HALLOWEEN HORROR: Mandy (2018)

Revenge thrillers are not renowned for their complex plots and they don't come more linear than Nicolas Cage's wonderously visceral Mandy (out on DVD this week).

It's 1983 and grizzled lumberjack - and man of few words - Red Miller (Cage) and his artistic, hippy, girlfriend Mandy Bloom (Andrea Riseborough) live an idyllic life in the wilderness.

Unfortunately, by chance, one day Mandy catches the eye of failed musician and deranged cult leader Jeremiah Sand (Linus Roache).

Sand employs demented biker gang The Black Skulls to kidnap Mandy for his pleasure, but things don't go exactly according to plan, sending Red on an epic, furious, quest for vengeance.

At times feeling like a journey into Hell curated by David Lynch, Mandy is part Apocalypse Now, part Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and part Unforgiven, taking queues from multiple genres as writer/director Panos Cosmatos aims his laser-focus on Red's mythic mission of revenge.

I loves me some weird cult shit and Mandy delivers on that front with The Black Skulls and Sand's Children of the New Dawn, and enough peculiar characters and mannered dialogue to populate a suburb of Twin Peaks.

Startling visuals merge with subtle camera tricks to disorientate the viewer, enhancing our insights into the minds of both protagonist and antagonist, creating an artistic cocktail of psychedelic grindhouse.

Reminiscent of Baskin in its brutal relentlessness, Mandy, however, is more concerned with the human - and occasionally superhuman - monster than the cosmic.

The role of Red is one that only Cage could truly have embodied, segueing from effortless charm to ruthless killer as his descent into madness progresses.

With a running time just shy of two hours, Mandy feels a fraction of that duration thanks to its spectacular pacing and addictive imagery.

The plot may be a short railroad, but the scenery is breathtakingly hypnotic as you are catapulted along this stunning and unforgettable ride.

HALLOWEEN HORROR: Antrum - The Deadliest Film Ever Made (2018)

As I've said many times I have a particular weakness for stories about cursed media, such as Cigarette Burns, Archive 81, Deadwax, The Hills Run Red, etc but the conceit of these movies tends to be that we, at most, see and hear only glimpses of the cursed object while our protagonists track it down and, invariably, suffer the fate of all those who have pursued it in the past.

The unique gimmick of 2018's Antrum: The Deadliest Film Ever Made is that we, the audience, are seeing the entire movie for ourselves, bookended by a pair of mockumentary segments, establishing the terrifying backstory and provenance of this "unique" print of a legendary 1970s Bulgarian (?) movie called Antrum that has left a trail of death in its wake.

In a sense, we are now the protagonists in the story of this artefact, "daring" to watch it despite its existential reputation.

The central movie-within-the-movie, while occasionally horrific and tense (because we keep expecting something to happen due to the manufactured reputation attached to what we are now watching), is essentially a grim, but possibly grittily mundane, nightmarish tale about a couple of children, Oralee (Nicole Tompkins) and Nathan (Rowan Smyth), on a camping trip.

The film opens with their beloved family dog, Maxine, being put down by a vet.

Nathan is traumatised by this, especially when his mother (Kristel Elling) suggests that Maxine has gone to Hell (for reasons we discover later in the film).

So Oralee hits upon the idea of taking her younger brother out into some spooky woods (clearly inspired by Japan's infamous Aokigahara forest) to dig a tunnel down to Hell to rescue the soul of Maxine.

Oralee has it all planned out as a therapeutic exercise, but her scheme goes awry as strange things start to happen and they stumble across a farm belonging to a pair of degenerate, white trash individuals (Dan Istrate and Circus-Szalewski) who like to capture people and cook them inside a giant brass effigy of Baphomet.

Although the role of the cannibals isn't particularly protracted, I still felt this was the weakest element of the film, a peculiar random encounter with shades of Texas Chain Saw Massacre meets the grisly realism of Man Bites Dog, jumbled in with the demonic terrors (imagined or otherwise) that the siblings were also contending with.

While this story on its own is a powerful thriller, with strong horror elements, the overriding unease of the film comes from what has supposedly been done to the print of Antrum that we are watching.

The documentary portions of the larger film acknowledge that there are subliminal images and symbols cut into the movie print, but there are plenty of other details (from Midsommar-style "faces" in the background of scenes to words scratched onto the negative) left for us to discover on our own, along with occasional odd jump cuts and auditory strangeness that really gets under your skin if you let it.

