Resident Evil (2026)

Permanent Residents

Resident Evil (2026)
Directed by Zach Cregger
Germany/United States/Czech Republic/Canada
Australia/New Zealand/France 2026
Columbia Pictures

So yet another new version of Resident Evil hits our screens, an adaptation (of sorts) of the successful series of video games which have been going since the 1990s. So this is, what, the 8th Resident Evil movie (counting only the live actions films and not the animated features... I need to see those, perhaps) and it’s also the second reboot, so to speak, since the last movie in the franchise, also a reboot, failed to gain any traction. 

So this one is the next film from the writer/director Zach Cregger, who had the huge horror hit Weapons last year (reviewed here). He’s apparently adapted another of his stand alone scripts into a Resident Evil movie, after getting the green light to be part of the franchise and, yeah, it kinda shows, in some ways, that it’s a rewrite of something else... but not to the detriment of the franchise, for sure. I’ve not had much experience of the video games but I know the movies and... well, none of the main characters seem to be in this. Not a problem though. 

I will say up front that I almost didn’t bother with this one because... surprise, surprise... the trailer put me off. Again. Does anybody in Hollywood know how to cut a trailer anymore. All I’ve seen for the last year are bad trailers which made me question whether I wanted to trek out for the movies or not. Better marketing people are definitely needed here.

Anyhow, I saw it and I’ll tell you now, I was rather pleasantly surprised. Even though I kind of hated the main character. He’s played by Austin Abrams who plays him quite similarly (as written, I would guess) to the horrible, drop-out character he played in Weapons so, yeah, I’m bringing baggage with me but, I at least overcame that hurdle. The actor does what he does well and, even though the character is not somebody I would want to hang out with, he does make things believable for the audience. 

Okay, so the film itself is not the action movie that the previous films were. It’s actually got a few elements in it which make it much closer to the experience of an audience member playing a video game and, I couldn’t quite work out if I liked this approach or not. But, it’s certainly effective so, what we have is a character who has absolutely no idea what is happening in Racoon City and its surrounding areas and, yup, we stay just with this character through the entire movie. Like you would if you were playing a game. It even switches to first person view in a couple of shots but... don’t remember that happening in the game I played (or tried to play, I was useless at the copy of Resident Evil 2 which was bundled with my old Playstation), to be honest. 

So he, and the audience, has no idea of what’s going on and... bullets are almost as much of a problem here as they were, quite deliberately, in the original game. I remember never having enough bullets when playing and you’d be forced to sneak around zombies (or actually organisms much more complex in this movie) and be constantly looking for more ammunition. Same thing here... the central character is always checking his shells and bullets and worrying about how he’s going to solve his next problem.

And the creatures in this are impressive. They are all mutations of some kind and make for some very surreal and grotesque encounters throughout the movie... bringing many a surprise and unexpected dilemma to challenge the protagonist as he goes to try and deliver his medical supplies (that’s the basic plot of the movie, by the way... a medical courier is trying to deliver something to the hospital in Racoon City but, by the time he gets there, things have already gone pear shaped).

Now, the director is not above resorting to many a horror movie cliché in this... so you get scenes of flickering lights meant to reveal and conceal, to keep the audience on edge. I even heard the old reliable ‘put a blatant heartbeat tempo’ on the score to ramp things up. So, yeah, it’s an exercise in jump scares too and... I can’t blame him for trying. Those don’t always work but the sheer inventiveness and gory creativity between each creature encountered more than makes up for this and sometimes work better as a jump scare in themselves. 

And I’m not sure I want to say much more abut Resident Evil (2026)... it’s not a film you are expecting if you only know the other seven movies but, it’s pretty effective and does feel much more like you’re being thrust into a ‘survival horror’ environment than those earlier movies too. It’s doing something right and I had a pretty good time with this one, I would say. I’ll definitely be picking this one up on Blu Ray when it comes out.

Tales Of Halloween

Pumpkin Patch

Tales Of Halloween
Directed by Darren Lynn Bousman, Axelle Carolyn, 
Adam Gierasch, Andrew Kasch, Neil Marshall, 
Lucky McKee, Mike Mendez, Dave Parker, 
Ryan Schifrin, John Skipp and Paul Solet
USA 2015 
Arrow Films DVD Region 2

Well then... I finally got around to watching the elusive Tales For Halloween in time for this year’s Halloween posts. I say elusive because I bought this one a couple of years before the pandemic at FrightFest for a fiver but, every October when I try and watch it, it seems to have buried itself under a pile of movies and I never seem to be able to lay hands on it but, this year it managed to turn up when a pile of physical media overturned itself on top of me and so I put it to one side for the right time. 

And I have to say... for a portmanteau film, which are often hit and miss anyway, this one is pretty good. You have ten short movies by ten different directors (some of them very famous genre directors like Lucky McKee and Neil Marshall) and they all seem to take place on the same night, although in different towns.* You can tell it’s the same night because, on many of them, George Romero’s Night Of The Living Dead is playing on TV (although, in one of the clips, it seems to be Carnival Of Souls). 

And, contrary to what you would expect form a string of shorts put together, even the ones that are maybe not quite as good as the others are still quite watchable and immensely entertaining. So ten, not bad, movies. And to boot you have a radio DJ linking some (but not all, she’s definitely underused in this movie) of the segments played by none other than Adrienne Barbeau, delivering her full on, smoky radio voice, as she did when she played radio DJ Stevie Wayne in John Carpenter’s The Fog (reviewed here). So more or less an homage but, presumably not named as such due to copyright reasons, I would guess. 

Standouts for me would be Neil Marshall’s segment Bad Seed, where a carved pumpkin comes to life and starts eating people, because it’s really silly and, considering I don’t like slasher movies so much (unless they’re Italian), the Friday 31st segment directed by Mike Mendez, which features a cute, stop motion looking alien (it’s probably really CGI) looking for a trick or treat. 

Also, another nice thing is the use of various famous directors amongst the actors in the odd cameo. So along with people like Barbara Crampton and Lin Shaye you have the likes of Stuart Gordon, Mick Garris and John Landis coming along for the ride. Which is nice and perhaps shows what a close knit community the horror community is (the great Dr. Rebekah McKendry is also in this). 

Added to this, among a whole list of composers scoring the shorts, we have title music done by the great Lalo Schifrin. Now, as far as I’m concerned it’s not one of his best but I did notice that one of the directors is also a Schifrin so, I have to wonder if the title music was pulled in as a favour to someone. But I also loved a musical moment in the segment The Weak And The Wicked where a pocket watch brings us to a flashback of a memory in the same style as a Sergio Leone western... and the music suddenly gets all Morricone in tone. So, yeah, some nice things to be found in this selection, to be sure. 

And that’s me finally done with Tales From Halloween. A short review perhaps but a definite recommendation from me if you want something fun and frivolous to watch during this years ‘Halloween festivities’. I believe some people are still doing this stuff and certainly my local Tesco, with it’s gazillions of novelty horror items put out for the kids in October, seems to indicate that it’s still a thing. 

*Nope. Tag line on the poster says “One Night. One Town. Ten Chilling Stories.” so, I guess that didn’t quite come across to me because, well, all the stories should be overlapping with each other then, right?

Curse Of The Fly

Live And Let Fly

Curse Of The Fly
UK 1965 
Directed by Don Sharp 
20th Century Fox 
Shout Factory Blu Ray Zone B

Six years after Return Of The Fly (reviewed here), the British made their own follow on which, in terms of certain things, doesn’t really make sense and, also, was bound to be a bit of a disappointment. Although, as a film in its own right, I think it’s a much maligned and pretty good, old school ‘comfort horror’ myself.

