Review: Quatermass and the Pit (12) / Directed by: Roy Ward Baker / Screenplay by: Nigel Kneale / Starring: James Donald, Andrew Keir, Barbara Shelley, Julian Glover 

Whisper the name Quatermass and the Pit, and you’ll have even the most hardened sci-fi fan hiding beneath his bed in fits of drooling paranoia.

Despite being fifty years since the original show, Quatermass has become linked with the mysterious, the strange, and the outright weird. It’s fair to say Quatermass and the Pit secreted itself into the public consciousness and reaches out its ethereal claws in more ways than one.

Ideas which have become standard tropes of the genre, reflected time and time again in classics such as Star Wars, Indiana Jones and Star Trek began here: the primordial soup of Sci-Fi.

Digitally remastered for Blu-ray, this new version has been scrubbed clean, given a new lick of paint and kicked blinking into the sterile light of the twenty-first century. Each scene has an authentic ‘60’s’ feel but is presented with such crystal clarity that it could have been filmed only yesterday.

Hobb’s End is at once an ordinary street in London and a place where the architects of the world’s destruction lay dormant, mere ghosts – or should that be locusts – of their former selves.

For those not familiar with Quatermass and the Pit, the story is essentially a five-million year old invasion of Earth. Happens all the time. Beneath the London subway station of Hobbs End, a mysterious thing is discovered. While top boffins scramble for an answer to what it might mean, the military step in with their own theories: anything from an unexploded bomb to propaganda device of the Nazis. During all of this, Professor Quatermass makes a series of startling and grim discoveries that revolutionise how mankind perceives itself and even questions our place in the world.

A high-brow, thinking man’s science fiction that one can slip into while enjoying a slice of true British cinematic history. Quatermass and the Pit is a tense, dramatic film with a twisting, revolving plot that ends in a place as surprising as it is poignant.

The social commentary that runs throughout touches upon the very nature of evil, society’s unrest – as important today as it was back then – and the monster that lurks within us all. Just beneath the skin, ripping at the slender veil of what’s laughingly referred to as civilisation.

Scripted by Nigel Kneale, filmed by Hammer Studios, starring the late Andrew Keir as Quatermass and the esteemed Julian Glover as Colonel Breen, this film delivers a solid and powerful performance through to the final apocalyptic reel.

That’s not to say it’s without faults. For all the pathos presented, Quatermass and the Pit remains a beast of its time: a Hammer production from the company renowned for wobbly sets and low-budget pieces. The special effects are dire. The original series of ten years earlier managed better. But that doesn’t matter. It’s not important. You have to suspend your disbelief further than normal to understand the vision this film struggles to represent.

The Blu-ray version of Quatermass and the Pit is packed with extra goodies, including a range of interviews with actors, film buffs, and Mark Gatiss – doesn’t he get everywhere these days!

In summery, if Quatermass and the Pit feels like tired, well-trodden ground that’s because it continues to be emulated in genre film making of the last half-century: a fitting testament to this film’s raw power to impress.

Quatermass and the Pit is out now on (R2) Blu-ray/DVD

To read our interview with Quatermass and the Pit actor Julian Glover, click here.

Review: Insidious (15) / Directed by: James Wan  / Screenplay by: Leigh Whannell / Starring: Patrick Wilson, Rose Byrne and Ty Simpkins

When Josh (Patrick Wilson) and Renai (Rose Byrne) move into their dream house with their young family, they look forward to a bright and happy future together. However, it’s not long before strange things start to happen, and their oldest son falls into a coma that seems to defy medical science. As the stress of their situation mounts, Josh starts avoiding the house, while Renai deals with a series of bizarre encounters and comes to the realisation that their house is haunted.

Like anyone with a shred of sense, they pack up and move to a new home, only to find that the ghosts have followed them and that it may not be the house that’s haunted.

Insidious is a frustrating film to watch. There are parts of the movie that are very well done indeed, with the tension building up slowly until it reaches fever pitch. Unfortunately, it’s at this point where the filmmakers usually do something to completely negate the fear and tension that it worked so hard to create. Characters launch into long, unnecessary pieces of exposition and there are two comedy sidekicks to the obligatory psychic, that seem to have wandered in from another movie altogether.

