DVD Review: Osombie / Cert: 15 / Director: John Lyde / Screenplay: Kurt Hale / Starring: Corey Sevier, Eve Mauro, Jasen Wade, Danielle Chuchran, William Rubio / Release Date: May 14^th

Osama Bin Laden rises from the dead as a flesh-eating ghoul and threatens the free world with a zombie apocalypse. You’ve got to be kidding, right? Actually no, that’s the premise of Osombie (tag line ‘Axis of the Evil Dead’) the latest of a raft of recent zombie movies (Juan of the Dead, Bong of the Dead) released to DVD, and, political misgivings aside, Osombie – as zombie movies go – is really rather good.

Dusty, a yoga instructor from Colorado, is on a desperate rescue mission in the middle east to save her brother Derek, a conspiracy theorist (and ex-fireman who survived the 9/11 attacks) who is convinced Osama Bin Laden is still alive, despite having been buried at sea. In Afghanistan, Dusty falls in with a team of NATO special forces on a secret assignment, and it turns out Derek is not so crazy at all. Infected by a biological weapon agent that turns its victims into the living dead, Osama has returned from his watery grave to create a secret army of zombie insurgents. When the group crashes headlong into the growing zombie apocalypse, Dusty and the troops must find and destroy the root of the zombie insurgency before it infests the rest of the world. They must kill Bin Laden again.

Scriptwriter Kurt Hale plays the scenario straight, without any trace of political satire or irony, making Osombie gung-ho, jingoistic nonsense all the way. But skilful direction by John Lyde raises Osombie way above the usual standard of cheap exploitation, at times giving bigger budget efforts like The Hurt Locker and The Green Zone a run for their money. Cinematographer Airk Thaughbaer effortlessly makes Utah (where Osombie was filmed) look like the Afghan desert, and adopts some of the stylistic devices of Kathryn Bigelow’s Oscar winner during the combat sequences. Thaughbaer also edited the film, and, with the exception of one or two dialogue-heavy scenes, Osombie is fast-paced action for all of its ninety minutes. The performances are excellent too – including by Corey Sevier, a Colin Farrell look-alike who spends much of the film shirtless and ripped. Danielle Chuchran, as Tomboy, plays the deadliest woman with a sword since Uma Thurman in Kill Bill. Heads roll, so do arms and legs and all other manner of body parts, courtesy of visual effects artist Clark Edmunds, who also provides CGI planes and helicopters that many a high budget Hollywood production would die for.

Hale’s screenplay is also pretty good. We actually care about the characters (helped by the actors who keep it real throughout). The death scenes of the individual marines (a staple in any zombie or war movie!) are surprisingly poignant. There are also some great action set pieces. To be fair, Hale does make an effort not to offend the Muslim faith in the film. The zombie insurgents are clearly meant to represent the Taliban and not the Afghan people or Muslims in general. Still, it’s hard not to see its zombie virus threating to ‘infest’ the rest of the world as representing the fear of the spread of Islam. Bin Laden himself doesn’t actually feature that much in the film, but remains an elusive bogeyman, much as he did in real life. As one reviewer commented: ‘Osombie fulfils a fantasy for many of us – killing m*therf**ing Bin Laden again’. Therein, I suspect, lies the appeal of Osombie.

Osombie, then, probably won’t do much to further diplomatic relations between the Muslim world and the West, but thanks to its non-stop carnage and some great military combat, zombie fans – and readers of Andy McNab – will love it.

Special Features: None

DVD Review: War of the Dead / Cert: 15 / Director: Marko Makilaakso / Screenplay: Marko Makilaakso / Starring: Andrew Tiernan, Mikko Leppilampi, Samuel Vauramo / Release Date: May 28^th

The idea of using Nazi zombies as a central plot point is nothing new and the next offering in this sub-genre is War of the Dead which sits somewhere between Dog Soldiers, Dead Snow and Assault on Precinct 13.

When a combined force of Allied and Finnish soldiers attempt to infiltrate a German bunker, they realise that they have under-estimated the resistance that they will face. Losing a large number of their task force leaves the surviving members with the daunting duty of completing the mission by themselves, but as their numbers continue to dwindle they find that their enemy is not prepared to just lie down and die. It turns out that the bunker they are tasked with destroying was a home for SS experiments on captured Russian soldiers to try and create “Anti-Death”. Ergo, zombies. The enemies that our protagonists have already dispatched come back stronger and more determined to stop them than ever.