Two big reasons that I suspect that this one bombed are as follows...

Let’s look at the poster for Curse Of The Fly because it says it all. The tagline reads, “Piece by piece... atom by atom... humans invisibly teleported through time and space - - Re-entering Earth as Half-human Monsters from the 4th Dimension!” Well okay then... if you take that very literally, space becomes just another dimension and so does time saved in travel, I guess. Half-human monsters are present but... yeah, this whole tagline is written in a pretty sensationalist style, it seems to me. This is not quite the film that people were getting.

But to compound that even further... there’s a big picture of a fly head on the poster and, let me tell you that asides from a quick glimpse of a photo from a previous film (and I’ll get to that later too), no flies are in any way present in this movie. So.... if you look at the word curse as meaning more of a legacy of bad luck you might just get away with it... but the audience was expecting a fly-man, thank you very much! 

Okay. so the film has two connecting tissues to the other movies. One is that it’s the next generation of the Delambre family working on a teleportation device between London, England and Montreal, the two main protagonists played by Brian Donlevy (the first movie Quatermass) and George Baker. So it’s the third generation of Delambres... but there are only six years passed between the films’ settings. Yeah, the Math’s doesn’t work out does it?

Plus... the ‘just escaped from a mental asylum’ love interest with a mysterious past, played by Carole Gray, marries the George Baker character within a week of meeting him, not knowing what she’s gotten herself into. By the way, no real revelation (unless I missed it again this time around) is made as to why she was in the asylum in the first place. All we know is that a detective is pursuing her. And as the rest of the story plays out... Baker’s first wife is still alive as a mismatched thing who unfortunately survived an earlier teleport experiment... but, hey, she can still play the piano pretty well! That’s about as much as I want to say about the story. 

Secondly, an ex detective consulted in his hospital bed is the character Inspector Charas, the helpful cop from the first movie. But, since none of the actors wanted to return for this film, he’s instead played here by Charles Carson, wearing handy sunglasses in the hopes that the audience won’t know the difference. But, again, three generations down... he still shouldn’t be looking quite this young. None of the figures are adding up!

However, all that aside... I really liked this film and I absolutely adore the opening credits. Panning in on the mental asylum, we see a window smash out with about three times the amount of glass coming towards the camera (which gives me pause to think that the film might originally have been a prospect to be shot in a 3D process). Then, the rest of the credits sequence comprises of beautifully shot scenes of Carole Gray running towards or past the camera in slow motion, wearing only a bra and panties (my mum identified the correct part of the decade this was made by the model of underwear said lady is wearing in this sequence, I’m proud to say). I love this opening and it’s backed up nicely with Bert Shefter’s quite pretty, piano dominant score for the movie. About which...

Sawtell and Shefter was often seen as a pairing on many genre soundtracks of the day. But the way they were utilised for The Fly franchise is interesting. The Fly (reviewed here) was scored by Paul Sawtell as a solo gig. Then, Return Of The Fly was scored by the familiar pairing of Sawtell and Shefter. And for Curse Of The Fly it’s Bert Shefter going solo. So... yeah... an interesting phenomenon. Can’t think of many composers who quite (even Newton Howard and Zimmer) ended up in this formation. 

And, like I said, I was fine with most of the rest of the movie and, once the initial disappointment about there being no giant fly/humans in it is overcome, it’s a pretty fun B-movie as far as I’m concerned. A fun B-movie with some absolutely breathtaking cinematography. And if you want to see another entertaining sight... this film has the great Burt Kwouk sporting a very out of place moustache. So, yeah, see it for that alone. 

My only other big problem with this is the stupidity of the movie making exactly the same mistake as many books and articles on The Fly franchise have in the past. When Charas is going through the Delambre file of the events of the very first film, he pulls out a photo of The Fly to show the detective. First of all, how would anyone have taken a photo of him like this in the first story when only his wife saw her husband in this state? But secondly... and much more alarmingly... the photo he takes out is not the fly as seen in that first movie (which is never seen without a lab coat) but the much larger headed fly from Return Of The Fly (a story which did not even involve Charas). So this makes absolutely no sense and is a really bad error, as far as I’m concerned.

And that’s me about done on Curse Of The Fly. Like I said, I really enjoyed revisiting it and am happy to watch again at some point in the future. A film perhaps better served with a title which sets up less expectations that it never satisfies but, even so, worth a watch as far as I’m concerned. 

The Fly

Come Fly With Me

The Fly
USA 1958 
Directed by Kurt Neumann 
20th Century Fox Blu Ray Zone A

On the occasional times I revisit the original The Fly, I always come away a little more impressed by it and this new Blu Ray upgrade, part of a five film set of The Fly movies, was no exception. It probably helps that it’s been quite a while now since I last saw it. And, giving in to the Mandela Effect which a lot of people share with me on this film... I’d forgotten that it’s a colour movie as opposed to a black and white picture (like the two direct sequels which were both in monochrome) and in a proper cinemascope aspect ratio to boot. 

As such, it does play the full cinemascope variation of the 20th Century Fox theme at the start (something which is often misused in more modern films) before switching into some wonderfully stark titles of graphic illustrations of mesh in red, with a fly in them, accompanied by Paul Sawtell’s wonderful score. 

And then we get to the wonderful start of the movie and you can tell right away that the structure of this is different from most of the other ‘monster movies’ out there form this time in sci-fi Hollywoodland. This may be in part due to one of the main writers of the screenplay being the great James Clavell, who wrote such best selling tomes as Shõgun, Noble House and King Rat. In fact, we don’t meet the main scientist protagonist of the film until a good 20 - 30 minutes into the movie. Instead we start off with a night watchman hearing Andre Delambre’s death by the sound of the hydraulic press coming down twice. He investigates to find Delambre’s wife Helen, played by Patricia Owens who gives a performance that does a lot of the heavy lifting for the film, fleeing the scene. Then he sees the body of the man with his head and arm crushed by the press, the very red blood effect dripping down the side of the machine in a piece of gory aftermath which I think must have been quite incongruous with a lot of horror/sci-fi cinema at the time. 

And then the mystery starts, as both Andre’s brother Françoise, played by the wonderful Vincent Price (who would return for the first sequel) and possibly quite the nicest Police Inspector on celluloid,  Inspector Charas, played wonderfully by Herbert Marshall, try and solve the mystery of why Helen is saying she murdered her husband but won’t give any details... putting her as the number one candidate for the hangman’s noose. It’s only after a good while that she decides to tell the two men exactly what happened and we see the majority of the rest of the film playing out in flashback.

So we have the great David Hedison (billed here early in his career as Al Hedison) playing scientist Andre Delambre, who has cracked (almost, with a few alterations after accidentally disintegrating the household cat), the secret of teleporting anything from one cabinet in one room to another in the next. The film depicts the happily married couple as the obsessed scientist perfects his new invention and then, just as everything goes right, we discover that, sometime off-screen (and again, this is unusual and works a treat), Andre has tried to teleport himself and a fly that zipped into the machine with him has merged atoms with him, resulting in the fly (which escapes and becomes the major focus of his wife and child, trying to catch it) having Andre’s head and an arm, while Andre himself is left with a fly’s head and arm. This looks great when you finally see the reveal but it’s also something I conceptually have a problem with... okay, I’ll get to that in a minute. 

But again, rather than show what happened straight away, Hedison plays the fly-bound Andre silently, with a black towel over his head and pointing and rapping a desk to communicate with his wife... so the mystery element is kept in tact for a good part of the film and it works really well. And, of course, when Helen finally pulls that towel off, just like the unmasking of The Phantom Of The Opera in the 1925 version of that film, Helen lets out an iconic scream... iconic because, as she keeps on screaming, we see her from Andre’s point of view and it’s a fly’s eye view, with her screaming countenance replicated many times over the widescreen frame. Wow... this must have looked amazing in cinemas, for sure... it’s no wonder the film was such a box office hit. A box office sensation that, sadly, the director didn’t live to experience, since he died the week before it opened. 