That’s not to say Insidious is a terrible movie. After a slow start it picks up the pace and delivers some effective, solid scares. The acting is OK, without any real standout performances, but no really dreadful ones (except the comedy sidekicks previously mentioned), and while the plot is more than a little similar to pretty much every other haunted house movie in existence, it does the job and is engaging, up to the final act where it gets a little contrived and silly.

All in all, Insidious is a missed opportunity. If the filmmakers had kept building the tension and drip-fed the back-story instead of giving it to us all in big meandering chunks, it could have been an effective, if unoriginal ghost story.

As it stands, there are parts of it that work really well, that are spoiled somewhat by the bits that don’t.

If you can suspend you sense of disbelief, there are many worse movies to watch on Halloween. It’s just a shame, because with a little effort, Insidious could have been so much better.

Extras: Horror 101: The Exclusive Seminar / On Set With Insidious / Insidious Entities / Trailer

Expected Rating: 7/10

Insidious is out now on DVD/Blu-ray

Review: The Wild Hunt (15) / Directed by: Alexandre Franchi / Screenplay by: Mark Anthony Krupa, Alexandre Franchi / Starring: Ricky Mabe, Kaniehtiio Horn, Mark Anthony Krupa, Trevor Horn

Live action role playing or LARPing as it is sometime known, hasn’t really had much exposure in cinema outside of a subplot in 2008 comedy Role Models. This is all about to change with the imminent release of Joe Lynch’s awesome looking Knights of Badassdom, a film primed for cult success. In the meantime a smaller independent film from Canada has sneaked out on to DVD this week and it’s a movie that deserves a lot more recognition. You could look at The Wild Hunt as a crazy mish-mash of genres that shouldn’t work, except it does work and it’s an effective, tense and clever little film.

Our story begins with Erik (Ricky Mabe) a young Canadian man who is plagued by bad dreams and self doubt. Erik is left to look after his Alzheimer’s stricken father most weekends whilst his girlfriend Lynn (Kaniehtiio Horn) goes off into a fantasy world in the Canadian wilderness to take part in an elaborate fantasy role playing game. Lynn was introduced to this world by Erik’s brother Bjorn (Mark Krupa) who is so enmeshed in this make believe universe that he rarely breaks his character of a Viking warrior. Erik suspects that Lynn is cheating on him and one weekend, scared of losing her, he follows them out into the woods. Erik finds the grounds for the event far more vast and detailed than he thought; there are hundreds of participants all belonging to different factions and all at differing levels of the game. Erik is forced to enter in costume otherwise he will be denied entry. Once there he finds his brother and Lynn and encounters many amusing characters. As the game goes on, Erik finds himself enjoying the whole thing and reconnecting with his girlfriend. The newfound happiness is about to be shattered however when a band of pretend savages and their shaman ruler start taking things a little too seriously.

To say anything else about the plot would be a disservice to you the viewer. Part of the joy of watching The Wild Hunt is discovering it for yourself. There are some wild shifts in tone in the script and direction that the film takes. It could have easily all fallen apart but the characters and world are so well presented that you end up going with every sudden turn the film takes. This starts off like most independent films with lots of handheld shots of guys with floppy hair staring out through windows. Once the action moves to the setting of the live action role play then things really kick up a gear. It’s possible that this could have been an out and out piss take of the whole subculture but writers Mark Krupa and director Alexandre Franchi clearly have a lot of affection for these folk so there is humour, mostly at the expense of a pompous nerd who has attained the rank of king, but there is also some touching character moments and little human flourishes amongst the world of make believe. Kudos also to the production team for somehow finding a vast village set complete with barns and Viking longboats that they could use as a set. They also seemed to have wrangled together a few hundred actors to really make the game seem like something people are hopelessly lost in every weekend. It’s a great subject matter for an independent film and the makers are very savvy for setting a small story in a larger world that makes the film seem more expensive as a result.