What is interesting here is that because the film is set in World War II, there is no existing knowledge of zombie lore and so the soldiers can’t believe what they are up against and struggle to work out how to kill the foes that they encounter. There are no gags or in-jokes to be had here, this is serious straight up horror, mixing in some great little set-pieces that are impressive considering the reported budget of €1million, making this the most expensive film ever made in Lithuania.

However, because of the lack of budget, the script seems bare, with very little in the way of character development and the zombies themselves are a blur, rushing around and jumping through windows like circus trapeze artists. In some action scenes it is difficult to know exactly what is going on. Even the main mission of infiltrating the bunker seems forgotten at times with some set-pieces side-tracking the group and chains of command shifting from one moment to the next. It says a lot when you pat yourself on the back for recognising the guy out of The Bill (Mark Wingett, if you’re interested), because most of the rest of the cast are forgettable.

But, because the director has decided to keep this strictly serious with no sense of parody – which would have been so easy to rely on – and the action does go against the budget, this tale of Nazi experimentation gone awry, with zombies to boot, is better than a lot of the straight to DVD horror dross out there.

Give it a whirl.

Special Features: Making Of, Trailer

DVD Review: Marvel Complete Animation Collection / Director: Various / Screenplay: Various / Release Date: Out Now

A hefty collection of Marvel comics’ recent animation movies, from Ultimate Avengers through to Planet Hulk, the Complete Animation Collection is a mixed bag at times – but thankfully that bag holds its share of (infinity) gems.

Unlike the DC animated movies, Marvel’s cartoon features are less concerned with adapting specific story arcs and tend to be more a series of standalone or origin tales instead. More accessible to new fans than DC’s Under The Red Hood or Batman/Superman: Public Enemies, they will serve as a nice stopgap in-between live action Marvel features or as further introduction to newer fans. They’re also more child friendly than DC’s oddly adult stories, making this one a collection for all ages – sometimes, in the case of Next Avengers, to its detriment. While Marvel are owning the multiplexes, it seems that DC have the straight to DVD animation market covered. On the basis of this collection, one could learn a lot from the other.

The Ultimate Avengers and Rise of the Black Panther whet the appetite for the Avengers movie. The first film is an adaptation of Mark Millar’s Ultimates books, shorn of the more questionable material. The Hulk battle is relatively short, with the main threat being a Nazi alien menace. The sequel adds the Black Panther to the roster and has the Chitauri (sound familiar?) invading Wakanda. Both films are action packed and enjoyable but humourless; a trait which runs through the other seven films.   

Bar poor Captain America, each of the Avengers gets his individual chance to shine, although it’s only the Hulk who manages to do so with any success. The forgettable Thor – Tales of Asgard lacks the humour that made the live-action movie such a joy, and its adventures of a young Thor and Loki feel a little too much like Saturday morning TV. You certainly won’t find Loki calling anyone a “mewling quim” here. The God of thunder and his sibling nemesis fare better in Hulk vs Thor, a surprisingly violent tale which does exactly what it says on the tin (Hulk vs Wolverine is more convoluted but funnier and even bloodier). The Hulk is practically omnipresent in this box set, with the grumpy green giant appearing in a total of five features (or six, if you count Hulk vs as two films). His head-pulverising fight with Wolverine is a box set highlight. He returns in Planet Hulk, ejected from the planet Earth and shot into space by Iron Man, Doctor Strange and (presumably, although his face is hidden in shadows and he never speaks) Mister Fantastic. It’s Ben Hur with aliens and the Hulk. Ben Hulk, if you will. Hulk talk too much for our liking, although it’s a lot of fun. Good as the Hulk animations are, once you’ve seen him beating up Thor for (semi) real on the big screen, it’s hard to go back.

In the most disappointing tale, Tony Stark travels to China for The Invincible Iron Man. Here is a different Stark to the man we’ve become accustomed to seeing in Marvel movies – the voice acting is terrible, Stark too humourless and his beard distracting. It’s actually another origin tale for Iron Man – and a completely different one to that as established in Jon Favreau’s 2008 piece. It’s essentially an alternate timeline in which Tony Stark doesn’t have any personality and never bothers putting his suit on.

Weakest of the lot is Next Avengers, which mistakenly assumes that we should care about The Avengers’ children and their antics. Like Tales Of Asgard, it belongs on children’s TV. The story is boring, the characters annoying and you’ll spend the whole film waiting for the real Avengers to show up to pull their brats in line.