Then, as Andre arranges for his wife to head press him to death, the film catches up to the start but, this isn’t the final iconic moment of the movie. In a much re-quoted scene, his brother and the Inspector only finally believe Helen’s story when they see the little fly caught in a spider’s web, with Andre’s arm and head, as it calls out “Help me! Help me!” as it’s about to get eaten by a spider. Apparently the scene was shot over twenty times because the two actors, Price and Marshall, were laughing so much at the scene that they couldn’t look each other in the eye.

And then comes the second of two problems I have with the movie. There’s no way their dodgy, hastily concocted explanation for the incidents in the film would be believed in a court of law but, here we are at the end with everyone free and living happily ever after. Apparently Clavell had written a much better ending where Helen kills herself after she has given her explanation but, this was sadly discarded. 

And my only other problem is... yes, we see the fly part of Andre trying to take over in his brain as he fights himself to hold on to his humanity (which looks quite ridiculous in a Doctor Strangelove kind of way) but, since his head is also on a fly, how in heck is his human brain also part of this fly head? I mean, I’m probably looking for verisimilitude where it doesn’t exist here but, the science doesn’t hold up here (yes, I know that’s a ridiculous statement about a film about a human fly but, it’s my blog, let me alone). 

And that’s me done with the absolute classic that is The Fly. A really great and somewhat different B movie which was given the budget and release of an A picture... definitely catch this one if you’ve never seen it before. And I guess I’ll at least be watching the next two films in the original series next... not sure if I want to bother with the two modern era versions again as yet.

Zeder

Pop K-Zones

Zeder
aka Revenge Of The Dead
Italy 1983 Directed by Pupi Avati
88 Films Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Gets into spoiler territory for the last shot of the movie.

Wow... Zeder is far more restrained and atmospheric than I would expect from any other Italian horror film which springs to mind from the same decade as this. It’s written and directed by Pupi Avati, best known in this country for his celebrated giallo The House With Laughing Windows (yeah, can’t remember if I liked that one or not but it’s in one of the Blu Ray upgrade piles for me to revisit for the blog at some point in the future) and it’s got, to my mind, a surprisingly Western attitude in the way it’s been shot and edited. 

This one starts off with an extended prologue set in 1956, where a young girl is being used by researchers to find the once dead guy who is sometimes getting up and rising from a hidden burial ground to kill the occasional person. In the process, the little girl is ferociously attacked by the object of the researchers’ desire and she has to have a leg amputated. 

We then switch to the present day and a young couple, Stefano (played by Gabriele Lavia, who has been in at least three Argento movies at this point) and Alessandra (played by Anne Canovas). On their first year of a wedding anniversary, Allessandra gifts Stefano a present of an old, electric typewriter... Stefano being a budding novelist working on his third novel (even though the first two have not found a publisher). Then, as he is trying it out, he finds the remains of two letters on the remnants of the old typewriter ribbon, written by one Paulo Zeder and talking about overcoming the barriers of death and about the mysterious K-Zones which can be found dotted around the planet. Basically, areas of anti-time are found two metres below the Earth in certain places which allow for a return from death. Zeder has donated his own body to the research and hidden it. 

Realising that this is an excellent idea for his third novel, Stefano and the reluctant Alessandra begin to investigate and end up stumbling into a conspiracy of an interested party who seem to be working hand in hand with the police and who also are acting out of their research, funded by a private investor and made possible by special order of the church and involving the secret archives in Vatican City. This all culminates in a bunch of researchers who cross paths with Stefano and, via mysterious bloody deaths and secret passages etc, all end up in the grounds of a long abandoned hotel and its K-Zone in the grounds. 

And yeah... it feels like a somewhat suppressed Italian horror film of the period... RAI TV seem to have put money into it so I suspect the reduced opportunities for gore and the more subtle approach might indicate it was originally made with an Italian TV broadcast in mind but instead given a theatrical release. That’s my guess. 

So what you have here is a strange hybrid. A bunch of familiar Italian faces embroiled in a conspiracy theory which is somewhat like a procedural in a giallo or a polizei with a score by the great Riz Ortolani which definitely (and I suspect quite deliberately) goes into the kind of Goblin-like territory found in a lot of the Italian horrors of this period. But, as I said, it’s quite restrained in the way it’s doing things... with a definite slow burn kind of atmosphere and, to my mind, this makes it much more watchable (though perhaps not as fun) as a lot of its contemporaries. 

Similarly, Lavia and Canovas seem a lot stronger and subtler in their performances here than in other films I could name, which all adds to the atmosphere that the government and some religious order are collaborating to find out just what is going on and, it is hinted, making sure the knowledge is in the hands of only a few. Because, of course, who wants a cure for death on an already overpopulated planet. 

Now, I can’t imagine being as gripped and enthralled as I was by a second watch of this one (although I will certainly try in a decade or so) as much as, say, a film by Fulci or Argento... but for the first watch, I was certainly on the edge of my seat for some of it and intrigued to see how the premise was going to be revealed. There was the occasional jump scare in the movie too... one of the most effective of which kinda made no sense. I mean, why would a bunch of pigeons come to be found and released from inside a closed coffin? But it’s fine, the quality of the rest of the film excuses these little indulgences. 

The end of Zeder was something which I found was nicely ambiguous too. Although it supports the underlying premise of the film in no uncertain terms, it also manages to be nicely vague in its tone. I mean, that last shot... is Stefano screaming in pain because of something which is happening to him behind his back or is he voicing the repercussions of what he, himself, has brought about? It is, perhaps, an unsettling moment when looked back in contemplation... which is a nice description of the film itself, I think. I’ve been ummming and ahhing about whether I should pick this one up for years and now that I have, I wish I’d seen this one sooner. It’s an untypical entry into the Italian horror genre... at least compared to many of the ones I’ve seen. 

Castle Of The Living Dead

Villainous Preserve

Castle Of The Living Dead
aka Il castello dei morti vivi
Directed by Warren Kiefer & Luciano Ricci
Italy/France 1964 Severin Blu Ray Zone A

Castle Of The Living Dead has, it seems, a troubled production history. Warren Kiefer was definitely involved to some extent but the film may, or may not, have had a few directors and also, apparently, involved future director Michael Reeves in the crew in some capacity. There has been some rumours that this is one of the many films that Mario Bava helped out on with the special effects but, again, nothing has actually been confirmed and the scene on which he is supposed to have worked doesn’t seem to appear in the movie. Also, the dialogue was not recorded on paper so, when the various actors had to do the dubbing of their lines afterwards, as many films of this nature in Italian cinema are shot without sound, they had to more or less remember or make up what they had been saying. 

However, for all that, the film was quite a joy to watch and it’s an interesting gothic thriller, set just after the Napoleonic wars, when Napoleon was in prison. I thought I’d seen this one already but it turns out I hadn’t so, I was very happy to give this one a play. The film is shot in a crisp black and white (as evidenced by Severin’s masterful restoration/transfer of this thing) and concerns a travelling troupe of performers who are invited to Count Drago’s castle to give a private performance. The two main actors in this troupe, one a very recent recruit after some conflict at the start of the film, are Philippe Leroy as Eric, who was so brilliant in movies like Without Knowing Anything About Her (reviewed here) and who has a fairly good screen presence for a main, male protagonist... and Gaia Germani as Laura. 

