MaXXXine

XXX Factor

MaXXXine
Directed by Ti West
USA/UK/New Zealand 2024
A24
UK cinema cut.

Warning: Slight spoilers.

MaXXXine is the third and presumably final part of Ti West and Mia Goth’s successful X Trilogy, which started with the incredible X, reviewed here (where Goth took on the role of both Maxine Minx and Pearl) and continued with the prequel, Pearl, reviewed here (where she just played the title character). Once again, Goth (also on board as a producer, although she’s not one of the credited writers this time around) plays the part of Maxine and this is set some years after X, during the 1980s, with Maxine Minx now a hugely successful porn star, looking to make the crossover to acting in real, Hollywood movies.

After some footage of Maxine as a kid, which is purely there to establish something during the third act denouement, we start this film once again with a big door being opened... but this time it’s not the barn door from Pearl’s farm but a similar looking door on a studio set in Hollywood, where we see Maxine auditioning for a role in a sequel to a low budget horror movie, The Puritan, to be directed by the same director of the first, Elizabeth Bender (played by Elizabeth Debicki). However, although she’s successful in getting the part and, hopefully, cracking Hollywood, it looks like her past, as the final girl survivor and self defence murderer from the events depicted in X, is also about to catch up with her, in the form of someone who certainly wants to grab her attention and who does so through murdering her friends and securing the services of sleazy, private detective John Labat, played by Kevin Bacon.

Yeah, that’s a thing here, by the way... while the first two films felt like independent movies (which they kind of were, in a way), MaXXXine feels like it has a lot of famous actors in it, not least of all the two, central cops portrayed by the always watchable Bobby Cannavale and the equally brilliant, as she always is, Michelle Monaghan. Honestly, as good as Mia Goth is here (and, she really is, as you’d expect), the two cops are the reals stars of the film as far as I’m concerned. They don’t get too much screen time but I would like to have seen more of their characters, it has to be said.

Anyway, the first main question that comes up is, does this all have something to do with the real life serial killer known as The Night Stalker who was terrorising Hollywoodland at the time... or is someone using those murders as cover for their own. Either way, Maxine needs to find out so she can concentrate on being the standout star of The Puritan 2... and she does so in her own, ruthless manner.

Now there’s a lot of good stuff here, not least of which is the use of sets and references from other films, such as the old Universal Bates Motel and house from Psycho. In fact, there’s a moment in the film where Kevin Bacon’s character has chased Maxine into the Bates house and, for a minute there, I thought we were going to get a blow by blow replay of Arbogast’s death scene in the original Psycho (as it happens, Kevin Bacon’s death, when it comes, is far nastier).

So, all the actors are fine, the direction, shot design and editing is... all good. That being said, I’d have to say that this is the least satisfying of the X Trilogy. It just doesn’t seem as clever, maybe wastes an opportunity about exploring the title character’s lineage (because I may have misunderstood the point of the dual role in the first movie, as it turns out) and, though I was kind of expecting it to have a double ending at one point, it didn’t do it in the way I was expecting it to and, while that’s normally a positive experience for me (I want a movie to surprise me), I kinda thought the ending we did get just felt a bit off and, well, a bit hum drum. It also felt like the dual ending could have been a ‘flip a coin’ decision, in terms of where it leaves the characters for the last sequence.

The other big sin the film commits is that it doesn’t really make good on the XXX factor in the title. X was about a bunch of people going to shoot a porn movie (and just hiring the wrong location) and the boldness of the nudity and positive sexuality represented throughout the film was a breath of fresh air for modern movie making. Pearl skipped a lot of that but made up for it by the way it was shot and the call backs to old movies (although, it kinda felt the technical  call backs were an anachronism to a later time than being represented in that one). This one has pretty much no sex and the nudity is poorly lit or just not on screen. And yes, I was disappointed by that missing element. If a film is called Star Wars, for example, I want to see people having battles among the stars. If it’s a title referencing a term for hardcore, pornographic films, as this one is, then I’d expect to see some of that better represented here... especially when the character of the main protagonist is a world famous porn star.