Like an episode of House crossed with Batman Begins, Doctor Strange is a nice change of pace. The story doesn’t feel particularly original, but it’s still nice to see one of the more under-represented characters get his turn in the spotlight. It’s the best film in the set and proves that a Doctor Strange movie could work, given the right treatment.

Each of the films has its own individual style, suited to the characters portrayed. Those starring Thor and Asgard tend to have a more ethereal feel, while the adult ones alternate between detailed (the Ultimate Avengers movies attempt to mimic Bryan Hitch’s art) and stylised animé. While none of the animation is terrible, it is patchy in places and at its worst in The Invincible Iron Man.

£35 is a reasonable amount for an eight-film box set, but it still feels a little pricey considering how old some of the films are (Ultimate Avengers was first released in 2006). Die-hard fans will probably already own a few of them, and the less hardcore will be reluctant to spend so much on a collection of cartoons; especially given the more obscure characters and stories featured here. With each of the dodgier films standing out more than the last, that price tag begins to seem all the heftier. Five pounds should be knocked off the price tag for Next Avengers alone. Wait for the price to go down and then throw the Next Avengers and Invincible Iron Man DVDs away.

With the current batch of Marvel movies beginning to look increasingly definitive, it’s hard to see why one should bother with the majority of this substandard set. Would that Marvel imbued it with the same care they have their live-action releases, this would truly be a collection worth owning.

DVD Review: Grave Encounters / Cert: 15 / Director: The Vicious Brothers / Screenplay: The Vicious Brothers / Starring: Sean Rogerson, Juan Riedinger, Ashleigh Gryzko, Mackenzie Gray, Merwin Mondesir / Release Date: Out Now

Grave Encounters starts the way many of these things do, a talking head producer informs us that what we are about to see is edited down from about 76 hours of footage and is exactly as they found it. We then find ourselves in the company of a fast talking TV show host who is the producer and presenter for a show called ‘Grave Encounters’ and they are filming episode 7. They are about to spend the night in the supposedly haunted Collinwood Home for the Mentally Ill, which has been derelict for many years. It’s like any episode of Most Haunted except, y’know… more American.

The team set up static cameras equipped with night vision and also carry around handheld rigs hoping to catch a glimpse of something sinister in the night. The first forty five minutes or so are familiar to anyone who has seen Paranormal Activity or the aforementioned Most Haunted; things go bump, strange noises are heard and a member of the crew’s hair gets played with. For those who complain that the Paranormal Activity films don’t show you enough, things get weird, really weird and you get a real sense of payoff as events unfold.

Around the middle of the second act things get interesting as there is a sudden shift from the norm of your typical found footage horror as we learn that 6am has come and gone and the team cannot get out the way they came in. The building seemingly doesn’t want them to leave and at every exit they are just presented with more corridors. Eventually the evil presence makes its horrifying debut and people are screaming, getting sick, disappearing and slowly going insane.

Grave Encounters may divide people more used to the subtler tones typical of this sub-genre. After the first forty five minutes the whole ‘is there anybody there’ thing is thrown out the window as ghouls emerge from the shadows and attack our crew. The actors all do a great job starting off as cocky sceptics looking for an easy sound bite, going on to being slightly alarmed, to eventual full blind insanity inducing panic. Most Haunted was never this good…

For a straight to DVD found footage film (and there has been a deluge lately) Grave Encounters is very enjoyable and had us jumping out of our seats through much of it. It’s surprising this hasn’t gotten a cinema release because word of mouth would probably make it a hit. It’s the ultimate party movie, best enjoyed with a bunch of mates and the lights off. It does stumble slightly with an ending that owes a little too much to a recent Spanish language found footage film, but it’s still a whole heap of scary fun.

Extras: Behind the Scenes featurette / Trailer

DVD Review: Bong of the Dead / Cert: 18 / Director: Thomas Newman / Screenplay: Thomas Newman / Starring: Simone Bailly, Mark Wynn, Jy Harris / Release Date: Out Now

Given that I have never smoked a joint nor indulged in anything more potent than Lemsip in my time, I didn’t have high (no pun intended) hopes for Bong of the Dead. Few sentences are more terrifying and indicative of lack of quality than the phrase “stoner horror comedy”. Indeed, Thomas Newman’s debut feature is a piece that will play a lot better to the pot-smoking crowd – but is it of use to anyone else?