Count Drago, as played by Christopher Lee (this is one of the films in the magnificent Blu Ray box set put out from Severin Films... The Eurocrypt Of Christopher Lee Volume 1), is a mad scientist with requisite henchman to do his bidding. He has invented a formula which, when introduced into a live subject either by injection or in a spiked drink, brings instant paralysis and rigidity... an advanced, instant embalming fluid which preserves the subject instantly and forever. This is wonderfully demonstrated, not just by the collection of frozen human beings in the Count’s own collection but, also in a wonderful scene where a cat licks up Laura’s spilled drink and instantly freezes... that is to say, the shot is held in a freeze frame and then goes about cutting to and from Laura’s reaction to save on any unnecessary special effects. 

The film then becomes a kind of cat and mouse game around the castle, as the troupe try and avoid death at the hands of Drago but also try to stay out of trouble with the local law enforcement, in the guise of a very young, almost his first feature film role, Donald Sutherland. Sutherland actually has three roles in this film... Sgt. Paul/The Witch and The Old Man. Frankly, I only spotted him as the Sergeant and again in drag several times as the old witch but, I guess he might have been an old man in the opening sequence and I somehow missed him in a crowd. I’m guessing it’s no coincidence that writer/director Warren Kiefer’s last name is the same forename as Sutherland’s famous acting son? 

The actors in this are all turning in a pretty decent performance, with Lee in excellent form (although the black make up around the eyes looks a little fake while succeeding in changing the look of his face somewhat) and with Sutherland hamming it up good, I would say. I’m assuming his role here somehow landed him a part in his next feature, Dr. Terror’s House Of Horrors (reviewed by me here). Since Christopher Lee is also in that movie, one wonders if Sutherland and Lee got on so well in this one that Lee perhaps recommended he be included in that little gem also?

And it’s a bit of a romp but has a very chilled atmosphere... a bit like one of Roger Corman’s Poe cycle of films... and it’s all shot in a beautiful castle and grounds called Castello Orsini-Odescalchi (where Tom Cruise would later marry Katie Holmes, apparently) and in a wonderful set of grounds called The Park Of Monsters in Bomarzo. These grounds include big statues and architectural features such as a main walkway in the shape of a screaming face with the mouth as the opening. I recognised this last architectural feature straight away as being included on the cover photograph of the 1995 Michael Nyman album Noises, Sounds and Sweet Airs. That being said, because of the skilful way in which the film has been cut together, the fact that the grounds were mostly shot somewhere else was a surprise to me, as it looks like they are in the same location in this and that the park dovetails straight into the castle. 

 And all this with a fairly typical, creaky old gothic style score by Italian maestro Angelo Francesco Lavagnino. I actually already had this score on a nice CD issue from Digitmovies from some years ago but, if you missed that release, Severin include the score on a separate CD as an extra feature in this boxed edition. Which is always a big draw for me on sets like this (although I wish the majority of the scores Severin decide to include weren’t already ones that have already been issued). 

All in all, this movie really wouldn’t set anyone on fire but, I think it holds its own and has a fascinating kind of DNA shared with those old 1960s Corman flicks and, also, maybe, a kind of specific Gold Key comics atmosphere to the whole thing (which I can’t really explain in words that would necessarily make sense to anybody else but, yeah, that means something to me). By that I mean, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend that people go out of their way to see Castle Of The Living Dead but, boxed up with others in a similar vein (such as Crypt Of The Vampire, which I reviewed in an old DVD edition here years ago), it’s certainly an interesting addition and, certainly, one of the hidden gems of the box. 

Borley Rectory

Wraith No More

Borley Rectory
UK 2017 Directed by Ashley Thorpe
Carrion Film Blu Ray Zone B

Borley Rectory burned down the same night in 1939 that my mother was born, so it’s always had a kind of special place in our hearts in this family. And here’s yet another movie about the place once named “the most haunted house in England”. This one’s a pretty good one though, as it happens. It’s not a full on drama and it’s something a little more than a documentary... so a docu-drama maybe? I’m not 100% sure what to call this thing, to be honest (and I don’t care). 

What singles this one out from many others, apart from being presented only in black and white (and resident shades and spectres of grey), is that the live action dramatisations are combined with a heck of a lot of animation. Indeed every frame is an animation with the live footage inserted and then worked over with various layers of animated detail to make a fairly unique viewing experience. It’s a little like the old technique that Peter Greenaway used for Prospero’s Books but with less obfuscation to the clarity of the message and, given it monochromatic status, it doesn’t threaten to overpower the audience while still throwing a lot at the frames. 

The documentary, for that is how I shall now refer to it from hereon, is narrated by the late Julian Sands, who would go on to play one of the real life characters in this in a later film based on this ghostly riddled piece of real estate (there have been so many made). Joining him are a fairly large cast for a relatively small scale project like this but the main two cast members were the only ones I recognised. The film stars Reece Shearsmith as newspaper man V.C Wall and the great film historian Jonathan Rigby as ‘ghost hunter’ Harry Price. I have to say, I’m used to seeing Rigby pop up in various physical media documentaries over the years but he’s always good to see live too, especially when he’s actually doing some acting, such as when he hosted and starred in the stage read through of Vampirella a few years ago (reviewed by me here).

The acting style from both these fine craftsmen and, pretty much the rest of the cast, is a bit over the top... quite deliberately I would think. Everyone gives this just a little more flamboyance with a stylised performance which I would expect is something which needed to happen to be able to match the quiet ferocity of the animated material going on all around them (and indeed, over them... I don’t think it quite gets to rotoscoping, at least not as far as I am familiar with it as a technique... but there might be some of that going on in here). So it’s a good call and, as far as I’m concerned, makes for an enjoyable series of performances throughout the film’s short, 73 minute running time. 

And it’s very well done, managing to create and maintain an atmosphere comprising lurking, sinister spirits who seem to be constantly watching this or that tenant of the property through various stages of the house’s history. I saw it, due to circumstances of who I was watching it with, in a fairly well lit room on a fairly large TV so it didn’t quite hit all the scares and fog the mind completely but, I imagine that if I’d seen this under slightly less well lit conditions or, ideally, at a cinema, then more of the scare moments would have landed better. 

The animated miasma of creepiness is done particularly well and with obvious relish, as little details which either illustrate or riff on the narrative commentary are brought in as needed. There was a nice visual allusion to the work of director Dziga Vertov fairly early on in the piece which was a cool moment, I thought. Similarly, the writing is pretty good and also pays respect to various works which, perhaps inarguably, were possibly influenced or inspired by the much publicised ghostly phenomena that surrounded the place. For instance, there’s a nice reference to Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting Of Hill House, not just name checked at the end of the piece but also in terms of some of the lines, such as referring to the various spectres as those who “walk alone.” Indeed, it immediately made me think of Julie Harris delivering the line in the original 1963 adaptation, The Haunting (which I reviewed here). 

So, yeah, a short shout out of a review for Borley Rectory but it’s definitely one I would recommend to those interested in such things and, yeah, certainly one of the better movies about the place. The Blu Ray edition comes with a raft of extras concerning the film and the events it’s based on and, while I haven’t watched these as yet and usually skip most of the extras on these things (seriously, who has the time these days, much as I prefer to have them) I have left the disc out before removing the covers and disc for a space saving filing exercise, so I can sit down and work my way through these at some point soon, because they seem really interesting. Certainly, I can’t recommend the physical release of this one enough. Definitely worth a look if you are into other worldly delights. 