All said and done though, I still quite liked MaXXXine and, while it wasn’t the ending of the trilogy I’d hoped for... it at least, kinda wraps things up and so, I can forgive it if the hyperbole of the marketing machine is selling the product as something it’s not, to be honest. My least favourite of the series but I’m still hoping they release a nice, X Trilogy box set on Blu Ray at some point soon (I deliberately didn’t buy the first two because I’m assuming/hoping a box set will be released in the near future).

Pearl

 

Before Swine

Pearl
Directed by Ti West
United States/Canada/New Zealand
A24

Warning: Some spoilers.

Ti West’s Pearl is a prequel to his movie X, which I reviewed here. It stars Mia Goth as the title character who, of course, played a dual role in X, one which completely took me by surprise as the old age make-up and performance of Pearl completely hid the actress from my perceptions in that one. This one was written, from what I hear, in a two week quarantine break in New Zealand, before the shooting of X, co-written over computer by West and Goth together. My understanding is that parts of this production were shot simultaneously with this one too.

And, it’s completely brilliant and, once again, Mia Goth amazes me with the power of her performance. Those expecting a film similar to X in tone may find this one slightly jarring at first. Now, I don’t usually like American made slasher films with X being one of the rare exceptions and, while Pearl is also, in essence a slasher film... it’s not a traditional slasher and it’s more in the lines of something like Hitchcock’s Psycho than, say, the Halloween or Scream films.

If you’re expecting nudity and goriness of X level proportions then you are probably going to be disappointed. The only nudity in this one comes in the form of an early 20th century, silent stag loop (one you might well have seen before if you have any interest in vintage erotica) and while there are some scenes of gruesome violence, such as a split screen sequence near the end where Pearl performs her own clean up by dismembering the corpse of her sister in law (Emma Jenkins-Purro), it’s far less frequent than in the aforementioned X. Although, of course, the pauses between the scenes where Mia Goth’s title character goes from naive, not too bright farm girl to completely derailed and unhinged not too bright farm girl... are much more potent for their diminished frequency.

The film is set in 1918 and I believe the director wanted it to play out in black and white. Alas, A24 refused that idea and so the film veers in the other direction. Starting off with a similar shot towards the barn doors and out onto the farm, which lovers of X will remember, it actually swings into full on technicolour levels of image saturation and, coupled with a really wonderful score by Tyler Bates and Tim Williams, it actually feels, sounds and looks (also helped along by the typography at the start) like a late 1940s/early 1950s movie... so the tone doesn’t seem quite right to the setting but, really, it does nothing to weaken the potency of the movie and the incredible performances at its centre.

We find out that Pearl has a domineering mother (Tandi Wright), a vegetable of a wheelchair bound, unresponsive father (Matthew Sunderland) and longs to leave the farm. Her husband is away fighting in the Great War and everyone is afraid of the Spanish Flu (indeed, people wear masks reminiscent of the start of the current Covid pandemic). Pearl is a dreamer and longs to escape and be a dancer in the movies, befriending and then later despatching the local town projectionist (David Corenswet). But we realise right from the start that Pearl is a little disturbed, as she pitchforks a goose and feeds it to a crocodile (or it could be an alligator, I barely know the difference).

As the film goes on, Pearl experiences more troubles and dwells on her horrible future... until her bouts of violent self expression become more frequent. But the movie still manages to be almost overwhelmingly entertaining as the stand out cinematography, the performances and the seductive, old Hollywood style soundtrack dazzle the viewer with their combined magnetism. Or at least, these elements pulled together certainly dazzled this viewer.

There’s the odd transition wipe on motion, the amazing split screen sequence which heralds in Pearl’s husband’s return home from the war and an amazing, held shot of Pearl’s face expressing a wealth of emotions behind her forced smile... not to mention a wonderful, stagey, song and dance number set against the trenches of the First World War.