The plot is like Harold & Kumar Get the Munchies crossed with Zombieland. When a meteor collides with the Earth, an apocalypse descends and the planet becomes overrun with zombies. Amongst the few remaining breathers are Edwin and Tommy, a pair of slackers who find that the most inconvenient thing about post-apocalyptic Earth is the lack of ganja dealers thereupon. Whilst growing their own cannabis plants, they discover that zombie brains make for the best fertiliser. The pair embark upon a quest to score themselves some fresh zombie brains.

It starts off promisingly, with the start of the outbreak depicted in a vivid, amusing and very splattery manner reminiscent of Peter Jackson’s Braindead. It’s a great opening, allaying any fears for Bong of the Dead’s quality. Alas, things take a turn for the worse almost as soon as the film’s reefer obsessed protagonists are introduced. It doesn’t even make it past the opening credits without a blast of ‘comedy’ flatulence.

Whilst it is possible to make an enjoyable movie that happens to star a pair of stoners (Pineapple Express being the best example of this), Bong of the Dead has little use for anything that’s not weed related. The viewer is supposed to find Edwin and Tommy adorable, but mostly they’re a pair of irritating stereotypes who say “dude” a lot. There are some laughs to be had, but most of them come in spite of the characters rather than because of them. A perfunctory hot female is introduced later on, but she quickly becomes as tiresome as the dudes.

Which is a shame, because the special effects are fantastic given the film’s low budget. Most cheap zombie films are nigh unwatchable, but the $5,000 budget and 15 day shooting schedule are not obvious in the action or gore scenes. The acting too, is much better than one might expect from such a cheap creation. Chief amongst the impressively directed zombie massacre scenes is the final fight, in which the trio have at their undead enemies with a garden strimmer. A Terminator style flashback sequence further shows what the film could have been. It really puts the ‘waste’ into wasters. A little more get up and go might have made this a low-budget classic. There’s even a promising villain in the form of an unusually loquacious zombie leader. Instead, Bong of the Dead is mostly two Cheech and Chong wannabes sitting around telling one another to shut up and remarking how “smoking hot” their female companion is.

Like its characters, Bong of the Dead is tiresome, annoying and half-baked.

DVD Review: Dream House / Cert: 15 / Director: Jim Sheridan / Screenplay: David Loucka / Starring: Daniel Craig, Rachel Weisz, Naomi Watts / Release Date: Out Now

People used to remark about Roger Moore’s acting abilities as James Bond, saying that his range of emotions depended on which eyebrow he arched. At least you could say that this did show a degree of animation, a characteristic his current Bond successor Daniel Craig is completely devoid of particularly in his latest outing, the lukewarm chiller Dream House (2011).  Starring the wooden Mr Craig in a role for which both Christian Bale and Brad Pitt were originally considered (bet they’re relieved they passed on this one), along with Craig’s real-life wife Rachel Weisz and the gorgeous Naomi Watts (who is one of the only good things about the film), director Jim Sheridan’s supposed edge-of-your-seat nail-biter is more likely to kill you through boredom than fright.

Will Atenton (Craig) and his wife Libby (Weisz) leave the rat-race of New York City for life in the suburbs, in order for him to devote more time to the best-selling novel he has been working on. With their daughters Trish and Dee Dee (played by real-life sisters Taylor and Claire Geare), the couple move into a run-down house which has remained empty since being abandoned by its owners five years previously. Once settled in Will and Libby set about renovating their new home with verve and enthusiasm (to the extent that you wonder when Will is getting time to write this inspiring novel which he was apparently so eager to work on).

Everything seems to be progressing smoothly until a series of strange events (mainly involving the local town’s folk, who become freaked out for no reason every time they encounter Will), begin to terrify Libby and the girls and make Will start to question his own increasingly fragile grip on reality. However it’s not long before the couple discover why their new home has sat on the market for so long, and that what they thought was their ‘dream house’ is more of a nightmare due to a sinister and horrifying past.

I’m not sure what I was hoping for with Dream House, but it was certainly something more inspiring than this lacklustre amalgamation of haunted house hokum and mad killer thriller, which in the end is so unsure as to what it is trying to be that it results in being nothing at all. Everything is such a hotchpotch, particularly during the climatic last third where the action flits intermittently back and forth between reality and fantasy to such an extent that you no longer know what’s real and what isn’t.

