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.

DVD Review: The Wicker Tree (15) / Director: Robin Hardy / Screenplay: Robin Hardy / Starring: Brittania Nicol, Henry Garrett, Graham McTavish, Honeysuckle Weeks, Christopher Lee / Release Date: April 30^th

Robin Hardy’s companion piece to the legendary 1973 Wicker Man fails to live up to the psychological horror of its original.

Based upon Hardy’s novel, Cowboys for Christ, two Texas Christians, Beth Boothby (Brittania Nicol) and Steve Thompson (Henry Garrett) travel to Scotland to preach the word of God to the pagan locals. The couple end up in the small village of Tressock and agree to become the Queen and Laddie of the local Mayday celebration in an effort to win over the natives and convert them to Christ. Things soon take a turn for the sinister. The good folk of Tressock have a different idea on how to ‘celebrate’ Mayday, and it doesn’t involve Morris dancing and flag poles, that’s for sure. Steve is led astray by Lolly (Honeysuckle Weeks) and is burdened with shame by his little romp with her in the local river, while Beth, who used to be a sexy pop star, is desperate to distance herself from her once sinful ways.

The Wicker Tree retains some of the elements of the original, a certain 70’s feel, loosely drawn characters, sex scenes that make you chuckle, yet it still manages to come across as a watered down version of Wicker Man. The satirical humour present in The Wicker Tree doesn’t quite work, apart from the subtitled sex scene – intentional or not. Both the Texas Missionaries are unlikable, almost repugnant characters, defined by their faith and constrained by the script, never quite managing to break out and make an audience sympathise enough to care whether they live or die. The villagers have more engaging characters, Sir Lachlan Morrison (Graham McTavish) Lady Delia (Jacqueline Leonardas) and even a cameo from Christopher Lee who appeared in Wicker Man. Their motivations are far better mapped out than our bumbling protagonists.

It’s all a far cry from Edward Woodward’s performance as Sergeant Neil Howie. A character that, despite being a devout Christian, wasn’t defined by his faith and managed to win the audience’s heart right from the get-go.

The Wicker Tree does successfully raise itself above the 2006 remake of Wicker Man – a film considered by most to be one of the worst remakes of recent years. Also, it makes a fine addition to the sub-genre of horror, defined by Mark Gatiss as ‘Folk Horror’. Other films of this short-lived genre include: Witchfinder General and Blood on Satan’s Claw.

Still, it’s as much a tribute to a bygone era of film making as any addition to horror. Sadly, the film never quite lives up to its expectations, and while certain scenes prove interesting, it is, in the main, a tedious and a time consuming affair.

Extras: None

DVD Review: Humanity’s End (TBC) / Director: Neil Johnson / Screenplay: Michael John Smith, Neil Johnson / Starring: Jay Laisne, Rochelle Vallesse, Cynthia Ickes, William David Tullin / Release Date: May 21st

Space: 2820. The human race has been all but wiped out, humanity usurped by a genetically-engineered ‘homo superior’ race known as Konstrukts and a race of Borg-like psychic super-aliens called the Nephilim. Between them they’ve decided that humanity’s a waste of space and set about wiping out earth colonies all over the Universe and blowing up the earth – all in the first five minutes. But Mankind’s an indomitable species and we live on; aboard a ricketty space tub we find sleazy space captain Derasi Vorde, his doe-eyed maintenance officer Contessa, a young girl named Alicia who has the ignominy of being a “breeding clone”, a dwarf clone-thing named Sorgon 387 and a petulant AI unit which runs the ship. What chance has the pure essence of the human race amidst such motley company? Let me tell you…

I really should hate Humanity’s End with every fibre of my critical being. It’s eighty minutes of well dodgy CGI (spaceships and explosions galore, none of them remotely convincing to anyone over the age of about two), pompous repetitive music, a script which wants to be a cross between Serenity/Hitch-hiker’s but ends up more like Carry On Up Uranus (fnarr, fnarr) with its oddly-inappropriate and slightly sleazy subplot about Vorde and his desperation to… er… protect the purity of the human race by mating with breeder Alicia. But oddly enough, Humanity’s End is a hard film to dislike because it’s so clumsy and heavy-handed it’s actually quite endearing. Plus, we don’t actually get that many spaceship films these days so it’s a bit of a change to watch something full of poorly-rendered space battles and people with silly names.