A puzzle box of a picture, where you find yourself searching for clues to the bigger picture while still being invested in the story of the two siblings in the woods, Antrum: The Deadliest Film Ever Made has definite shades of The Blair Witch Project and a soupçon of additional David Lynch weirdness about it.

Actually a Canadian horror film written and directed by David Amito and Michael Laicini, Antrum deserves praise for its hardcore attempt to establish a verisimilitude around the supernatural print of this supposedly cursed movie.

If you allow yourself to buy into this, even if just for the 95 minute running time of the movie, this has the potential to stay with you for the longest time... and don't be surprised if find yourself tempted to watch it again to see if you missed anything.

HALLOWEEN HORROR: Honeydew (2020)

 

Botany student Rylie (Malin Barr) and her waiter-cum-actor boyfriend Sam (Sawyer Spielberg, son of Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw) are travelling across New England, so she can research an outbreak of an ergot-like fungus called "sordico" that has been devastating local farms.

After their attempt to camp in a field is interrupted by the land owner in the middle of the night, they find their car won't start and so have to walk to the nearest property in the hopes of being able to call for assistance.

They turn up at the home of eccentric old farmer Karen (Barbara Kingsley), who lives in a rundown house with her brain-damaged son, Gunni (Jamie Bradley), who passes his time watching Popeye cartoons or staring at static on the TV.

Karen phones a neighbour to come over and help, but he never turns up and so the young couple are forced to share an awkward evening meal with Karen and Gunni, before the strange old lady shows them to a basement bedroom where they can pass the night.

Despite his medically-necessary dietary regime, Sam can't settle and so goes back upstairs to eat some more.

He is surprised by Gunni, who seems to be trying to tell him something, but then Sam passes out and has a Popeye-themed hallucination about his stomach condition.

Upon waking, he can't find Rylie - or Karen - and starts to search the house and its environs, but wandering into a barn he is ambushed and drugged.

Written and directed by Devereux Milburn, Honeydew is Texas Chain Saw Massacre family dynamics seen through a David Lynch or League of Gentlemen lens, with the extended sequence of Karen's hospitality to her guests being a marvellous, nerve-testing, exercise in the horror of the peculiar and uncomfortable.

Milburn clearly likes to push his audience as far as they can comfortably go, then push them a bit further.

No matter how bizarre the behaviour of the strange hostess - and her son - gets it feels so real and genuine, there is clearly something going on that the young guests aren't privy to.

While there is shock and gore in Honeydew, the best weapon in its arsenal is discomfort. 

From the start, this atmosphere is accentuated by unusual sound design and experimental split screen, which could be construed as affectation, but if you allow yourself to be drawn into this nightmare, it can be genuinely unnerving.

Having taken a reasonably cliché set-up - and some very on-the-nose foreshadowing of the cause of the madness ahead - the writer/director puts a impressively disturbing spin on things.

Even when you think the action has moved into more familiar captivity tropes, matters continue to unfold in dark, weird, perverse, and unexpected ways. 

For a moment, Devereux Milburn lulls you into thinking Honeydew might turn out to be standard Hollywood horror fare after all, but then he swiftly pulls the rug from under your feet.

But then the frights aren't over. 

The bleak denouement seems to go on and on (but in a good way), and the more you dwell on what is happening before your eyes the more it'll get under your skin.

HALLOWEEN HORROR: X (2022)

It's 1979 and a group of eager young filmmakers from Houston - fuelled by drugs, horniness, and dreams of making big bucks - head out to shoot a porno (The Farmer's Daughter) in rural Texas, to try and cash in on the emerging home video market.

They've rented a guest house in the grounds of an isolated farm owned by an old couple, Pearl (Mia Goth)  and Howard (Stephen Ure), who both appear to be several hundred years old.

Unfortunately, as you might expect from a horror film, especially one released on the A24 label, all is not as it seems.

Pearl is grieving the loss of her youth, and Howard believes he is no longer able to satisfy her, but the old woman finds herself attracted to one of the actresses, Maxine Minx (also Mia Goth), and when she catches a glimpse of the adult movie being shot her frail grip on sanity slips.