Italian Gothic Horror Films 1957-1989

Faux Goth And Multiply

Italian Gothic Horror Films
1957-1969
by Roberto Curti with a forward by Ernesto Gastaldi
McFarland Press ISBN 9780786494378

Italian Gothic Horror Films
1970-1979
by Roberto Curti 
McFarland Press ISBN 9781476664699

Italian Gothic Horror Films
1980 - 1989
by Roberto Curti 
McFarland Press ISBN 9781476672434

Just a very short but sweet shout out to an absolute powerhouse of a trilogy of reference books by Roberto Curti, comprising Italian Gothic Horror Films 1957 -1969, 1970-1979 and 1980-1989. Not that there aren’t still a few Italian Gothic Horror movies made to this day (and still just about being made, I’m very glad to say) but because, as you’ll see from the progression of the tomes themselves, it goes very much into decline by some point in the late 1970s/early 1980s.

So, each volume is set out in years and every Italian gothic (in Curti’s view) is included with a full listing of titles, alternative titles, casts, crew, distributors etc… just like Sight And Sound used to do, back in the days when that was a great magazine and not the pale spectre of a cinematic review it is these days.

Following on from each entry is a fairly large summation of the film itself, before Curti gets into the full meat and bones of each production, giving potted biographies of the key players, analysis of the way each film came to be funded and made… as well as any distribution and certification woes which eventually led to each film’s buoyancy or downfall at both the Italian and International box offices. And, clearly, Curti has been quite thorough in his research.

Of course, all the classics you would expect from tomes entitled in this manner are covered such as I Vampiri, Black Sunday, Black Sabbath, The Ghost, Suspiria, Inferno, The Beyond and so forth, all including valuable information about each film’s genesis that even the less than casual viewer may find noteworthy. It also delves into the possibly slightly shadowy area of the photonovel style magazines which accompanied some of the films in Italy when they were released... and even, in at least one case, when the film remained either unreleased or heavily censored, neither fate of which befell the photo magazine version.

If I had anything critical to say, asides from the author continually referring back to the Italian titles of many films and thus leaving me in the dark as to which film he’s talking about (and don’t get me started on the fact that a fair few of the English titles of the films have been released in alternate titles by various boutique labels since these works were first published), it would be his insistence of including certain non-horror films in the collection, when actually they belong to another genre entirely…

And I’m primarily talking about gialli here. I mean, there aren’t that many included and I totally understand the inclusion of films like All The Colours Of The Dark. I mean, that film is revealed in the final scooby-doo like reveal to be a giallo for sure but, in Curti’s defence, it does use the language and trappings of the gothic horror film and poses as such for the majority of its running time.

I’m much less forgiving about the inclusion of such thrilling gems as The Red Queen Kills Seven Times or A White Dress For Marialé. On the other hand, certain films that have been marketed as gialli in recent years, by nefarious labels trying to lure unwary customers into parting with their money by tying them into the currently popularity of that genre, are clearly and quite rightly defined as gothic horror here… so I’m glad someone else is with me when it comes to such brilliant genre films as The Perfume Of The Lady In Black or even the somewhat dreary Seven Deaths In The Cat’s Eye.

My biggest pleasure when I read these kinds of reference books is the number of titles new to me which I can add to my shopping list… and I certainly have only seen about a half to two thirds of the movies listed within these pages. That being said, when I started researching titles I was less than familiar with, I discovered that I already had around 90% of them to watch on Blu Ray, sitting in various piles around the room, often as part of boxed editions put out by the likes of Severin Films and Vinegar Syndrome… so that was a nice surprise!

Well that about wraps it up for me and Roberto Curti’s three volume set Italian Gothic Horror Films. These are probably the most useful books I’ve read on the general view of the genre and I would have to recommend them as essential cineaste reference books, as far as I’m concerned. Not a lot more to say about it other than there’s a lot of ground covered in these. Definitely worth a purchase.

Labyrinth

A Load Of Trap

Labyrinth
Directed by Ryühei Kitamura
USA 2025
Screened on 29th August at FrightFest

Warning: This one has spoilers.

Okay then... so Labyrinth was my fourth and final pick from this year’s FrightFest and I chose this one because I figured it would be a gory and violent film and, it’s been a long time since I saw one of those dumb, mindless, bloodletting movies. I thought it would make a nice change from the ghost stories and high concept films I’d been watching during the rest of the festival. 

Alas, Labyrinth just reminded me of why I tend not to gravitate to these kinds of films in the first place. It kinda uses the same style of plot as the Saw films (of which I only saw the first when it came out in the cinema... although I am assawed these are actually worth a look for my blog sometime) and just gives it a slightly different method behind the madness, so to speak.

So, we have a bunch of people who we all see abducted by... I’ll call them ‘angels of death’... in an extended sequence leading up to the title card. The abducted are played by Mekhi Phifer, Alexxis Lemire, Shane West, Chris Klein, Ami Park and David Sakurai. I think that’s all of them. Anyway, they are brought to a series of rooms and corridors by a character who is, presumably, supposed to be Satan, played by Tommy Flanagan... who seems to be attempting to channel Christopher Lee a tad. And they all have to survive a series of death traps to atone for their sins.

And I’m sorry to say... it all leads up to an ending which the audience will most likely see coming. I won’t give it away here but most people will get there long before the last sequence of the movie.

Now... it’s well acted and, it is hyper gory in terms of bloody carnage... although I was hoping/expecting the goriness to be a little more innovative or pushed beyond the norm for a movie which, more or less, exists just for these kinds of bloody set pieces. It can get quite intense in places too... such as the Russian Roulette scene. And the actors are all pretty good although, honestly, if you want the audience on your side you should probably not have killed off the most charismatic personality in the cast first. 

As the film plays out, it becomes clear that the various characters have all done something bad in their past and it’s the reason why they have ended up in a labyrinth of traps. But, again, you are kind of expecting that too.

I mean, it’s a well shot production but, honestly, as I’m writing these words and realising this is going to be a really short review, I can’t think of too much more to say about the film, either good or bad. There was a lot of laughter coming at me from the right hand side of the auditorium whenever one of the specific actors opened his mouth and said something but, I can only assume that’s because some of the crew or maybe his mates were all sitting in the audience too. It’s not as though he was saying anything funny. And some people were definitely getting freaked out a little (a girl sitting next to me was having a hard time with some of the scenes) with some of the gore... although, apart from a scene where the actor I mentioned above has to cut out his vocal cords with some scissors, there’s nothing new on show here... the usual decapitations, head to toe body splittings, crucifixions etc. If you’ve seen one horror trap movie you’ve seen them all is what I was thinking about these kinds of movies as I watched... but then I remembered the brilliance of such movies as the original Cube and then think, no, it can be done well.

Sadly, for my money at least, Labyrinth is not a movie that does this particularly well. It certainly does it competently and it looks very professional... there’s just not anything innovative in terms of the story content for me and, yeah, you really will see that ending coming from a mile off. Not one I’ll visit again, for sure.

Salmokji - Whispering Water

Water Way To Go

Salmokji - Whispering Water
Directed by Lee Sang Min
south Korea 2026
28th August 2026 Screening at FrightFest

Okay, so after the somewhat brilliant movie Nervous (reviewed here) I returned to FrightFest the next morning for my second of this year’s films, Salmokji - Whispering Water. Which looked pretty fantastic and grossed about a gazillion pounds in its home country, knocking Project Hail Mary (still haven’t seen that) off of the top spot.

Now then, it would be true to say that this movie was mostly what I expected it to be but, sadly, not nearly as much as I’d hoped it would be.

The film starts with the brilliant premise that a road route to and in a remote forest area away from the city has had the images replaced with a ghost head staring out of the big lake. The company responsible for shooting the films and stills delete the offending image but are hit with an ultimatum by their client that new footage needs to be up by the end of the day (which, makes no sense to me because... why would you not have a back up anyway) so a new team has to go and film it.