Now it’d be churlish to expect Prometheus on a budget of $2 million and I suppose we have to grudgingly admire director/co-writer Johnson for his ambition and his desire to tell such a huge scale story with little more than loose change by Hollywood standards. So his script is peppered with these tortuous ‘character moments’ where Vorde seduces Alicia whilst Contessa yearns for Vorde’s affections and Alicia grizzles about her lot as a baby-maker. In between are these big FX sequences which never really quite come off and a sense of threat which is so huge it’s impossible to really take it seriously. But against all expectations, and after all the bang and clatter and booming portentous threats of human extinction, Humanity’s End sort of finds its feet towards its conclusion, puts aside its childish things and offers up a note of hope in the face of human tragedy.

Oh all right, Humanity’s End is a bit of cheap and worthless trash and yet it’s entertaining enough in its own dumb way, with an appealing sort of rough shambolic charm and if nothing else you’ll have fun spotting all those Red Dwarf/Babylon 5 homages as you cringe at the tacky special effects and the eye-poppingly earnest acting. This is almost the dictionary definition of ‘guilty pleasure’ and boy, do I feel guilty.

Extras: None

Review: Cassadaga (18) / Director: Anthony Diblasi / Screenplay: Bruce Wood, Scott Poiley / Starring: Kelen Coleman, Kevin Alejandro, J Larose, Louise Fletcher, Rus Blackwell / Release Date: Out Now

This latest release from the generally-reliable After Dark horror label is, if you’ll pardon the pun considering the subject matter (and especially the opening sequences which will have you squirming in your seat), a cut way above the standard of the tide of cheap and cheerless straight-to-DVD genre titles which come Starburst’s way. Anthony Diblasi’s Cassadaga, an intense and powerful combination of Italian giallo and Southern Gothic horror, is actually slick and accomplished enough to deserve a cinematic release.

Way more subtle and affecting than tiresome slashers like Saw and Hostel, Cassadaga deftly dances with familiar ghostly supernatural tropes before changing partners in mid-stream and drifting in the direction of torture porn with its depictions of mutilation and graphic body horror. But there’s more to Cassadaga than a few cheap thrills and a bit of gratuitous gore; this is a horror film with a touch  of style and intelligence as well as some sturdy performances and striking, evocative cinematography.

At first we seem to be on recognisable territory. Following the death of her younger sister in a traffic accident, deaf art student/teacher Lily More (Kelen Coleman) seeks solace at the spiritualist community of Cassadaga (which really exists) in Florida. She quickly takes up with her star pupil’s single father Mike (Alejandro, True Blood’s Jesus) and a visit to a local spiritualist brings her into contact with an angry, restless spirit which sets out to torment her day and night, leading her and those around her to question her sanity. It soon appears that the vengeful spirit is directing her towards a series of unsolved disappearances which are inevitably connected to the masked figure merrily mutilating young women in a basement and replacing their limbs with doll parts so he can turn them into marionettes. This is Geppetto, the local insane serial killer…

There’s plenty of good, meaty stuff here but the film’s problem is that there’s so much going on that some elements of the plot are a bit undercooked and characters come and go from the story without much explanation. Coleman is excellent as the strong-willed, determined Lily but her new boyfriend Mike, who looks as if he’s going to be integral to the resolution of the sometimes-meandering storyline, disappears when his ex-wife gets wind of his new relationship and he never shows his face again. Geppetto too, remains a bit of a mystery. He’s a ruthless and merciless killer but he’s a bit on the bland side because the film doesn’t tell us what motivates him, why he does the things he does; as a consequence he’s just depicted as a mad butcher who, in the last reel, becomes simply another lumbering murderer chasing a pretty screaming girl. Also a bit of a puzzler is why Lily is depicted as deaf; it doesn’t actually add anything to the story, other than making her appear a bit more vulnerable than the ballsy girls who usually strut through horror films waiting to get their throats slit and much of the time her deafness is barely referenced and it’s easy to forget, such is the confidence of Coleman’s performance, that the character’s deaf at all.

Cassadaga, however, is a richly-atmospheric piece which, refreshingly, takes its time and is happy to let its characters develop at their own pace which makes them somewhat more relatable than the usual horror cannon fodder. Diblasi’s direction is bold and confident and the film only really falters because of the scope of its ambition, its desire to depict believable people whilst combining the derivative ‘ghostly figure’ horror clichés with more graphic mutilation horror without really ever allowing either element the room to breathe. The film remains a quiet triumph though and, for once, is a bit of a gem amidst the flotsam and jetsam of straight-to-DVD horror titles. It’s well worth tracking down.

Special Features: None