HALLOWEEN HORROR: Lovely, Dark, and Deep (2023)

Socially-awkward Lennon (Krypton and Barbarian's Georgina Campbell) lands a position as a backcountry ranger in the (fictional) Arvores National Park.

The massive park is known for the large number of people who go missing there, including Lennon's sister when they were youngsters.

Lennon is determined to find out what is really going on in the dark and creepy liminal spaces of the heavily forested park, but encounters a conspiracy of silence among her work colleagues.

Head-strong and determined to march to the beat of her own drum, Lennon disobeys a direct order during a hunt for a missing person (who she actually ends up rescuing, thus attracting the ire of whatever is lurking in the darkness) and finds herself on five days notice.

It is during these final days of her first season in the park that things start to get really strange.

I had high hopes that Lovely, Dark, and Deep would be a solid blend of two of my favourite horror sub-genres: rural horror and cosmic horror, but ultimately it falls into a well-trodden formula seen in so many similar movies.

While it's thankfully not as grating as a pretentious Ben Wheatley rural horror outing, early Blair Witch and Picnic at Hanging Rock vibes soon give way to obtuse, clichéd and random imagery. 

There's an overly-long nightmare sequence that has Lynchian aspirations, and is clearly meant to be the closest we'll get to an explanation of events, but much of it ultimately comes off as being weird for weird's sake.

The film, written and directed by Teresa Sutherland (who wrote the far-superior The Wind) clearly has good intentions; there's an interesting idea buried in there but as a story it's poorly told.

The cycle of sacrifice to the hungry and unknowable spirits that inhabit the woods is a really novel concept, but is hidden among a lot of unnecessary distraction padding out the 87-minute run time. 

Clearly there isn't enough of the main plot, as written, to satisfactorily fill the movie's duration and so atmospheric artistry is called upon to inflate what is there.

On one hand there actually was much to admire in Lovely, Dark, and Deep but on the other was the inescapable fact that it was thin fare, reminiscent of so many other movies - both better and worse.

In The Earth (2021)

Why, oh why, do I keep doing this to myself? After the pretentious nonsense of 2013's A Field In England, I thought I was done with the oeuvre of auteur Ben Wheatley... but then I saw that he had made a new rural horror film that the trailers managed to make look quite intriguing.

While the world is consumed by the latest pandemic, scientist and city boy Martin Lowery (Game of Thrones' Joel Fry) and park ranger Alma (Ellora Torchia) head into a quarantined area of forest outside of Bristol to deliver equipment to researcher Olivia Wendle (Hayley Squires), who has set up camp deep in the woods.

During their second night of camping on the long journey through difficult terrain, Alma and Martin are attacked in their sleep, their radio is destroyed, and their shoes are stolen.

The following day Martin cuts his foot badly while continuing on barefoot, but they soon run into an apparent homeless man, Zach (The League of Gentleman's Reece Shearsmith) who takes them to his camp.

Very quickly it becomes clear that Zach is up to no good, and is actually trying to make contact with a woodland entity - Parnag Fegg - through symbolism and sacrifice.

Eventually, our protagonists escape his clutches and stumble into Wendle's encampment, only to realise that the scientist is as barmy as Zach.

While, he was using ritual, she using science, but heavily influenced by an old, occult tome that mentions the nearby standing stone around which all this weirdness seems to revolve.

As with A Field in England, In The Earth is largely a pompous, po-faced, mess of style over substance, but peppered with moments of pseudo torture porn and squirm-inducing injury detail, almost entirely inflicted on Martin.

For some reason, this film is allowed to run for 107 minutes, and, boy, does it feel it. When Wheatley isn't bombarding our senses with strobe lighting or flickering subliminal images (which I wouldn't object to if I felt they had some meaning), he's allowing his antagonists to monologue incessantly. 

I guess the writer-director believes he has an ear for dialogue, but more often than not it comes across as peculiarly mannered and stilted, akin to a poor student film.

Echoing 2018's Annihilation, the underlying story of In The Earth suggests that nature is 'fighting back' against mankind (and is possibly responsible for creating the unspecified plague affecting the globe... but I might be giving the plot too much credit there).

Both Zach and Olivia are taking different paths to opening a dialogue with an anthropomorphic avatar of nature, the mycrrhizal mat, a network connecting all the plant life in the area, to, essentially, negotiate a peace treaty.

And this core idea is interesting and worthy of investigation, but In The Earth doesn't do it justice.

I'm of an age where I don't need everything explained in a horror movie to get that its conceit is frightening, as long as there is the suggestion of an intelligent design behind it all.