The last team are missing and with the former director on sick leave after his experience there but, they all go down to the place and, one of the innovations of the film, if you want to call it that, is the sped up journey of the van spherised and shrunk down to a moving globe of passing footage at the centre of the screen (look, that’s the best way I can think of describing the effect… go see it if you want to see what I’m talking about).

Of course, when the crew and their producer Su In, played by Lim Hye-yoon, get there, things of an uncanny and definitely spooky nature, all focused around the lake, start to happen. And then the producer who is ill turns up and, if that doesn’t strike up a warning alarm in your brain, then you probably will quite enjoy this one. Of course, before you can say Spirit Of Dark And Lonely Water (and if you get that reference you’re probably pretty old), all watery hell breaks loose and, as many a young lady could tell you, there’s nothing light hearted about your waters breaking.

Okay, so someone whose opinion I admire greatly was exiting the screening as I left and so I asked him what he thought. His response was that it’s clichéd and, yeah, I think he really hit the nail on the head for this one (thanks Jason).

And that’s a big problem for this film, which has quite a good opening premise but then starts to very quickly pile on the expected tropes for this kind of movie. And then repeats them… and then overplays them for the rest of the movie. The problem is, for instance, that once you realise the lake can masquerade as anything plus any safe space in or out of the area… there’s not much point in rooting for any of the characters. Everyone is doomed and, I’ll charitably allow the filmmakers (who have made a pile of money out of this thing, don’t forget), that this is the main reason why the film just isn’t very scary and none of the jump scares really work either.

Honestly, Salmokji - Whispering Water plays like a very tedious, young-teen minded film and so, yeah, this reviewer is many decades removed from the target audience but, I do find it infuriating that a film which is as well lensed as this one kind of shoots itself in the foot by doing exactly what is expected of it, rather than deviating and taking a more interesting route. This one just wasn’t my cup of tea, it’s sad to say.  

Nervous

Recorded Delivery

Nervous
Directed by Abner Pastoll
2026 South Korea/United Kingdom
27th August 2026 Screening at Frightfest

It’s that time of year once again and, as always, one of the films I decided to attend at this year’s edition of FrightFest was the opening film, Nervous.

Now I’d like to say I chose this screening because the film looked really interesting (and, indeed, it did and is) but my primary motivation on this thing was, as always, to be one of the first to check out the FabPress stall for new books and US Blu Rays from the likes of Severin Films, so yeah, mission accomplished on that count.

That being said, I’m so pleased this was the opening film of the festival this year because, it was a truly great movie. After a bit of a false start that is, since the first ten minutes played without subtitles on the Korean parts of the dialogue and then, when they finally realised, they started the film off again with the proper subtitle track.

So, an Irish girl called Sarah, played by Sarah Bolger, goes to Korea with her husband Sungsoo, played by Sungsoo Yune (hmm… I sensing a trend with the character names here). They pitch up at the isolated dream house that Sungsoo’s Aunt has effectively given them but when they get there they find a mysterious intruder who leaves quickly. Also, another lady kinda joins them in friendship called Eunbyeol, who is played by none other than Ko Asung, from The Host and Snowpiercer (reviewed by me here).

But the young couple also find an old gramophone in the attic, which plays a record emitting, seemingly, silence plus weird crackling. Could it all have something to do with the outbreak of dead men and missing women which seems to have been sweeping the area?

Not long after this, Sarah stops being able to hear her husband, who just starts coming out feint and muffled on the audio track of the film. And as Sarah gets more involved with the somewhat mysterious and seductive Eunbyeol, she (and the audience) realises that it’s all men that she can’t hear, while she can hear the women-folk just fine. What’s that I hear you cry? “Not all men!” Well yeah, I think that’s kind of the point… the film does have a not so subtle, ‘me too’ feminist agenda but… it takes its chances with all the other story beats and, in this particular milieu, I didn’t think it was out of place and it's a valid point to make.

And that’s as much as I want to tell you about the plot, suffice it to say that the rogue comments about serial killers and missing women does, indeed, come into play by the end of the tale.

It’s a pretty beautiful film to start the festival off with, to be sure. Absolutely stunning cinematography and frame designs. The director likes to use big rectangular blocks of tonally variant surfaces, textures and colours to both either use as a separator for a couple of characters in a shot or, in one spectacular moment in particular, to bring his characters together in a centred, dark panel of the frame while the two outside quarters of the screen are light and used to highlight that integration of people.

And, needless to say, the film also has some excellent sound design, which, for a film that trades in crackles and muffles, it really does need to have, to be fair.

Not to mention a sequence towards the end which will have you holding on to your right ear in sympathy with what one of the characters does to themselves. It’s a slow burn but that approach more than enhances a couple of scenes which, shall we say, are not for the squeamish.

And that’s me done with this years opening FrightFest film Nervous. An absolutely beautiful film which, okay, maybe needs a more compelling title but is absolutely exquisite and, I just hope it manages to secure both a theatrical and Blu Ray release in this country, at some point soon. Maybe a label like Mubi should take a look at this one.

Insidious - Out Of The Further

The Further Adventures...

Insidious - Out Of The Further
Directed by Jacob Chase
Australia/USA 2026
Blumhouse
UK Cinema Release Print

Warning: Slight spoilers.

Okay then... another Insidious movie, namely Insidious - Out Of The Further and, well, it’s actually quite good in many respects, even though the franchise is now pretty much divorced from its original creator other than a production credit. Which means, of course, that Elise’s two assistants from the previous movies are no longer with us. 

But, hey, Elise is... as played by the 83 year old Lin Shaye and, yeah, that actress is still kicking ass in this movie. Elise is still dead, of course... but as usual, she’s helping out people from her unique place in The Further, the realm between life and death where the evil entities that plague the various corporeal, human inhabitants of these films live. And, since her two regular helpers are not in this installment (she’s the only character/actress to appear in all six movies to date), we’re introduced to a new, physical world helper in the form of Clare, played by Maisie Richardson-Sellers... and she’s a likeable enough character and the actress does a good job on selling her here, even though she’s really only brought in for the last third of the movie.

Okay, so this film focuses on a new family, three generations of daughters headed up by main protagonist Gemma (played by Amelia Eve), her daughter Maya (played incredibly well by Island Austin) and her own mother Ingrid (played by Laura Gordon). We initially see Ingrid die in a violent fashion in front of the young version of Gemma in the past. This is followed by the usual, big Insidious title coming up with the ferocious, atonal music accompanying it but, either my cinema had rubbish sound or it was pretty dialled back this time around. It didn’t startle me like they usually, quite purposefully do. 

And if I had a criticism of this film in general it’s that it does go through all the usual tricks of the trade of the modern horror film, like showing you where you think the scare is going to come from or shifting the audio landscape to not-quite-subconsciously herald in another intense scene... but it somehow manages to be completely unscary this time around. I don’t think it’s me but... this film did feel somehow less stressful than any of the other movies in the franchise and... I wonder if that’s down to the director over anything else? 

There are, though, some unsettling moments for a certain sector of the audience, I reckon... Gemma grows up to be a dentist and there is a full on ‘dental horror’ scene in this. It wasn’t particularly scary for me but it was inventive in what it reveals about one of the characters. I could see how it might set some people’s teeth on edge if they have a quite understandable fear of dentistry (I’m personally in a good spot with my dentist these days so... maybe that’s why I found it less distressing). 

