real human being - the dialogue is very overwritten. But it improves after a midpoint twist, and the big reveal is done well. Perkins & Sondheim play fair too, rewarding the eagle-eyed, puzzle-minded viewer.

OUIJA (USA 2014 / Stiles White)
**
Elaine and her friends - the oldest high schoolers since Grease - suspect the the reason her BFF Debbie just hanged herself is because of a ouija board. Fortunately (at least for the purposes of the narrative), Debbie's parents go on holiday and give Elaine a key to their house, so that the gang can have a go on the board themselves and summon up a troubled spirit, as of course anyone would in their situation. My favourite part of this nonsense might be the scene where Elaine watches a video of Debbie finding the board in her house, after which she says to herself (and the viewer), "She found it in her house...." That happens because this is a film that doesn't trust its audience with anything new, challenging or different. It's almost aggressively wholesome, it's the epitome of mid-2010s PG-13 horror, and yes that means bloodless CGI deaths and yet more ghosts with elongated mouths. There's even a grandma who has great insight because she's Hispanic, and therefore exotic and otherworldly. The flipside of all these clichés, of course, is that it's an easy, fluffy watch, and at 90 minutes it doesn't outstay its welcome.