The neighbours’ hostility and lack of co-operation with Will and Libby in their efforts to get to the bottom of the mysterious incidents plaguing their new home, and the local police’s dismissal of their fears and concerns is clearly meant to rack up the tension, but instead results in becoming as irritating and frustrating for the viewer as it is for the bewildered couple. Unfortunately David Loucka’s screenplay gives Craig little more to do in moments of supposed horror, than to shout at Weisz to “get back in the house”‘, which one imagines she is happy to do if only to get away from her husband as much as from any encroaching evil.

One would love to find something positive to say about the film – the ‘dream house’ for instance is beautiful in a typically post Scream, wealthy American suburb way. But that’s just clutching at straws. From the posters and advance publicity you’d be forgiven for thinking you were settling down to a horror film – but horror is unfortunately the main ingredient missing from this soulless production.

Apparently after disagreements between Sheridan and the film’s production studio Morgan Creek, he, along with Craig and Weisz, refused to have anything to do with promoting the film to the press. After watching it you’ll understand why.

DVD Review: Clone / Cert: 15 / Director: Benedek Fliegauf / Screenplay: Benedek Fliegauf / Starring: Eva Green, Matt Smith, Lesley Manville, Peter Wight, Istvan Lenart, Hannah Murray, Natalie Tena / Release Date: May 7th

The cynic in me can’t help thinking that Clone, filmed under its working title of Womb before its co-star Matt Smith recorded his first series on Doctor Who and only now seeing the light of day as he works on his third, has suffered the indignity of a more lurid name-change purely to cash in on Smith’s current TV popularity. Clone shouts sci-fi, Womb… well, I’m not really sure what it shouts if it shouts anything at all. The name-change is only a slight irritation; like recent borderline genre movies such as Take Shelter and Another Earth this is a film which has a Big Idea at its core but uses it to examine very specific human relationship issues rather than to dazzle its audience with its clever visual spectacle. Clone is a very bleak, very powerful movie which, despite the presence of Smith is most definitely not one suitable for Doctor Who’s younger fans.

We would appear to be in some alternative Universe – best not to think about it – where human cloning has been developed to the extent that it’s now fairly common. But it’s not popular. Cloned ‘copies’ are considered to be second-class citizens and they’re routinely shunned and spurned by society’s ‘originals’. Rebecca (Ruby O’Fee) and Tommy (Tristan Christopher) meet as children and become close friends. But their friendship ends when Rebecca’s mother has to relocate to Japan. 12 years later the now-adult Rebecca (Green) returns and embarks on a more intimate relationship with grown-up Tommy (Smith). Unfortunately a tragic accident cuts short their adult romance. But Rebecca can’t and won’t move on and she uses the cloning technology to conceive and ultimately give birth to Tommy’s genetic copy.

Fast-forward twenty years or so (although Green doesn’t look noticeably older) and young Tommy is, not unnaturally, the spitting image of his father. The relationship between Tommy and his mother becomes more complicated as Rebecca tries to hide the truth from Tommy as he fights strange, uncontrollable and inexplicable desires and has to face the disdain of those around him.

Clone is art house cinema flirting with the populist. Filegauf’s script is spartan to say the least and his direction is full of moody, often static long shots. Filmed almost entirely in and around an isolated and rather battered beach house in the middle of nowhere where it’s always bitterly cold, Clone has a strong and individual visual look, suggesting its other-world setting without resorting to tricksy visual flourishes and smart dialogue. But its story, whilst unusual and sometimes even uncomfortable – it eventually crashes right through one huge social taboo – is a pretty straight-forward one, even though its telling demands more of its audience than just passivity. We watch Clone and can’t help but question the morality of the development of the technology the film uses so casually and it asks us to think about what right we have to interfere with nature and what the consequences of that interference might be. It’s probably also about what it means to be human (always as well to throw that one in, just to be on the safe side).

Clone’s not one for action fans – describing its pace as glacial suggests a much faster film than this – and it’s not exactly a laugh riot (although one line of dialogue, where the ‘young’ son-of-Tommy asks his mother if his father has “gone back to his home planet” will raise a smile bearing in mind Smith’s subsequent career trajectory). It is, however, hugely watchable, not least of all because of the outstanding performances of its two leads. Smith is remarkably assured – there’s a kitchen-table sequence in which he’s electrifying in his unpredictability – and Green keeps her kit on in this one which allows her to deliver a focused, intense performance as a woman quietly devastated by grief and then tormented by the steps she’s taken to overcome it.