As soon as you see the A24 logo pop up you know you're in for a wild ride, and writer/director Ti West's X certainly delivers.

In much the same way as A24's Midsommar, Ari Aster's rural shocker from 2019, was a modern reworking of The Wicker Man, so X is a reworking of Texas Chainsaw Massacre (although certainly not a remake), with a heavy side-order of Psycho for good measure.

But that's also part of the artifice of the movie, as it's constantly dabbling in clever juxtapositions, foreshadowing and downright misdirection, as Ti West clearly knows what his audience is expecting and likes to mess with those expectations.

In fact, after a brief intro of the police rolling up to the brutal murder scene at the farmhouse, the story flashes back a day to fill us in on how events got there.

Almost a full hour passes - of the 105 minute movie - before the real violence begins, but from then on it's pretty relentless right up to when the credits start rolling.

Pearl may look as weak and feeble as Grandpa from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre but she strikes from the shadows with the element of surprise, like a psychotic ninja.

Conversely, Howard doesn't hold to no stereotypical slasher movie rules and is quite happy blasting away with his shotgun.

The first part of X is primarily concerned with Maxine, Bobby-Lynne (Brittany Snow) and Jackson Hole (Scott Mescudi) making The Farmer's Daughter with producer Wayne Gilroy (Martin Henderon), and cameraman RJ Nichols (Owen Campbell) and his girlfriend Lorraine (Jenna Ortega), who is acting as sound engineer.

Given this set-up, unsurprisingly there's a plenty of bare female chests on display - and a brief male appendage in shadow - but before you start to think that this is a real porno, the nudity switches very quickly from The Deuce to The Shining.

The adult movie-shoot-within-the movie is interwoven with discussions on the nature of film versus reality, while much play is made of future star Maxine's "x-factor" that makes her desirable to everyone, and this segues into the murderous couple's motivations, which are explored through the narrative of the latter part of X.

A prequel, Pearl, was shot back-to-back with X, co-written by Mia Goth and Ti West, set in 1918. This film will see Goth reprieve her role as the titular Pearl and fill in some of the character's killer backstory. 

SAW WEEK: Saw (2004)

Liberal use of the derogatory term "torture porn" is often used to throw Saw under the bus, lumping it in with lesser works of lower quality.

However, in truth, director James Wan has managed to pull off some Texas Chain Saw Massacre level sleight of hand that makes people remember seeing something that was far more gruesome than is actually shown on screen.

Sure, there's some nasty torture devices shown in Saw, creations of the enigmatic Jigsaw Killer, but the terror invariably comes from the suggestion of what the devices could do to their victims rather than graphically depicting it.

Saw is really a dark police procedural, striking a similar vein to Seven.

Here the mysterious antagonist is imprisoning people he believes are wasting their lives and, in his own sick way, is trying to make them appreciate what they have... or die trying.

Even the police's nom de guerre for the antagonist is a misnomer, as Jigsaw doesn't kill people in the film, rather he puts them in situations where they often end up killing themselves.

The bulk of the contemporary action in Saw centres around a pair of strangers - Adam (Saw scriptwriter Leigh Wannell) and Dr Lawrence Gordon (The Princess Bride's Cary Elwes) - waking up in a seedy bathroom with no idea of how they got there or how to escape.

Both are chained to strong pipes on opposite sides of the room and there's the corpse of a man, who appears to have blown his brains out, on the floor between them.

They soon realise they will have to work together to try and solve the puzzle they are trapped in.

As the story begins to introduce flashbacks into the men's lives, we are also drawn into the second main plot thread, that of the hunt by driven cop David Tapp (Danny Glover) to unmask the Jigsaw Killer... and his increasingly obsessive belief that Dr Gordon is his man.

Events culminate in one of the most memorable twists in modern horror since M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense.

You can only fully appreciate this the first time you experience it, but it's a masterstroke from director Wan and writer Wannell in both simultaneously laying out all the clues and totally misdirecting their audience.

Revisiting the film, you will then see all the Easter Eggs.

Definitely not the faint-hearted, Saw is as much a mystery movie as a game-changing horror.

Taking the maxim 'less is more' to heart, James Wan - in his first mainstream directing gig - gives viewers just enough for their imaginations to fill in the rest, cutting away before actually showing anything truly gruesome.