My one disappointment came when the bohemian projectionist character, who shows the pornographic stag loop to Pearl in his projection room, referred to his job as a good ‘gig’. I checked it out after and found I was correct that this is an anachronism in the language, it would seem... as the term didn’t start to be used until the 1920s, at the very least two years after this movie is set. Or so I’m told.

However, it doesn’t really matter because Pearl is a truly entertaining motion picture and one which I will, of course, pick up on Blu Ray, along with X. I’m just waiting for the third installment in the trilogy, MaXXXine, to get a release and then, well, I’m keeping my fingers crossed for a nice Blu Ray box set of all three packaged together. Also, this is a rare prequel these days in that, other than to spoil the surprise, perhaps, that Mia Goth also plays this character in X... this is a movie which could easily be watched before seeing X and it will probably enrich the experience of seeing that original. Or at least add even more tension when you realise, prematurely, just what Pearl is capable of. And that’s me done with this one. If you are into very focused, quite intense gothic thrillers or, indeed, liked the first movie... then you should have a pretty good time with Pearl, I would say. I can’t wait to see the third installment in this franchise, for sure.

X

Boogie
Knives

X
USA 2022
Directed by Ti West
A24

I’ve not seen much of anything by Ti West before... just a couple of short segments of portmanteau horror films V/H/S (reviewed here) and The ABCs Of Death (reviewed by me here) and, I honestly don’t remember either of them making an impression on me. That being said, I’m certainly going to have to play catch up with this particular director because, what we have in the case of X is a very well put together movie in a genre that, I really don’t usually enjoy all that much.

And by that last comment, to explain, X is really not a horror movie... it’s a slasher film. I know many people, especially those who believe that slasher movies are somehow horror movies, would disagree with me here but, honestly, it doesn’t have the necessary genre tropes to make it into the area of horror for me (for further clarification on my thoughts about the genre here, check out a review of a book purporting to be about Italian Horror Cinema which I have scheduled to go up on the blog in a week or two). I’m pretty sure the director would disagree with me here too... especially since it’s stated by one of his characters in the movie that Hitchcock’s Psycho is a horror movie (it isn’t, it’s a straight thriller folks!). And if there’s one genre of cinema I’m not very interested in it’s the American slasher movie... which is possibly quite ironic considering I love Italian gialli but, well, there you have it.

I decided to see this one, however, because I found the hook of it being set in 1979 and being about a group of six people who rent out a cabin to shoot a porn movie, well... irresistible. And then, as it turns out, it’s so well shot and executed that, well, I certainly didn’t regret my decision.

I’m not going to sum up the modicum of a plot because the fact that I’ve told you it’s a slasher combined with the other information in my previous paragraph pretty much tells you all you need to know. And, also, I don’t want to be accused of spoilers on this one, although I’m sure veterans of the slasher genre will probably see every set piece coming, for sure... but that doesn’t matter.

The film opens very strongly and had me from the start, by almost parodying the opening camera placement of John Ford’s The Searchers to some extent, by having the camera looking out from behind the doorway of a cabin to the main house across the way as a police car slowly pulls into view and joins some others. However, what this opening shot also serves to do it set up in the mind the 4:3 aspect ratio of television and home video formats of the time period, because the sides of the screen around the opening of the cabin (or possibly it’s the barn, which also features in the story) are almost completely black, setting up that aspect ratio in your mind. The director than further pulls the audience into the world by zooming the camera in closer to the exterior view, causing the black vertical bands to disappear off the sides and bringing us into the widescreen format. Then, using a blend of static shots and slow camera movements which inform the whole film, we are taken on a tour of the bloody aftermath of an incident which has taken place at some point (without being shown any of the details). And then we flashback to 24 hours before, with stripper and budding porn actress Maxine, played by the always watchable Mia Goth, getting ready to go with her producer boyfriend Wayne (Martin Henderson), sound girl Lorraine (Jenna Ortega), director for hire RJ (Owen Campbell) and fellow porn actors Bobby-Lynne (Brittany Snow) and Jackson (Kid Cudi) to the site of the shoot.