However, Wheatley's "throw everything at the wall and see what sticks" approach actually undermines the uneasiness of the scenario.

There was a moment, in the final act, when Olivia was fine tuning her son et lumière communication devices, that I thought this drivel was about to be salvaged by some Quatermass-level fringe science, but sadly the plot opted to devolve into a psychedelic, early Pink Floyd music video (but without the great tunes).

What should have been terrifying was simply annoying.

Clearly Wheatley has enough fans that he can continue to gain funding for these arthouse horror projects, but I definitely don't count myself among their number.

A Field In England (2013)

During the English Civil War, an alchemist's cowardly assistant, Whitehead (Reece Shearsmith), is tasked with tracking down rogue alchemist O'Neill (Michael Smiley) after the villain made off with some occult tomes that belonged to Whitehead's master.

Caught up on the periphery of a battle, Whitehead falls in with a trio of deserters who are making their way across a field towards a tavern - little realising that one of these men, Cutler (Ryan Pope), is actually in league with O'Neill.

The men are captured by O'Neill - with Cutler's aid - and forced to help him in his search for buried treasure. Only, instead, they unearth "terrifying energies trapped inside the field".

On paper this set-up sounds promising and reading the critical response to the film (courtesy of the film's Wikipedia page) I knew I was in for something a bit out of the ordinary.

What I got instead was a pretentious 'student film project' with inflated ideas about its own self-importance.

I find it truly mind-boggling that "serious film critics" have no problems slagging off Hollywood blockbusters that are meant to be pure entertainment but sit them in front of drivel like A Field In England and they will pontificate on its "challenging nature" and "audaciousness" until the cows come home rather than simply saying: that was a load of shit.

As an indicator of how shallow the film actually is, at one point we're hit with the stunningly original revelation that the real treasure in the field was not gold but the friendship that had developed between the men. Pass the bucket, please, I think I'm going to throw up.

It's not as if A Field In England is even that well made.

There's some very poor editing choices (particularly when - for no explained reason - the men are suddenly having a tug-of-war match with an unseen opponent, who may have been an intricately engraved post but this is never entirely clear) and the hallucinogenic sequence that comes in at about the hour mark - and seems to go on forever - is quite clever in parts but ultimately serves little purpose beyond giving the viewer a headache. Woe betide anyone with photosensitive epilepsy who accidentally watches this (there is a warning at the start of the film).

Let's not even dwell on the moments when suddenly all the actors stand stock still - in obviously 'very important' poses - like children playing statues when the music stops.

And that bit in my plot summary above about the "terrifying forces trapped inside the field", I only got that that from the blurb on the back of the Blu-Ray. You certainly don't get that from the film. The men eat some magic mushrooms, go a bit loopy (cue strobing, kaleidoscopic flashing imagery) then someone off-camera turns on a giant wind machine that blows over O'Neill's tent!

Things happen without explanation that we are, presumably, supposed to view as "highly significant" but instead just come across as daft as they have no context (such as the fellow who comes back to life and alerts O'Neill to where his friends are hiding, then the next thing you know he's attacking O'Neill).

But talking of things happening without explanation there's no real justification for shooting the film in black and white - except to go some way (but not far enough) to masking its £300,000 budget. It also only involves five actors on screen for 99 per cent of the movie (there's a brief cameo from The Mighty Boosh's Julian Barratt at the start) and all the action takes place in a single field.

In a nutshell, this has to be the biggest waste of 90 minutes of my life I've endured in a long while. I simply can't recommend A Field In England to anyone as there is nothing here that hasn't been done better elsewhere.

I was hoping for a minimalist slice of magic realism or avant-garde horror to add to my library of very British rural horror films that I so adore, but instead I got a headache and a nagging sense that I'd just been conned out of the cost of a Blu-Ray.

• You can read about some of the background behind the making of this "revolutionary" movie on The Independent website here.

Call Me A Sucker, But My Interest Is Piqued!

A scientist's string theory experiment goes wrong when his brane explodes. Corey Harlan must find him and the brane's core in a mysterious house where doors lead to other worlds, guided by the dimensional being Aclima.

I guess I'm a sucker for punishment, but Bulk really intrigues me - despite the fact that I have never seen a film by British auteur Ben Wheatley that I liked (and it feels like I've seen quite a few).

Every time I promise myself that 'enough is enough' and I won't be lured into watching his next offering... and then I do, and inevitably I utterly hate it.

However, I'm hoping the Lynchian Bulk will be different...