Arty and yet accessible, Clone is an engrossing and absorbing experience. Never likely to make its way into the multiplex, it deserves to find a quietly appreciative audience when it arrives on DVD. Clone will also be featured as part of the Sci-Fi London Film Festival from 1st to 7th May prior to its DVD/Blu-ray release the following week.

Extras:Trailer, behind-the-scenes.

DVD Review: The Darkest Hour / Cert: 12 / Director: Chris Gorak / Screenplay: Jon Spaihts / Starring: Emile Hirsch, Olivia Thirlby, Max Minghella, Rachael Taylor / Release Date: May 21st

When it was released in cinemas, The Darkest Hour got a bad rap from critics and paying customers alike. With its impending release onto DVD and Blu-ray, it’s time to reassess and see if the film is actually that bad. To put it simply, no it’s not. The sophomore directorial effort by Gorak – who had previously given us the frankly chilling Right At Your Door – is by no means a great film, but for an attempted special effects laden mini-blockbuster it’s okay.

Perhaps we’ve been spoilt by all the American based disaster and end of the world films, with their tumbling skyscrapers and epic CGI destruction, but The Darkest Hour is more subtle. Shots of eerily abandoned Moscow streets offer a macabre sense of dread that cannot be hidden from. Also, the creators have introduced a different kind of villain, with no visible monsters or aliens hunting the leads down. Instead, an invisible foe hides in broad daylight, unable to be seen until it makes its presence known by setting off previously dead electrical appliances.

In a nice twist, the characters realise that they are better off travelling at night so that those appliances and light bulbs can give away their pursuers. The two male leads of Hirsch and Minghella are likeable enough, playing two internet entrepreneurs visiting Moscow to try and tie up a business deal that goes awry. Drowning their sorrows in a nightclub, they meet up with a couple of girls, played by Thirlby and Taylor, before the lights go out and the whole city is bathed in darkness. From the sky, orange balls of light fall to the ground and one evaporated cop later, they are on the run for their lives from an enemy that they can’t see.

Whilst trying to make their way to a Russian submarine that is sitting in the river, promising salvation, they meet up with other survivors and also find their numbers dwindling as they are picked off. Towers of light start streaking into the sky, sucking conductive metals with them and all appears to be lost. But there are pockets of resistance around the world who are finding ways to fight back and our band of unlikely heroes are no different.

You can pinpoint where the disappointment comes from quite easily. Where we are now used to superheroes and over the top set pieces in action films, what we have here is a group of normal people trying to survive an extraordinary event. With an invisible foe, there is nothing tangible to root against and the biggest issue is the film thinks it is more epic than it actually is. It is an independent production with some decent effects and a reported budget of $30 million. It is by no means a bad film and the initial reviews seem to have been overly harsh, but it looks like the idea was to create the opening part of a trilogy, but this isn’t quite strong enough to make people come back for more. The creators really were in a ‘damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t’ scenario here. They tried to do something different instead of the usual alien invasion plotline, but haven’t managed to quite pull it off.

Okay but not great – it’s still worth a viewing, if only for some nice cinematography of the Russian capital and some decent special effects considering the budget.

Extras: Deleted and extended scenes, digital copy

DVD Review: Enter Nowhere / Cert: TBC / Director: Jack Heller / Screenplay: Shawn Christensen, Jason Dolan / Starring: Sara Paxton, Scott Eastwood, Katherine Waterston, Shaun Sipos / Release Date: Out Now (US), TBC (UK)

You know what it’s like, you wait for one cabin in the woods type film for ages, then two turn up at once. Thankfully, this take on the premise is just as different and almost as twisty as the Goddard/Whedon affair.

Samantha (Katherine Waterston) is lost in the woods, looking for her husband after he’s gone for help when they had run out of petrol. She finds a small cabin and another lost soul, Tom (Scott “son of Clint” Eastwood) who has been there several days after crashing his car nearby. All there is at the cabin is a broken ham radio. No phones, no food and seemingly no help for any conceivable distance. Jody (Sara Paxton from The Innkeepers) turns up passed out outside, and when she comes to, explains that her boyfriend has abandoned her after a row, and she has no idea how she got to the cabin. We have seen Jody earlier, though, in a pre-credit sequence where she and her man Kevin (Christopher Denham) were in the process of robbing a convenience store and she seems quite the badass.