The two octogenarian antagonists of the film are Howard (Stephen Ure) and his wife Pearl (played again, in a dual role, by Mia Goth, who stayed on with Ti West at the location to film the prequel movie, Pearl, when X had finished shooting). Actually, when I figured out it was Goth behind the old age make up (one of my big problems with movies which use old age make up is that they always look fake), I figured that the film would steer into horror territory by the end of the story, expecting some kind of Elisabeth Bathory style twist reveal to the character but, alas, there is no story content reliant on the casting. Even so, Goth does a really good turn as the old lady who causes so much trouble for the young film-makers of the piece, it has to be said.

The film has a nice 1970s vibe to it, while still maintaining a clean, crisp look to the proceedings. It’s straight, no filter, as the saying goes but it does emulate the 1970s feel in other ways, such as using a wipe at one point and also, quite often, using that fast crosscutting into and out of the next scene and then back again and repeat... which I kinda hate but, heck, he seemed to do it in a, slightly, more palatable way than when Dennis Hopper used the same technnique in Easy Rider so, yeah, nicely done.

There are some other things which he does too which are very interesting. For example, shooting some of the shots from very low down angles and then just throwing them into the edit alongside shots taken at eye level, somehow without managing to pop the viewer out of the movie in a jarring manner. It all flows pretty well. There are some nice split screen moments too, when West pushes the method and actually has characters and situations switching sides of the split frame and, in one wonderful case, the same things overlapping to make a single image but just slightly out of kilter on the angle (or the way it’s been spliced in) and I thought this looked pretty cool.

Another interesting thing he does is subvert the visual syntax of the film via the audiences familiarity of the medium. For instance, a 4:3 shot from the porn movie the actors are shooting might follow on or precede a shot of another character somewhere else but, it will still be exactly the next follow on shot the subconscious mind is expecting it to be, just with a different character and in a different aspect ratio. And, yeah, once I’d got the hang of that after he’d done it a couple of times, I'd say I was having a good time with the way the material had been edited too.

Now, in terms of jump scares... there are a couple of good ones but none of them relating to the set piece kills. Frankly, if you are reasonably cine-literate, you’re going to see all the kills coming before they happen (you don’t go looking through holes in barn doors and you don’t poke your hand through a hacked out door panel to reach around for the lock, for example). Now, in many of the cases, I’m pretty sure this is done intentionally by the director, who seems to delight in getting away with well worn clichés and, well.. he gets away with them perhaps but I don’t think the average viewer will have any surprises and, honestly, I’m not so sure all of the kills (perhaps the final one where one of Mia Goth’s characters takes out the other one) are supposed to be as obvious. There was one moment that annoyed me because, there’s a famous Lucio Fulci ocular gore moment in Zombi 2 (aka Zombie Flesh Eaters) where it totally looks fake and, frankly, a similar sequence here didn’t look any better. However, even with the fake looking effects, the movie was quite fun in the execution of them and I still had a good time with most of it, to be fair. And the artistic decision during the first stab scene to suddenly have the assailant and the victim bathed in red lightning for the remainder of the shot, to emphasise the idea of blood in an almost Dario Argento/Mario Bava non-sequitur lighting manner, was actually very impressive.

One last thing... the score for the film by Tyler Bates and Chelsea Wolfe also was quite 1970s/1980s in its approach and I quite enjoyed what they did with it here. I mean, it’s not so blatant as, say, the Disasterpeace score for It Follows (reviewed here) but, yeah, it did remind me of something like, say, The Amityville Horror to a certain extent and I thought it was subtly done. Alas, the score has not been released as a proper CD, merely a substitute electronic download, so it doesn’t look like I’m going to be able to hear it away from the movie anytime soon, it would seem.

