Review Category: Movie

If I never hear the name ‘The Grog’ again, it will be too soon. Holding a seance in an abandoned children’s shelter, a group of filmmakers – including in-universe horror legend The Grog, played by Kurt Deimer – rustle up more than they had bargained for when they awaken something terrible from its undead slumber.

This comedy-horror film has a few horror icons of its own in Insidious star Lin Shaye and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: Part 2‘s Bill Moseley. Playing the film-inside-the-film’s director and the house’s realtor, Shaye and Moseley will be this low-budget horror’s biggest draw. And, with both genre stars getting a surprisingly generous chunk of screen time, director Paul Boyd certainly gets his money’s worth.

As for the rest of it, Scared to Death offers a reasonable selection of genre fare, ranging from haunted dolls to things that go bump in the night. Which makes it ironic, given the quality of the cast and its obvious love of the haunted house, that Scared to Death is so lacking in… well, scares. The film’s VFX work is solid and some of the visuals are particularly unnerving (especially one involving Lin Shaye and a bed), but between the wooden performances and hit-and-miss writing (take a shot any time someone says ‘The Grog’) the atmosphere simply isn’t there.

SCARED TO DEATH premiered at FrightFest Glasgow on March 8th, 2025.

Adapting his own novel of the same name, Italian filmmaker and genre giant Pupi Avati emerges with the oddest film of this year’s Glasgow FrightFest film festival… or, indeed, any film festival.

Set in the 1940s, this Gothic noir follows young writer Lui (Filippo Scotti) as he falls in love with US Army nurse Barbara (Mildred Gustafsson) following a brief encounter during the Italian Liberation. One year and a move to Iowa later, and he finds himself living next door to that same nurse, with whom he has developed quite the obsession. Learning that Barbara has disappeared, our writer’s fixation sends him down an entirely different path as he attempts to track down his lost love.

Shot entirely in black and white, The American Backyard is a striking return to genre filmmaking from a director who rose to prominence in the 1970s and ’80s with horror masterpieces The House With the Laughing Windows (1976) and Zeder (1983). As Lui scrabbles about in his neighbour’s garden in search of a disembodied voice, the director shows signs of his roots in creepy Italian giallo. For the rest of it, The American Backyard divides its time between courtroom drama, psychological thriller, and atmospheric mystery.

Scotti delivers a commendable performance as the eccentric young writer, giving the film a strong anchor amid its more expressionist flourishes. The presence of veteran British actor Rita Tushingham also gives flavour to this heady brew of deranged ideas, disturbing imagery (vagina in a jar, anyone?) and discomforting emotions. If it gets lost in the weeds partway through, The American Backyard finds its focus again during a powerful – if unsatisfactory – finale.

The American Backyard is a deeply strange late-career entry from a genre giant of old. Dark and unsettling in a way one can’t pin down, it’s brimming with a devious energy, barely buried beneath the surface of a deliberately composed period thriller.

THE AMERICAN BACKYARD premiered at Pigeon Shrine FrightFest Glasgow on March 8th, 2025.

A documentary about a painful family reunion takes a turn into altogether darker territory when filmmaker Emily (White Lotus star Brittany O’Grady) realises that the subject of her movie has gone missing. Hauling cinematographer Danny (E.J. Bonilla) along for the ride, Emily sets out in search of her mother.

Found footage movies about would-be documentary makers are a dime a dozen, but very few of them come directed by bona fide documentarians. In Our Blood has this in director Pedro Kos, who was nominated for an Oscar with his short film Lead Me Home. As such, this moody horror film is more confidently shot than most, with a genuinely engaging frontwoman in O’Grady’s Emily. Any found footage horror which doesn’t spend most of its time following its subjects as they run around screaming aimlessly in the dark is to be celebrated, and In Our Blood has far more on its mind than that.

In its story of addiction among society’s most vulnerable, some surprisingly heavy themes are tackled. The real faces and residents of ‘transitional community’ Camp Hope feature in the film’s end credits, speaking to a deeper consideration for the issue of homelessness on the streets of New Mexico. This unexpected depth sits ill at ease with the more goofy developments lurking in the finale, marking a tonal shift (rats and a pig’s head aside) which doesn’t entirely work but at least grabs one’s attention. It’s a shot in the arm for the otherwise leaden pacing and not-particularly-enticing mystery of the first half.

In Our Blood is undeniably well made and has good intentions in its account of the lost and vulnerable in modern New Mexico. However, its genre work is somewhat anaemic, coming in too late and too out of left field to function as much more than a tacked-on postscript to the film Kos really wanted to make.

IN OUR BLOOD premiered at FrightFest Glasgow on March 7th, 2025.

Europe, 1940. As war rages across the continent, a rag-tag gang of misfits come together to save the galaxy when an extraterrestrial creature crash-lands on the outskirts of their quaint English village. Leading the charge, plucky Arthur Roundtree (Tom Bailey) finds himself manning the thin red line between mankind and total annihilation.