Due to the good work of the actors and the writers there is a sudden shift into horror that works totally because you are so invested. The film goes to some uncomfortable places and becomes more like some kind of Shakespearean tragedy. I felt myself start to physically tense up at one point because I cared about these people, it’s a lesson that many filmmakers forget in their race to throw gore at you; make the characters likeable. The violence is sudden and shocking and the actors involved really sell the idea that things have gotten out of hand. The message seems to be that no matter who you are or who you pretend to be, when out in the wilderness and faced with the same emotions we all face in our every day lives the animal instinct will take over. There are characters whose only happiness comes from the weekend retreat where they get to act like a sorcerer and lord it over a crew of men. When these people are faced with the same problems they faced in the real world, things like rejection, they react violently to the things that drove them into the game to begin with. It’s something most can identify with, who hasn’t sought comfort through Call of Duty online multiplayer only to get cussed down by some 12 year old with a headset who lives in Albania. This is why I don’t go paintballing anymore. One characters journey in the film (I won’t say who) is especially moving, leading to a final scene that will play on your mind for a while.

The Wild Hunt calls to mind The Wicker Man, to me at least. Both films deal with outsiders introduced to a world they do not understand and explore the darkness just under the surface of the every day. This is a far better companion piece to that film than The Wicker Tree could ever hope to be and for that reason I urge you to seek it out.

Extras: Trailer, Making of, Storyboards, Festival footage, Commentaries.

The Wild Hunt is out now on DVD

Review: George A. Romero’s Deadtime Stories Volume 2 / Directed by: Jeff Monahan, Matt Walsh / Screenplay by: Jeff Monahan / Starring: Amanda Frost, Nick Mancuso, Amy Marsalis

George A. Romero’s Deadtime Stories: Volume 2 is a major disappointment from one of cinema’s foremost masters of horror. With Romero himself hosting the intros and outros of this anthology through screens of a pyramid of old TV sets, he comes off as a Poor Man’s version of the Cryptkeeper complete with bad, very bad, puns. It’s as if he was phoning in his performance and from the looks of the set, maybe he was. Romero’s dialogue is flat, making him unappealing as a storyteller. Even John Carpenter had more life in him back when he had a similar role in the poorly recieved TV anthology movie Body Bags back in ’93. At least he was fun and campy. Romero reminded me in looks of the owner of a bookstore I used to manage who used to talk like a cross between the Lords of the Rings‘ Golem and horror icon Peter Lorre. At least that guy would have been more entertaining!

The three horror stories featured come off as student films that are weakly written, though competently directed. It’s as if we’ve heard these tales before and know the punch line before we get to the end.

The first story, The Gorge, is reminiscent of Neil Marshall’s far superior film The Descent, where three best friends are trapped in an underground cave, one of which has a broken ankle. Without immediate hope of rescue, what will they do to survive?

The whiney, sexually frustrated characters are unlikeable and you kind of wish they would have done a Monty Python camera pan when we first meet them to the real cave explorers. Watching paint dry would be a better activity than to spend 30 minutes viewing the first episode.

ON SABBATH HILL is the second story, which while the title might be great, it really doesn’t have anything to do with the story. A family man, university professor who is a real hard nose in class (we’ve all met this type before) has an affair with one of his students getting her pregnant. She wants to keep the baby and he realizes that his career that he worked so hard for will come to an end. Inevitably, the student commits suicide for the entire class to see and the professor’s guilty conscious begins to take its toll as she haunts him.

Here is a missed opportunity where it looked like the students themselves were starting to set the teacher up for his evil ways, but alas, no such plot device is used and it basically a paint-by-numbers plot.

The third and most promising, until the cop-out ending is Dust. A security guard who works at a high-tech lab learns that a scientist has been experimenting with dust from the planet Mars that has the ability to cure cancer. Knowing that his dying wife has only four months to live, the guard steals a sample of dust and injects it into her IV bag, rejuventing the woman causing her to have a voracious appetite for sex ending with disaterous results.

This episode was the most entertaining if it wasn’t for the “gee, how do we end this,” ending. The first two acts are interesting before the writer ran out of ideas and decided, (“I know! George Romero did this before!”) and went for a Night of the Living Dead tag-on.

Expected rating: 5 out of 10

Actual rating:

George A. Romero’s Deadtime Stories: Volume 2 is out now on Region 1 DVD. UK release TBC, but Vol. 1 is available here.