But, yeah, that’s me done with X and, I have to say, it was so much better than I thought it was and, despite my aversion to the slasher genre, I have to admire the film for what the director and the rest of the cast and crew managed to achieve here. This was definitely the first feature I’ve seen directed by West so, yeah, now I’m going to have to go back and catch some of his other movies, for sure. Very much worth a look!

The ABCs Of Death

Primer Scream

The ABCs Of Death
2012 USA/New Zealand
Directed by Kaare Andrews, Angela Bettis, Bruno Forzani and Hélène Cattet, Ernesto Díaz Espinoza, Jason Eisener, Adrián García Bogliano, Xavier Gens, Jorge Michel Grau, Lee Hardcastle, Noboru Iguchi, Thomas Cappelen Malling, Anders Morgenthaler, Yoshihiro Nishimura, Banjong Pisanthanakun, Simon Rumley, Marcel Sarmiento, Jon Schnepp, Srdjan Spasojevic, Timo Tjahjanto, Andrew Traucki, Nacho Vigalondo, Jake West, Ti West, Ben Wheatley, Adam Wingard, Yudai Yamaguchi
Monster Films Blu Ray Zone B

And so... on to The ABCs Of Death. This is another movie which, like V/H/S (reviewed here), did the festival circuit back in 2012 and which I managed to miss or somehow not have the opportunity to see. And, again like V/H/S, it's another portmanteau movie comprising of lots of different shorts bound together by a unifying concept. And, of course, I am very aware you should never start a sentence using the word “And” because that’s just bad grammar... but sometimes I feel that in terms of setting the right tone it’s the correct thing to do anyway... so what are you gonna do?

Like most movies which are collections of shorter films or chapters, The ABCs Of Death is not alone in being somewhat a hit and miss affair but, it has to be said, because of the basic premise of this work, you certainly do get a fair amount of chances at being both over and underwhelmed, as the case may be, for just over two hours. This premise resulting in, naturally, a very much “does what it says on the tin” kind of experience is that 27 directors from various different countries have been approached (one of those is a two person directing team) and each given a letter of the alphabet. From that letter, the people in question are tasked with picking a word and making a short four to five minute movie about death involving their word of choice... with no interference about the content of that short.

As you would expect from using such a large group of people, the resulting films are diverse and often wildly different in style from each other. It also means that, since the order is kinda nailed down by the letter given, there’s no control over the tone of the short film and its relationship to the shorts that come before or after it. So, for example, you may get two or three which take a strong, humorous approach to proceedings lumped in together followed by a couple of really bleak visions, and so on. Also, there’s always the chance that some writers/directors are going to come up with some similar material and this does happen on occasion. Two of the teams involved, for example, take a starting point in a similar vein to Fellini’s Eight And A Half... by which I mean the short films both start off with the directors/writers etc trying to come up with a word to use for their segment in the movie The ABCs Of Death. Which is kinda interesting but, no more unusual than there being, for example, a couple of shorts that take an animation approach to their subject.

There’s also a nice “game on” approach to the movie too in that the title of each short, featuring the letter and the word, is not revealed until the end of each short... so you can have a fun time trying to guess what the word is that the director has picked as you watch each short unfold. Some of them are not going to be easy to guess... a couple of them are downright impossible.

Everybody is going to have their own highlights and lowlights in this collection but, for me, the real pick of the crop were the following...

Jake West, director of one of my all time favourite vampire movies, Razor Blade Smile and those two recent Video Nasty documentaries (reviewed here and here) has a great little short called S Is For Speed which juxtaposes grindhouse glam sensibilities with the flipside of the coin, where human beings are practically wasted corpses and it really highlights the way a person can look completely different from two different make up jobs.