My second criticism took the form of an homage scene and, my problem is it didn’t go far enough. So you remember the eye slowly being pulled towards a big, sharp splinter and then being gouged out in Zombi (aka Zombi 2 aka Zombie Flesh Eaters, reviewed here)? Well, a similar scene but using a much cleaner, sharper instrument is restaged here in reference... except the director seems to have an eye on the censors and it doesn’t quite get to the eye gouging. But that would have been nice to see in a modern movie, for sure... especially since the victim is also the main protagonist here. That would have really shocked the audience if she’d lost an eye and helped build the kind of ‘the gloves are off’ momentum that the film needed.

But. like I said, the film is pretty entertaining and a fair bit better than Insidious - The Red Door (reviewed here), especially because Lin Shaye has more of a role this time around. 

And that’s me done with Insidious - Out Of The Further. I thought this was a fine addition to the franchise and, I think if fans give it a chance, they should be into it too. It does open up a possibility of having sequels that are not just centred around the same family from the first five movies and I thought it did that in a more than credible manner. I just wish the scares could have been ramped up a notch. Oh, and stay for the mid credits scene and especially because, during those credits, you can hear in more detail something that composer Joseph Bishara does in the movie too... which is go into the realms of John Carpenter style scoring, specifically The Fog, at some points. So that’s cool too. 

Under The Shadow - Almeida Theatre

Djiin And Djang

Under The Shadow (stage adaptation)
Directed by Nadia Latif
Adapted by Carmen Nasr
From the film by Babak Anvari,
Almeida Theatre on Saturday 20th June 2026

The Almeida Theatre is possibly my favourite theatre... despite this being only my third visit since the mid-1980s, when I saw Joanne Whalley in a production of Wedekind’s The Lulu Plays (playing the role Louise Brooks made famous in Pandora's Box) and also, about nine years ago, an amazing adaptation of The Twilight Zone (reviewed here). I just like the look of the theatre, I think... although the surrounding streets seem to have changed quite a bit since I was last there. 

I’m on their mailing list though so was surprised then I saw that they’ve put on a theatrical production of the amazing ‘evil djiin’ movie Under The Shadow from 2016 (which I reviewed here). On the one hand it’s perfect for a stage adaptation because the film is mostly just set in one apartment building, for most of the time. But, yeah, there are special effects to think about which would make a stage adaptation very hard. Also, I couldn’t see how my favourite moment, when Shideh runs from the house in terror, only to be promptly detained by the local authorities for not wearing her head scarf, could be recreated on stage. And as for that last point... I was right, they didn’t even try and I can certainly see why it was cut, even just for pacing reasons here because you need to keep the momentum going on this particular stage show, I think.

But I went anyway and was astonished to find that, actually, it was a pretty great, solid two hours of theatre and I absolutely loved it. The format is such that, to get certain things across which are done easier and quicker on film, things had to be added. For instance, there are some wonderful scenes with the entire cast stuffed into a small space under a trap door at the front of the stage, which is doubling for their underground shelter from the bombs and, ultimately, missiles falling on their home city of Tehran and these serve to get huge amount of information across about both the characters and their relationships to each other... and the political turmoil of the country in 1988, when this tale is set. 

And there’s a lot more of Shideh’s husband in this for the first half, before he’s sent off as a doctor to ‘the front’. Again, lots of information given throughout these scenes and they work very well.

The performances in this, even from the child actors, are pretty strong too. I really liked Leila Farzad, the lead actress playing Shideh in this version and, I loved her chemistry with both her daughter and, especially, her older neighbour played by Souad Faress. Farzad really came across as a woman who is living with the hell of not being allowed to continue her medical studies, due to early political affiliations, while also being a modern, independently thinking woman in a country which, perhaps, did not encourage such attitudes at the time (if I’m off here in that assumption, please put me right in the comments below). 

The staging is wonderful too. The way the space is divided and an amazing set of Shideh’s apartment, with depth added through open doors (again, the artistic world owes a debt to Roger Corman’s set dressing technique) is impressive and allows for a small strip of ‘the street’ down the front of the stage. Okay, some of the scares didn’t quite work for me but I’m putting that down to being jaded and old and, I can tell you, they were certainly working for the rest of the audience. And the sequence where the unexploded missile lands above Shideh’s ceiling and is poking through it, revealed in a top section of the stage you didn’t even know existed until the reveal... is absolutely stunning. 

Another big change is the ending of the film... if I remember it rightly... and without giving too much away, it gives us something both more hopeful in one sense but, depending on how you interpret things, something far more cynical than the original version. In fact, I’d have to say that I kind of liked this ending a little better, which all hangs on a monologue given by Leila Farzad.

And that’s me done with the stage version of Under The Shadow, I think. I had a really good time with this one and was really pleased I saw it. However, it’s only on for another couple of weeks so do yourself a favour and grab a ticket while you can. And while you’re there, grab a small tub of the salted butterscotch ice cream from their bar, it’s wonderful stuff. 

 To grab a ticket for the show, check out their website here... https://almeida.co.uk/ 

The Sand

Sandwiches There

The Sand
USA 2015 Directed by Isaac Gabaeff
Frightfest presets DVD Region 2

Why can you never get hungry on a beach? Because of all the sand-which-is there!

Or, in the case of this film, The Sand, the answer is... because you are an unknown, carnivorous creature sitting under a large area of the sand and feasting upon any humans who get even close to making contact with said sand. 

Okay, so this film is another of the free DVDs I snagged at Frightfest some years ago and, again, it’s one of the better ones although, it does have some negative stuff in it too. Now, the first thing I thought of when I looked at the title was that it’s maybe a remake of the old 80s classic Blood Beach (a film sorely in needing of a modern HD release) and, even in Alan Jones’ introduction to the movie, which is an option to play on this DVD, he mentions that particular film. However, this movie isn’t really a straight up remake of that one at all and, although I wasn’t quite as taken with it as Mr. Jones, I did have a fairly good time with it, it has to be said.

The opening ten minutes or so was a little hard to get through for me, consisting of chaotic, shaky cellular phone footage of a teen party taking place on the beach one night, to establish some of the characters and also that the organiser had asked for everyone to put thier phones in a bag (yeah, that’s not going to be a set up for a scene later in the movie now, is it?) and that one of the party goers finds this huge, seaweedy looking rock, which most audience members will probably realise is an egg from early on. The party footage is interspersed with languid shots of an abandoned beach the next morning, in slow and languorous camera movements. Wait... did I say abandoned? No, there are eight people left sleeping from ‘the night before’ (four guys and four gals), all in the same area of the beach. Two on a lifeguard station, four in a car, one on a bench and one stuffed into an oil can by his friends.

As they come back to life and before their feet touch the sand, one of them sees a gull land on the sand, get stuck and then get eaten by it. She tries to warn the others (all are within earshot and sight of each other) but the hungover girl on the beach immediately gets stuck on the sand and shares the same fate as the bird... but not before one of the guys in the car runs to the rescue and gets similarly stuck and eaten himself (in one of the more picturesque and believable pieces of goriness in the movie). It soon becomes clear that the found ‘egg’ hatched at some point and all the other people at the party the night before have been eaten by the beach, in this abandoned strip where barely anyone comes. Once the surviving six realise that they can’t touch the sand and, once various hot dogs have been thrown  to try and ascertain the size and shape of the area of the sand which is hostile, the film consists of the various attempts of these remaining people to escape their fate, as the rules of ‘the sand’ and the monster beneath become more defined and their number gradually diminishes. 

And it is an entertaining movie with some nice performances by the likes of Brooke Butler and Meagan Holder. Some of the sequences, such as when one of the girls is balancing on the back bumper of the car trying to get the trunk open to get to the bag of phones inside, are fairly intense and suspenseful. Which makes it even more annoying when I say that, in some ways, the budget lets the film down a little. I know it’s a low budget horror production (shot in twelve days with the same cast and crew after another movie which fell through... I get it) and that’s often the best kind but, I have to say that much of the CGI in this really lets it down and I kinda wish they’d gone for more practical effects. When a passing policeman (temporarily protected by his non-organic shoes for a short while) who obviously doesn’t believe what’s going on, get his arm chomped off by the beast, the resulting stump gushing blood looks totally unrealistic and just, I dunno, kind of watery. 