Oh no, not another cheap, poorly-made zombie apocalypse movie. Gimme a break. But wait… this one looks… different. This one looks… good. Having recently endured the rigours of Luke Goss in the appalling and unreviewable ‘Zombie Undead’ I’m starting to be a bit wary of films with the ‘Z’ word in the title or anything promising hordes of ‘the undead’ and ultimately delivering about six startled-looking extras with some red on them. If any horror genre has reached saturation point it’s the zombie movie and it takes something special – a ‘Walking Dead’ or ‘Shaun of the Dead’ for example – to reanimate my interest in movies about the recently-deceased. Last year’s ‘The Horde’ depicted a zombie apocalypse from a French perspective and now ‘The Dead’, a striking new movie by the Ford Brothers, takes us even further afield to the parched plains and deserts of Africa, as the world grinds to a halt in a landscape which already looks pretty apocalyptic to most soft Westerners.

An evacuation flight out of a war-torn, troubled Africa crashes off the coast and American Air Force Engineer Brian Murphy (Rob Freeman) emerges as the only survivor in a land where the dead have risen and are savagely attacking and devouring the living. Desperate to find a way back home Freeman meets up with Daniel (Prince David Osei) whose village has been decimated, his wife slaughtered and his young son missing. The two join forces, their cultural differences acknowledged but set aside as they struggle to cross a hostile, infested terrain in search of sanctuary and, they hope, an eventual reunion with their families.

The Ford Brothers have worked a minor miracle here with what can only have been the tiniest of budgets. Perfunctory, derivative storyline notwithstanding, ‘The Dead’ in many ways takes the zombie movie back to its roots. Those who rail against the super-fast, athletic undead of recent vintage won’t be disappointed with the slow, eerily-shuffling and relentless zombies here or the graphic and stomach-troubling sequences where they tear and rend at their victims before happily munching on slices of bloody flesh. Yum. Elsewhere zombies are dispatched with an almost documentary matter-of-factness; one has its face blown right off, others are decapitated and dismembered, many more shot through the head. What’s really most impressive though is the absolute and implacable constant presence of the zombies; we see them here and there in large numbers but the film deftly gives the impression that, even in the tractless wastes of the African desert there’s nowhere to hide, no place to stop and rest – within moments a zombie or two will just appear. One particular scene – Murphy hides high up in a tree during the night and in the darkness a zombie shuffles below him, mindlessly unaware of his presence – is the stuff of real zombie nightmares.

Clearly conscious of their low budget, the Ford Brothers have gone to great pains to make the greatest use of the available African vistas, with great wide shots of dusty plains and arid deserts contrasting starkly with the more typical modern urban environments of your standard zombie slasher. The paucity of dialogue – there’s a good twenty or so minutes where no-one talks at all – adds to the film’s sense of other-worldiness, a sense already stunningly-realised purely by virtue of its Dark Continent setting. It’s a bleak and relentless experience – perhaps not as desperately pessimistic as ‘The Mist’ – but there’s precious little light and shade here and, at the end, not much hope for the future when Murphy discovers that what he’d hoped might just be a localised outbreak has actually spread a whole lot further.

‘The Dead’ is really a bit of a gem in a sub-genre much abused in the last few years. Its catchpenny title doesn’t do it much justice and its lurid cover suggests something much less evocative than the haunting and memorable film which the Ford Brothers, clearly talents to keep an eye on, have created. Highly recommended.

Special features: 16 minutes worth of behind-the-scenes stuff, one deleted scene and cast and crew interviews.

‘The Dead’ is available on DVD in the UK now

At some point during the last two years, Director Scott Stewart and actor Paul Bettany got together and decided that obviously Bettany was the new Clint Eastwood and subsequently turned out two supernaturally tinged westerns. Legion was bloody awful and squandered a good premise with a terrible script and laboured direction. I’m happy to report that Priest is a step up for the duo, but only in the way that eating dog poo is preferable to catching the Ebola virus.

Priest takes place in a gloomy future where a war with vampires has decimated much of society. Eventually for a reason never explained and one that doesn’t actually make sense, vampires are sent off to live in specific walled off zones in the desert. The ninja like Priests are retired from their vampire slaying as they’re no longer appears to be a vampire menace. The cities that remain are lorded over by The Clergy and citizens are frequently told to obey the will of god through propaganda adverts featuring Christopher Plummer. Out in the desert wastelands a young girl is kidnapped by a vampire known only as ‘black hat’ (Karl Urban) who then keeps her in a cage and carts her around on a vampire infested train. A young sheriff from the desert (Cam Gigandet) hunts down a priest (Paul Bettany) as he is the girl’s uncle and the only one who can bring her back. Priest is brought out of retirement much to the clergy’s disapproval and heads off into the desert to find his missing niece. The Clergy despatches some other priests including a terribly miscast Maggie Q to bring back the rogue priest dead or alive.