Ben Wheatley, who made Kill List (reviewed here), Sightseers (reviewed here) and the first couple of episodes of Peter Capaldi’s incarnation of Doctor Who, Deep Breath (reviewed here) and Into The Dalek (reviewed here), amongst others... delivers a mini rollercoaster of a ride with a POV view of an undead monster and the way he or she is seen by the pitchfork and torch brigade in pursuit. It was nice seeing the two lead actors of Kill List, Neil Maskell and Michael Smiley, reunited for this one, entitled U Is For Unearthed.

Once you can figure out the fact that, due to the movie magic of editing around things, certain nasty looking fights don’t really happen while shooting, the human versus dog sport of Marcel Sarmiento’s D Is For Dogfight is worth a look and has a lovely conclusion that really emphasises that a dog really is man’s best friend. Really charming twist/reveal on this one.

Timo Tjahjanto’s L Is For Libido is quite refreshingly sick and is a real tribute to one's stamina. It’s also quite gory, if that floats your boat, with a final denouement which is quite extreme and which manages to top the already fairly extreme nature of the basic premise of this piece.

And then there’s my favourite of the lot and the one set of directors who, once I’d discovered they were involved with this project, ensured that The ABCs Of Death was an instant purchase for me. O Is For Orgasm is directed by none other than the wonderful team of Bruno Forzani and Hélène Cattet, who gave us the brilliantly surreal, giallo infused movies Amer (reviewed here) and The Strange Colour Of Your Body’s Tears (reviewed here). The names of the director(s) of each short is not revealed until the end of each one (under the title) but their style of directing is so recognisable, right from their first frame of film here, that it would be impossible to mistake it for anybody else’s work. O Is For Orgasm is basically another abstract montage of beautifully lit, brightly coloured, surreal moments with absolutely no dialogue involved. It’s a tour de force of sheer cinematic beauty for its brief running time, on a par with some of this pair’s early shorts and, for my money, this one short stretch of film is worth the price of admission, so to speak.

And that’s that. I’m guessing this was a fairly popular collection on its initial release because there’s a sequel just been released in some countries and I have to say that, because the shorts segments are so... well, um... short, there’s never really a moment in this film when you start to get bored (although I’m pretty sure I’d seen one of the animated shorts in here prior to its inclusion in The ABCs Of Death, a number of years before. Definitely a must watch if you’re a fan of horror and don’t mind watching short movies. One of the more successful portmanteau movies I’ve seen in my lifetime, for sure.

V/H/S

Taped Heck 

V/H/S
2012 UK
Directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, David Bruckner, Tyler Gillett, Justin Martinez, Glenn McQuaid, Radio Silence, Joe Swanberg, Chad Villella, Ti West, Adam Wingard
Momentum Blu Ray Region B

I remember wanting to see this movie when it did the festival circuit a couple of years ago, despite seeing some pretty mixed word of mouth, so to speak, on Twitter. Ultimately, it’s a movie which seems to doom itself to failure in some ways, fairly early on in the game but, at the same time it’s certainly a nice idea to present an old style horror anthology by using the, relatively, new popularisation of the old found footage variation of horror film. And, it has to be said, there are some fairly bright moments in the movie that make it worth persevering with through the negative stuff and I can certainly see why a couple of more enthusiastically received sequels have already been made in what is now a strong, found footage franchise.

The film is all shot on VHS tape... well, probably not actually, it’s probably shot on something much better and visually downgraded after the fact. This becomes especially apparent in the last story of the movie where some interesting CGI stuff is utilised throughout yet another “shaky cam” sequence. This, of course, allows for the various crews getting away with all kinds of bad camera work and not having to think too much about the design of any particular sequence in terms of framing... other than the details of the set or location dressing, of course.

The framing story starts off really quite badly by inviting us to follow a bunch of thugs who have been hired to steal a specific VHS tape from a house. Unless you are some kind of hoodlum yourself, you will find yourself having absolutely no sympathy whatsoever for any of the characters and will want to see them all die in as horrible a way as can be conceived, right from the outset. Now, while this may well be the tactic being deployed by the filmmakers here, for me this just didn’t work that well. If I can’t sympathise with any of the victims then I’m really not going to invest enough emotion in them for the scenes of suspense to work on me and while the director was taking great delight in showing little, telling details unheralded in a corner of a frame, such as a corpse vanishing, for instance, this stuff really didn’t get the heart racing as much as I’d hoped a horror movie might.