This comedy sci-fi from director Jack McHenry combines Dad’s Army with Predator to create one of the more eccentric war films ever made. Produced through a Kickstarter campaign, the budget is noticeably low, and the film’s rough-around-the-edges performances, special effects and action are all part and parcel of the film’s appeal. To those less enamoured with the world of super independent cinema? Keep calm and carry on, The Doom Busters was never going to be for you.

As such, The Doom Busters commits to the bit, not letting a little thing like no budget get in the way of an alien invasion. Featuring energetic performances from its cast and employing satisfying bursts of bloody violence, it’s an easy film to root for and a hard one to dislike. Cinematography by Rory McHenry makes good use of the English countryside, while Faye McKeever’s costume design really helps to sell the 1940s setting.

The Blitz spirit lives on in Doom Busters – a rip-roaring, Nazi-blasting work of low-budget sci-fi with an infectious sense of enthusiasm.

THE DOOM BUSTERS premiered at FrightFest Glasgow on March 7th, 2025.

In her feature debut, Izzy Lee (Innsmouth) presents a haunted house story with an edge. The director is no stranger to staging things with a pertinent, political slant, and it’s this angle that propels things above the standard horror fare.

Mia (Fanya Sanchez) has lost her husband, Adam (Mason Conrad), to what is ruled suicide, but not before being hounded on suspicion of murder. She’s now on a year-long house arrest after being found guilty of losing her baby (this is set in a ‘fictionalised’ town where abortion or even miscarriage is illegal). Her parole officer (Lee Boxleitner) epitomises the aggressive misogyny of the town and the ‘system’ that has convicted her. Trying to make things easier for her is her new boyfriend, Marc (Vincent Stalba, who disconcertingly looks a little too much like a young Jeremy Hunt for our liking), an old high school friend. Promising to look after her, things get strange when his phone and keys go missing and Mia begins to believe Adam is still around.

Opening strongly with a distinct sense of injustice, House of Ashes manages to play to its strengths throughout without bludgeoning you over the head with them. Beautifully filmed by Sophia Cacciola (The Once and Future Smash), there’s a sense of claustrophobia in Mia’s situation. Incredibly relevant, the story highlights the misogyny women find themselves subjected to in the US and elsewhere. From victim-blaming, anti-body autogamy, gaslighting, and white knight syndrome, Izzy Lee’s film brings the threads together perfectly, the politics not overpowering the fantasy elements, and vice versa. The haunting she suffers reinforces the patriarchal system she’s experienced all her life and continues to do so. An obnoxious social media ‘influencer’ (Laura Dromerick) who invades Mia’s privacy for her own profile hits the mark perfectly. We’ve all seen something similar in real life.

Although House of Ashes clearly has a low budget, the production value is much higher than expected, proving Izzy Lee has a bright future ahead.

HOUSE OF ASHES screened at Pigeon Shrine FrightFest Glasgow 2025.

Struggling Billy (Raúl Castillo) convinces his peace-loving wrestling friend Dom (Tony Cavalero) to sink all their money into a cryptocurrency with hopes of a rosy future. Billy wants to be able to buy a house so he can share custody of his daughter, but while he’s bragging of his good fortune to his ex-partner, the value of his bitcoin is plummeting faster than a bird carrying a boulder. The ‘crypto bro’ who started the Tulip coin, Charles Hegel (a brilliant Josh Brener) has apparently died in Kenya, forcing everything to be locked down and leaving Billy owing thousands in loans. Heading to Reddit, he finds a hacker, Eva (Melonie Diaz) who tells him Hegel has faked his death and pocketed millions from his shitcoin scam (something we’ve really seen happen recently). Billy and Dom team up with Eva to find Hegel and make him pay back the money.

Taking a well-timed swipe at how precarious the cryptocurrency world is, co-writer (with John Hibey) and director Cutter Hodierne gives this kidnap/home invasion caper a lighter edge, but doesn’t shy from some grittier moments. It also says a lot about greed and manipulating those in positions of power. Despite being bound a lot of the time, Hegel manages to get into his captors’ heads, attempting to pit them against each other. Hodierne adopts a Moby Dick metaphor, with the ‘little guys’ fighting the ‘big machine’, Billy fighting his instinct to get revenge versus doing the right thing for his family.

Castillo is captivating as he simple-mindedly falls for the crypto scam, genuinely believing his life has changed for the better with the promise of free money. That opening alone should act as a warning for those wanting an easy way out. His descent into thuggish criminality is tragic but handled with humour, with Cavalero’s Dom carrying the deadpan laughs. To compare Hodierne’s film to that of the Coen brothers’ is somewhat lazy, yet the parallels are too strong to deny – and that’s certainly not a bad thing.

COLD WALLET is released on digital platforms on March 3rd.

Set on a distant Earth-like planet that really is quite a lot like Earth, and whose 1999 seems to be playing it out in a distinctly Earth-like way, Chinese director Li Yang’s debut feature film Escape from the 21st Century is a whirlwind of action, silliness and teenage angst right from the word go. When three friends – Wang Chengyong (the cool one), Paopao (the slightly overweight and thus insecure one), and Wang Zha (the ordinary narrating one) – get into a fight for the honour of Yang Yi (the cool one’s girlfriend), they accidentally develop the power to sneeze themselves into a coma… and twenty years into the future.