Whatever direction the three try to find a way out of the woods, they end up back at the cabin. When Jody likens it to a game of Pac Man, where you always end up on the same playing field, Tom asks “How do you get to the next level?”

With the revelations that follow, that’s how, and it is with the subsequent twists that the film steps up and becomes a completely different beast.

First time director Jack Heller has crafted a surprisingly good and entertaining tale thanks to the Shawn Christensen (who also wrote the Taylor Lautner vehicle Abduction) and Jason Dolan script which is as audacious as it is ridiculous. It is most importantly though, entertaining – and allows the characters to build rather than rely on shocks and gore. Tom Harting’s cinematography goes a long way to helping set the mood and tone, so much so that it is a shame that this will probably never see a big screen. Paxton once again proves her worth, but Waterston and Eastwood seem to take a while to warm up, coming across a little stiff earlier on.

This is another film that benefits from going into as cold as possible, (don’t even watch the trailer, as it tells you far too much) and while the final act is a little predictable, getting there is fun. It does feel a little like a feature length episode of The Twilight Zone or Lost at times, but it doesn’t feel padded out, and is still head and shoulders above some other recent releases.

Lets hope Lionsgate UK give this a release sometime soon!

Review: Thor – The Hammer of the Gods / Director: Todor Chapkanov / Screenplay: Steve Bevilacqua, Rafael Jordan / Starring: Zachery Ty Bryan, Mac Brandt, Daz Crawford / Release Date: Out Now

A side effect of the assembling Avengers has seen an assault on straight to DVD cinema by the God of Thunder himself, Thor. With the big man’s name lying beyond Marvel copyright jurisdiction, it leaves the door open for many movies starring a Thor. Not that Thor, sure, but a Thor.

This Viking adventure precedes the most recent Marvel adaptation by two years, a re-issue of a Sci-Fi Channel television movie, starring Zachary Ty Bryan (of Home Improvement fame) as the big man. Chris Hemsworth he is not, although some of the characters sound a bit like him at times. To compare the film to 2011’s Thor seems a little unfair, given the latter’s Marvel budget and big-name director. But you can’t have your cake and eat it; by cheekily surfing in on the coattails of Thor’s success, it invites such unfortunate comparison.

Hammer of the Gods sees Thor and his treasure-seeking Viking comrades travelling to an island, where they encounter vicious, inhuman creatures. “There is something on this island,” the warriors realise, “and it doesn’t much like men.” Not so much Ice Giants but foaming lycanthropes. What follows is like Dog Soldiers crossed with Outlander but without any of the action.

Zachary Bryan is terribly miscast as Thor. Even his Home Improvement dad Tim Allen would have done a better job than this chubby pretender to the throne. He looks less like the God of Thunder and more like a downcast tabletop gamer, having just been beaten by a twelve-year-old at his wargame of choice. Not everyone can boast Hemsworth’s admirable abs, but Bryan is the least impressive person in his own movie. He’s decidedly mortal here, making it appear as though the filmmakers had made a film about a gang of rubbish Vikings and renamed one of them Thor as an afterthought. Other names from Norse legend will sound familiar, but no one seems particularly legendary. As the group are beset by werewolves (mostly off-screen), Thor has visions of a great warrior wielding a mighty hammer. Believing the hammer to be the key to their survival, he sets about hunting it down. Because who needs silver bullets when you have a big hammer?

More impressive than Budget Thor are Mac Brandt (one of the few actors who actually looks the part) and Daz Crawford. Crawford will be most recognisable as Lighthammer from Blade II. His heavy Northern accent hardly befits a Viking warrior, but he’s still the best thing about Hammer of the Gods. Close your eyes when he talks, and you can pretend Sean Bean is in it. The werewolves are unbelievably horrible. Hardly any attempt is made to disguise the fact that they’re just men in dodgy wolf masks. It would be funny, were it not for the preceding hour of tedium it takes to get to that point. Since the film is best served by keeping its werewolves well away from the front of the camera, much of the action consists of the Vikings bickering amongst themselves. It looks pretty, but watching this Thor feels like a constant chore. By the time the man finally gets his Mjolnir, it’s too late to care.

It’s a dull, uninteresting and cheap film with acting and a script typical of a Sci-Fi production. Don’t let the fact that its lead character is currently in vogue pull you in – Hammer of the Gods is thor-oughly bad.