The idea is that while the hoodlums are going through the house, one of them starts watching the various other “found footage” VHS tapes in the TV room and we watch these along with him... and it’s here that the film threatened to lose me on two counts.

The first problem is that the group of characters in the next found footage film are basically... another bunch of hoodlums not much different from the ones in the framing footage and who have absolutely no sympathy from me when they start dying. The other problem is, and this should really have been a no brainer of a mistake not to make, is that we are no longer watching the video footage we were watching... somehow, each of the miniature found footage stories are now directly on our screens. So that completely kills that concept then... did someone splice these onto one long tape in just the right places so that the framing story can then take over again in between each segment? This makes absolutely no sense and it was just about now that I kind of gave up on the film inside my head for a bit.

Luckily for me, the first story has an enthralling femme fatale, lets call her the “I like you” girl, in the form of British actress Hannah Fierman and it was her that got me interested again. Now it’s obvious, right from the outset, that no good is going to come out of the main protagonists hooking up with her at a party (yeah, good, they all deserved to die for their thuggish behaviour anyway) but it’s such an old school dose of clichéd but classic sexual horror that I was enchanted with it in some ways... primarily, I suspect, because the actress I just mentioned had such an interesting screen presence.

After this segment, the film becomes a bit of a hit and miss affair, as would be expected in these kinds of anthologies. The majority of the scenarios presented to us are nothing too new but, in some cases (the well made ones), this really doesn’t matter. There’s a nice “haunted apartment” section, for instance, which turns into something else and which, while not altogether unsurprising, has enough in terms of the writing and performance that, if anything, it leaves you feeling the segment was just a little too short. The down side of that, however, is that it’s not actually pseudo-VHS footage... it’s pseudo-Skype footage... which, of course, makes even less sense when you consider it in the context of the found footage framing device... what, somebody transferred their collected Skype conversations to VHS tape. Why?

Another segment is a “final girl” story with a nice “Predator-like” killer who can only be seen on video and with a main protagonist who is using her companions as bait to catch him... which could have been quite refreshing and is relatively well done visually but which has a script and story that really lets it down. Seriously, if you’re going to go hunting a killer, you take weapons with you and not rely on setting traps which it’s obvious couldn’t have been made and prepared in the ridiculously short amount of time played out via the footage. No matter how unintelligent the characters are in horror films, sometimes as a necessity, this one really takes the cake for a person going in completely unprepared and needlessly. So the twist in the tale in that one was tempered by the quite extraordinary lack of brain power of the person who sets events in motion in this one.

There are around six stories in the film in total and, while some of them do hold your interest... and some of them do finally have some characters who are at least a little sympathetic... it’s not exactly the best set of horror shorts I’ve seen although, the last story with it’s Dennis Wheatley style shenanigans is quite nicely done with some well executed special effects. There was an alternative ending on this sequence which I’m glad the director didn’t go with but, strangely, this story marks the end of the film. The framing story is, surprisingly, already played out by the time this last segment appears with, pretty much, no context... so it was a bit of a jarring ending in some ways.

Ultimately, although I was disappointed with a lot of this film, it’s still a nice idea and, like I said earlier, you expect anthology format kinds of films to be a bit hit and miss. This one is mainly miss for me but there were enough interesting spins on old classics to keep me interested... once I’d gotten past the first quarter of an hour. Due to the nature of the beast, I can’t say it’s not worth watching because I expect everyone is going to have their own specific hits and misses among this lot so, if you’re a fan of horror, and found footage shaky cam horror in particular, then you could do a lot worse than to spend an evening in with this movie, of you can rustle up a cheap copy. I’ll certainly be checking out the sequels at some point... when the price is right.