Priest starts off quite well. The city is well presented and there are a couple of street scenes right out of Blade Runner, in fact they are so alike that there could be a court case. There is also a quite nifty animated prologue detailing the history of the human-vamp war and the priesthood which sets the tone nicely. When Cam Gigandet shows up as a sheriff (also terribly miscast) and there is a fight in a bar you start to think that this may actually turn out to be an okay guilty pleasure with impressive production design. Then about thirty minutes in it all falls apart.

The problem with vampires is they have to obey certain rules. You have the typical rules we all know and love; sunlight, crucifixes, garlic and whatnot but every now and then someone clever comes along and puts a new spin on things. I’m thinking the absence of the soul angle as seen in Buffy and Angel. Priest has absolutely no rules whatsoever, or if it does they are never very well explained. During an extended battle scene on a moving train I suddenly realised that this vampire was in bright desert sunshine and was not even squinting his eyes. There is also the introduction of the concept of vampire ‘familiars’ who are bald ugly half vampires that swarm all over the desert. This concept is tossed away in favour of more CGI nonsense when there is a whole scene in a town made up of these folk which would have been more interesting than what actually happens.

Now the problem with humans is that we have to obey certain rules, gravity, and physics and so on. You can be the most gifted martial artist in the world but you still do not have the power of flight no matter how floaty your cloak. In Priest it seems that the rules of physics simply don’t apply so you have ridiculous scenes where the Priest takes out a bunch of bad guys before something he has thrown in the air hits the floor. It serves no narrative purpose apart from making the 12 year old who watches it think it’s cool and then injure himself leaping from the top of the stairs. After about seven or so of these sorts of scenes I completely tuned out because there was no threat, there was nothing to be afraid of. With no rules the screenplay meanders all over the shop and becomes just an incoherent collection of scenes. It also falls victim to what so many films do nowadays; it feels a lot like a Playstation 3 game. The vampire creatures look just like the nicely rendered beats from recent games such as Prototype and the moves our heroes perform are right out of games like Darksiders or Devil May Cry. If you want to be a video game then be a video game but don’t be something that doesn’t respond when I move my control pad because it’s just annoying.

There is an attempt at some characterisation and depth with Cam Gigandet and Maggie Q’s characters but they are so miscast and have zero chemistry with any of the other performers that it just rings false. Paul Bettany puts the arse in bad arse and should really start looking to get a new agent because he is not doing himself any favours with these films.

Priest is a pretty looking failure but a failure on almost every level. There is probably a good story to be told in this initially fascinating world but this isn’t it.

Extras: Director/actor commentary, Deleted and Extended Scenes, Creating the world of Priest featurette and the weapons and vehicles of Priest featurette. 

Priest is out now on DVD/Blu-ray

When a horror film has a generic title like Shiver, it’s often a sign that it lacks a clear identity of its own. Unfortunately, that’s the case here. Ostracised by his peers because he suffers from severe photophobia, teenager Santi (Junio Valverde) and his mum Julia (Mar Sodupe) move to a mist-shrouded mountain village. Unfortunately, no sooner have they arrived than something nasty lurking in the forest starts picking off sheep and villagers.

Because he is pale-skinned and acts a bit like a vampire, suspicion falls on Santi. This is one of many ideas that the script toys with half-heartedly. It doesn’t really work because it’s hard to believe that ignorance and superstition would take such a hold on a village than has access to broadband. The photophobia, made much of at the start, is all but forgotten by the second act. As for what is actually causing all those deaths, the explanation, when it comes, is far-fetched and about as scary as someone lunging at you with a chorizo.

There are borrowings aplenty from other movies. For a lot of the time, the village setting is perilously close to the sort of cheesy Middle European locales – all pointy gables and gurning locals – familiar from many a Hammer flick. The cinematography has the dank, mossy tonality of the Twilight films, and there is a perfunctory gesture towards teen romance when Santi takes up with local hottie Angela (Blanca Saurez). Valverde, with his doe eyes and high cheekbones, even looks a bit like Robert Pattinson’s Spanish cousin.