Similarly, although the gazillions of small, cotton like tendrils of the creature which raise up from the sand when anything is in close proximity look quite effective but, when they decide to go full on giant tentacle terror towards the end of the movie, the CGI appendages just don’t look like they’re there in the same shot... they literally look like they’ve been cartooned over the top of the film (which they kinda have, I guess).

However, special effects don’t maketh the movie and, though I would have liked more money pumped into the effects work (and I rarely ever say that about special effects because, I usually don’t care anything about them), it was still an entertaining ride of a modern horror B-movie and I think it would play well as part of a an all nighter with friends and liberal amounts of alcohol. The Sand is nowhere near one of the better monster movies I’ve seen but, there’s obviously a lot of love gone into this one and it kinda works. 

Night Tide

 

A-Mora-Therapy

Night Tide
Directed by Curtis Harrington
USA 1961
AIP/Indicator Blu Ray Zone B

“Americans have such a simple view of the world.”
Mora, Night Tide

I’ve been wanting to see Night Tide for a little while now. Shot in glorious black and white, the film stars a young Dennis Hopper as sailor Johnny, who visits a coastal town on his weekend leave days. While in a jazz club, he meets the mysterious Mora, played by Linda Lawson, who works in an amusement side show playing a mermaid for a living. It isn’t long before the two start seeing more of each other, as Johnny starts hanging out with her and the beachside community in town, where she lives in an apartment above the Merry-Go-Round. However, the occasional fleeting presence of a mysterious Greek woman who frightens Mora... and the discovery that both of Mora’s previous boyfriends drowned at the full moon, leads him to fear for both his life and Mora’s, as he tries to understand the mysterious woman with whom he’s fallen in love. 

Okay, so with the inclusion of the mysterious, intimidating woman played by Marjorie Cameron, we basically have a vibe from this movie which gives it the feel of a watery remake of Val Lewton’s Cat People from 19 years earlier. Which is pretty much what it is with a possible difference, depending on how you personally decode the story beats. 

The film is almost a psychological drama with Mora pictured as actually being a real mermaid, with the Greek woman representing her fellow, siren-like fish people who are calling her to return to the sea during the full moon. There’s quite a lot of silence and pausing in terms of the dialogue of the movie and it’s really obvious to see, even from this early point into his career, that Hopper is actually a really great actor. Giving the part lots of expression and attitude (especially of naivete or innocence), he fleshes out the character with a lot of depth, as you can see him carefully considering everything in his head before he speaks... I’ve never had an awful lot of time for Hopper as an actor, to be honest but, this film really hits home just how good he was. 

Equally great is the confused and troubled Mora, with Lawson really going to town on the mysterious woman and her unusual attraction to the sea (especially when the moon is full). She perfectly compliments Hopper’s strangely sympathetic performance by giving him a cypher to play off of... as her character shifts between mental states to frighten Johnny as much as she mesmerises him, in her seduction of the character.

There is a slight difference between the basic idea holding both Cat People and Night Tide together in terms of story... in that there is a full on explanation here for what is troubling the main female protagonist. But where Cat People veers right into a very specific conclusion at the film’s end, Night Tide maintains the ambiguity and it’s not until things have gone horribly wrong, by the end of the picture, that the film allows a feint hint that the writer is both trying to have his cake and eat it, where this specific movie is concerned. It’s only at the end, where the dry ‘scientific explanation meets Scooby Doo’ is undercut by the fact that nobody can explain the Greek woman who has been appearing to Mora and Johnny throughout the film, that doubt is once more cast as to the true legacy of Mora’s character.

The film is moodily shot with a lot of slightly off-kilter, fun house style camera angles (from a Dutch fun house, obviously) which give it an almost Caligari-like feel in some places but, it also gives off an aura not unlike a certain film which came out a year after this one was made (although released later in some territories) which I also believe it shares some common DNA with... that being Herk Hervey’s Carnival Of Souls. Although the incessantly eerie pipe organ music of that later work is instead filled in with a more traditional score by famous Hollywood composer David Raksin, which sometimes hits the mark and, other times, undercuts it in a negative manner, it seems to me. However, the enigmatic mood is kept throughout and the score doesn’t relly harm it in most places. 

The film reaches a kind of unsatisfactory conclusion by the end of the picture, it has to be said but, it’s honestly a fun journey getting there. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend Night Tide as an ambiguous thriller which strays into horror territory and, I think the film should perhaps be a little better known than it currently is. The Blu Ray from Indicator has the usual ‘let’s push the boat out’ flurry of extras which, I’m sure are very good but which I haven’t had the opportunity to sample myself, as yet. But I’m really glad they put this one out and I’m happy to have seen it. 

Undertone

Pod Fearing People

Undertone
Directed by Ian Tuason
Canada 2026
Vertigo Releasing
UK Cinema Release Print

Finally got to the cinema again (the last six months have been very hard) and about the only movie that could coax me out was one in which I knew the sound design would play a huge part. And, yeah, sound design is everything to Undertone, so I think I made the right call here.

So in terms of actual physical appearances by actors, this is a two hander, all set in one house, with lead actress Nina Kiri as supernatural phenomena debunker/podcaster Eva and Michèle Duquet as her silent, dying in bed mum. All the rest of the cast, including Adam DiMarco as her fellow podcast hoster Justin, are all voices playing out on her headphone receiver.

And, suspending disbelief about how podcasts which are being recorded for future airing can have live callers at random recording times, the film has a pretty claustrophobic atmosphere as Eva and Justin, over a space of a few recording sessions, work their way through listening to a series of ten anonymously emailed sound files concerning a young, ‘expecting’ couple during the night. Starting off with the husband recording these to initially capture his wife talking in her sleep.

That’s as far as I’ll go on the story content other than to make the comment that the initial set up obviously shares some DNA with the fantastic movie Monolith (reviewed here), which I saw play at FrightFest a couple of years ago. And, even more so in the case of Undertone, the action never once leaves the confines of Eva’s mother’s house. Eva leaves once but, yeah, the camera stays behind.

Now, I’m a sucker for these very small cast, single location pieces and, I have to say, this slow builds to being one of the most terrifying I’ve seen in recent years. Perhaps for the wrong reasons by the end of the movie but it’s all down to two things, asides from where the ideas thrown up by the recordings goes.

The first of these two is the wonderful performance by Nina Kiri. Apart from when she’s talking on her side of the podcast, it’s a solid silent performance which relies a lot on the reactive expressions Kiri brings to the table here, both to what she’s listening to but also to what’s going on in the house as she keeps an eye on her dying mother.

But the equal star of the show here is the aforementioned sound design. The films does have a deftly, light handed score on it but it’s the mix of sounds giving audio sensations of both what’s on the recordings and, again, simultaneously in the house... which makes or breaks this thing. And it’s well done here.

So well done in fact that, while I was perhaps disappointed by the obvious style of the conclusion the film has, my heart was still beating fast in my chest due to the absolute unremitting cacophony of the foley track.

So yeah, my final thoughts on Undertone is that it’s a very well performed and mostly well crafted slice of horror which, ultimately doesn’t allow for too many surprises by the end of the film but, makes up for it in sheer energy and artistic determination. Good for a scare and certainly one to partner up with the aforementioned Monolith as a nice ‘mates round for drinks’ double bill or even the third or fourth film in an all nighter (it certainly gets way too loud to sleep through).