Here the three discover that the future for all of them is less than ideal and that growing up, for all that they long for it in 1999, is far from what it’s cracked up to be. Despite the very silly central conceit, the dark future of 2019 is often surprisingly brutal. The film builds an unanticipated amount of depth and heart out of the three teenage boys’ simplistic yearning for a better, cooler future. With its exploration of time travel as a way to change and better the future, all while not being able to remember who you lent your copy of Street Fighter II to, Escape from the 21st Century could have an intense poignancy for anyone currently going through an early mid-life crisis.

The performances – of both adult actors playing unworldly teens and teenage actors spanning from start of the summer holiday hopefulness to despair and dead-eyed determination – are all very strong, but it really is the direction that stands out. Leaping back and forth in time without confusing the audience and hurling cultural references (western audiences will definitely get many, while some are almost funnier for being so unfamiliar) and both goofy and spectacular visual effects at the viewer, Li Yang refuses to give us a chance to get bored as we rollercoaster around from teen angst to brutal martial arts violence to cyberpunk to anime to Bond movie to goofball silliness. It’s easy to imagine this combination putting off some more sober cinephiles, as it can feel like the sugar rush of a pre-teen let loose with adult money in a sweet shop, but the earnestness of both the performances and Li’s exploration of lost childhood sell it far beyond mere dazzle and spectacle.

Filmmakers eager to find an audience for their small scale, post-apocalyptic story need to bring something new and distinctive to what’s long since become an overcrowded genre. The team behind Die Alone rise to the challenge to deliver an inventive and thoughtful tale of tragedy and survival which – while it includes some familiar dystopian tropes – feels fresh and original.

In a world laid waste by a lethal virus, the natural world has turned against the remaining survivors. Victims become an aggressive hybrid of human and plant life, driven to attack the uninfected. Youngsters Ethan and his partner Emma have fled the city to wait out the disaster in their isolated retreat. When a startled Ethan wakes up in their crashed vehicle, Emma is gone, and he’s only saved from raiders by Mae, a solitary, middle-aged woman who takes him to her rural homestead. Ethan is struggling with memory lapses and periods of disassociation, and his efforts to trace Emma take on an increasingly alarming timbre.

While Douglas Smith is great as the distressed and driven Ethan, Carrie Anne-Moss is simply superb as the resolute and guarded Mae. Writer-director Lowell Dean is an auteur with an eye for the twisted and macabre, and Die Alone mixes moments of explosive and bloody violence with periods of reflective restraint. It’s a well-plotted and well-paced affair. But it’s the film’s unnerving atmosphere, its sharp visual aesthetic, and the way in which the central mystery of Emma’s fate is resolved, which impress the most. Although the menace of the hybrid creatures is often peripheral to the main plot, Dean’s team do conjure up some extraordinarily vivid and unsettling designs.

DIE ALONE will be released on DVD and streaming platforms from 10th March

Two little boys come into possession of a cursed little toy in The Monkey, a loose adaptation of a 1980 Stephen King tale. Written and directed by Longlegs‘ Osgood Perkins, this comedy-horror film turns King’s story of a demonic childhood artefact into an absurdist Final Destination.

Twin brothers Hal and Bill (both played by Christian Convery) come into ownership of the titular monkey when rooting around their absentee father’s things in the attic. It doesn’t take long before they realise that the toy’s tune spells death – when the drums strike, someone dies. Yuckily.

Years later, and the boys are now estranged. The monkey comes crashing back into their lives when Hal (now played by Theo James) learns that his aunt has died… under suspiciously macabre circumstances. Figuring that this can only be the work of the monkey, Hal returns to his childhood home to figure out where it is and whether it can once again be contained. To complicate matters, he has his own son (Petey, played by Colin O’Brien) in tow. Can Hal put a stop to the monkey’s cycle of terror before it claims someone else he loves?

As Perkins turned Longlegs from a Silence of the Lambs-esque procedural into a work of Nicolas Cage-raising shamanism, so The Monkey takes its own maximalist approach to genre. Compared to his previous work, it’s a deeply unserious horror film, prioritising big laughs over scares and splatstick humour above tension.

An opening sequence with Adam Scott makes clear that its stars are all very much in on the joke. Elsewhere, White Lotus star Theo James is cast as both the film’s straight man and its biggest weirdo (Osgood Perkins cameo aside), while She-Hulk‘s Tatiana Maslany steals the show as the boys’ mom, giving the film its most bananas monologue. Those hoping for something a little more traditionally scary may be put off by the Treehouse of Horror approach to tone, but the laughs come as thick and fast as the horrific death sequences.

If the novelty wears thin after the first couple of roof-raising kills, the tight pacing and short runtime ensure that the film never outstays its welcome. The Monkey is an uproariously bleak work of comedy horror, powered by two of the genre’s brightest – sorry, darkest – minds.

THE MONKEY is out now in cinemas now.