The script, cobbled together by several hands, calls on everyone to behave in a random, reckless way, and throws up some odd loose ends (while Santi is hanging with Angela, Angela’s dad is romancing Sant’s mum – awkward!). The result is a draining of credibility and tension. Director Isidro Ortiz compensates with stylish atmospherics, but his technical competence only serves to raise your expectations, making the rather lame storyline even more of a letdown.

Having said that, there’s some nice footage of vertiginous cliffs and swirling mist. Valverde does a very good job in the lead role, and teenage girls might warm to this movie because of him. Even so, there’s something deeply wrong with a film that makes you wish you were watching Twilight.

Shiver is released on DVD in the UK October 17th

Review: Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil (15) / Directed by: Eli Craig / Screenplay by: Eli Craig, Morgan Jurgenson / Starring: Tyler Labine, Alan Tudyk, Katrina Bowden, Jesse Moss, Philip Granger, Brandon Jay McLaren, Christie Lang / Release date: Out now

The backwoods hillbilly has been a staple of horror films for a long time now. Everything from the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre to Wrong Turn to most of the recent French horror films have taken a dim view of country folk often painting them as inbred, moronic and cannibalistic psychos.

In horror cinema the sheltered beings from the country seem to lose it every time a nubile blonde cheerleader wanders into their territory and they set about eating or breeding with them. It’s about time someone took a stand for these folk and flipped things on their head so that we see things from the perspective of the good ole country boy. A film where we learn that country folk are amongst the most decent human beings on the planet and are simply misunderstood. This is the simple yet genius premise of Eli Craig’s Tucker and Dale vs. Evil a film that gets a lot of entertaining mileage from this premise.

Our story begins with confident country handyman Tucker (Alan Tudyk) and his best pal, the gentle lummox Dale (Tyler Labine) setting off for a weekend of fishing at Tucker’s newly bought countryside shack which they intend to fix up. At the same time a bunch of shallow, dim-witted college fraternity types head out for the country for a weekend of camping and drinking (Guys with names like Chad and Jason, you know the type). The two parties cross paths on the way and the college kids, who have seen too many films get freaked out at the shabby dungarees wearing appearance of Tucker and Dale. Things get worse when Dale lays eyes on pretty and smart Alison (Katrina Bowden) and due to his shyness his attempt at talking to her goes rather wrong. Disheartened but not disillusioned, Tucker and Dale carry on to their country abode and set about tossing back a few beers and night fishing. Whilst out on the pond at night our heroes catch sight of the college kids skinny dipping. Alison falls off a rock and lands head first in the water knocking herself out. Tucker and Dale race to her rescue and bring her on board their rowboat. The rest of the kids see this and assume the worst and flee for their lives. Dale nurses Alison back to health and when she awakes although frightened at first she starts to warm to the gentle giant. The college kids meanwhile hatch a plan to get Alison back from the clutches of these two hillbillies. Misunderstanding and communication problems on a mass scale follow, often leading to college kids dying in increasingly gruesome fashion.

I can’t recall the last time that I saw a slapstick comedy that amused me that didn’t come from Hong Kong. For that reason alone, Eli Craig deserves a lot of praise. The way in which the college kids end up rapidly dispatching themselves by impalement and dismemberment by wood chipper as they ineptly try and fight what they see as a hillbilly menace is hilarious. There have been a lot of comedies this year that promised much but delivered little. Tucker and Dale vs. Evil is so damn funny but at the same time very smart. It’s a simple idea and it’s a wonder that nobody has done something like this before. The script challenges horror conventions and clichés and flips them on their head whilst not forgetting the bloodlust of the horror audience. So people die in a very gory manner, tripping into wood chippers, burning themselves alive and shooting themselves in the head. It’s all played for laughs though and plays out like a Looney Tunes cartoon with tons of blood.

Alan Tudyk is one of Hollywood’s best kept secrets, often popping up in supporting roles and perhaps best known to genre fans as Wash, the pilot of the Serenity in the film of the same name and its inspiration, the TV series Firefly. Tudyk has a real gift for physical comedy which has not been tapped in previous films and the scenes where he is sawing into a bee hive and running from the angry bees and getting maimed all because of communication issues are genius. Tyler Labine is also a very likeable performer, best known as a slacker extraordinaire in the short-lived series Reaper. Labine playing Dale manages to make a credible romantic lead despite his large and hirsute appearance. Alison gradually falls for his vulnerable charms and it never feels false because of Labine’s innate likeability. The pair of Tudyk and Labine have brilliant chemistry and their reactions as they are surrounded by death are priceless, constantly believing that they are in the midst of some kind of mass suicide cult and still wanting to do the right thing in spite of all that is going on.

Sadly Tucker and Dale vs. Evil can’t keep up the momentum and once the first hour is up. It sadly lapses into standard horror fare, becoming exactly what it was initially parodying. It seems like a genius idea that sadly had nowhere to go and perhaps would have made a better short film. For the first hour though this is fresh, funny and inventive. Comedy fans will enjoy the performances and the physical comedy and gorehounds won’t feel short changed either. Now it is out on DVD and because it has not been given a proper release in cinemas this is bound for cult status and is well worth a rent.

Extras: Making of feature, photo gallery.

Hannibal Lector became the world’s favourite psychopath when Anthony Hopkins brought Thomas Harris’s character to (larger than) life in Jonathan Demme’s ‘Silence of the Lambs’ in 1991. But few who shivered at Ant’s overblown boggling portrayal of Lector were aware that the character had been brought to the screen just a few years previously, in a more restrained and far more effective manner, by Brit thesp Brian Cox in Michael Mann’s underrated ‘Manhunter.’ The film’s subsequently attained true cult status and whilst its reputation speaks for itself and has slowly grown in the intervening years it seems destined to remain the litter of the Lector bunch, eventually being remade by director Brett Ratner as ‘Red Dragon’ (the title of the book which spawned it) in 2002.

‘Manhunter’ is resolutely a creature of the 1980s, like so many films of its time defined by the very recognisable fads and fashions of the era. The music is all pulsing tones and thudding synths (there’s even a cheesy soft rock ballad playing over the end credits) and the women have mullet hair, the men sport big moustaches and, at the beach, wear ludicrously short shorts. Director Michael Mann is clearly developing his art here and some of his pacing is off in places but his measured, stylized and leisurely direction manages to evoke a creeping sensation of dread and terror as FBI profiler Will Graham (William Petersen) comes out of retirement to help catch the infamous serial killer known as “the Tooth Fairy”  (Tom Noonan). Ironically, for a movie which introduces the legendary Lector (Lecktor?), Noonan’s Francis Dollarhyde (“The Tooth Fairy”) is much more formidable and disturbing and there‘s almost something supernatural and otherworldly about his methods and his studied, robotic movements. Dollarhyde is an utterly insane and ruthless killer and whilst the final confrontation between him and the Police is a bit on the clumsy side, the movie never undersells its bad guy or undermines the threat he poses and there’s something distinctly stomach-churning about the way he slowly stalks and then torments his victims, ultimately leaving them in no doubt about what fate’s in store for them. Modern serial killer flicks tend to go straight for the jugular so it’s refreshing to see ‘Manhunter’ taking its time, keeping its killer off-screen until the tension’s unbearable; when we finally meet “The Tooth Fairy” we’re well aware of the threat he poses and the bloodshed he’s capable of.

Cox’s Lector is, interestingly, little more than a supporting character, the imprisoned killer who’s in communication with the Tooth Fairy and is, in his own way, manipulating him so he can carry on his own killing spree vicariously. Cox is a colder and more believable Lector than Hopkins; here he appears in a white-walled, antiseptic cell as opposed to the grim, stony dungeon of ‘Silence of the Lambs’ and his confrontation with Graham, the man who put him away but who is clearly still terrified of him and unnerved by him, sizzles off the screen in ways Hopkins little chinwags with Jodie Foster never really quite managed.

Michael Mann has, since 1986, made far slicker films and is now one of cinema’s most accomplished and interesting filmmakers with credits like ‘Last of the Mohicans’, ‘Heat’, ‘Ali’ and the monstrously-underrated ‘Collateral’. But ‘Manhunter’, a bit rough and ready and clearly the work of a director-in-progress, is an intriguing and endlessly-fascinating calling card which deserves to be remembered as more than just “that first Hannibal Lector movie.”

Special features: Commentary, vintage featurettes.

‘Manhunter’ is out now on Blu Ray in the UK