Those films that followed and sought to emulate its style often focussed too much on realising the suggested brutality and not enough on the mystery angle, but Saw still stands up 17 years later as a powerfully engaging crime thriller.

THROWBACK THURSDAY: The Horror! The Horror! The Horror!

These days I'm a sucker for horror movies, with a particular weakness for monster movies.

While my passion for the genre began with a teenage viewing of the original 1978 Dawn Of The Dead, one of my favourite franchises remains the Nightmare On Elm Street movies.

I can still clearly remember the buzz the first one generated around school when it came out in 1984.

I was 17 at the time and not as into horror movies as I am now, but the "word on the street" was - in those pre-internet, pre-DVD dark ages - that it was the "most terrifying movie anyone had ever seen ever!"

Of course, when I eventually got to see it on VHS it was quite tame; still brilliant, thrilling and gory, but nowhere near as horrific as my teenage mind had imagined, fuelled by the hyperbole of fellow teenagers who'd claimed to have seen it... and just made it through to the credits by the skin of their tough guy teeth.

Even at the time some of the mood-setting special effects seemed quite primitive, these days they look positively archaic.

I seem to recall that the first horror film my parents let me stay up to watch on television was The Omen II. That scared the crap out of me and gave me nightmares for days - but now that also seems quite tame to my cynical forty-something brain.

I guess at the time it was some 'reverse psychology' parenting to stop me pestering them to be allowed to stay up and watch 'grown-up' movies.

It must have worked because I don't recall any horror movie encounters until the height of the heady days of the tabloid-led 'video nasties' scare (in the early '80s), when it was de rigueur to go round each others' houses and dare each other to watch the latest piece of nasty that someone had acquired on video tape.

I didn't make it through either The Evil Dead or Texas Chain Saw Massacre - which is ironic as the latter would, decades later, form the backbone of my university dissertation, and both movies rate among my top horror flicks these days.

It wasn't until one of these illicit gatherings when a gang of us were watching George Romero's Dawn Of The Dead that I had my 'Road To Damascus' moment and realised I was actually rather enjoying this movie and would like to see more of the same.

But that's not to say I've become so hardened and blasé to horror that nothing has a lasting impact on me.

Here's a quick rundown of the top three horror movies that still give me the heebeejeebies:

• The Exorcist

• The Blair Witch Project

• The Amazing Mr Blunden

No real shocks with the first two. I know The Blair Witch Project doesn't do it for everyone, but it digs at me on a psychological level for some reason - I guess it's something about being lost in the woods with an unseen antagonist, and the cinema-vérité style, with the handheld camera, just makes it all the more real.

It's that level of 'truth' that also makes The Exorcist so unnerving to me. Later horror films have generally taken a lighter touch, and even been more action orientated, but The Exorcist unfolds like docudrama and, to this day, as with Blair Witch, I can't watch it without the lights on!

The final entry in this trio of terror is an unlikely one that is obviously very personal.

My gran took me to see The Amazing Mr Blunden at the town centre cinema in Tunbridge Wells when I was six - and it scarred me for life.

To be honest I can't remember much of the specifics of the film, just that it involved a ghost and a large house fire. It wasn't the ghost that got to me, it was the house fire.

To this day, I haven't watched the film again because something about it just flicked a switch in my little, six-year-old brain.

And I have no plans to... even though it appears to actually be a U-certificate kids' film and not the hideous torture porn my addled brain recalls being 'forced' to sit through Clockwork Orange style with my eyelids pinned back.

Ten "Banned" Exploitation Classics That Tarantino Recommends

It never even entered my mind that this could be called "controversial"!

Banned on arrival, prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act, hunted as video nasties. Fight for Your Life. Eaten Alive. Last House on the Left.These are the grindhouse shockers Tarantino keeps recommending, from Leatherface's heat-stroke nightmare to a one-eyed angel of revenge that inspired Tarantino’s own Kill Bill.

Gein But Not Forgotten - The Return of The Original Psycho

You know the iconic horror films his twisted legacy inspired, but you may not know his name… yet. This October, Ryan Murphy’s Monster anthology series returns with its third - and darkest - season yet. Monster: The Ed Gein Story arrives on Netflix October 3.

In the frozen fields of 1950s rural Wisconsin, a friendly, mild-mannered recluse named Eddie Gein lived quietly on a decaying farm – hiding a house of horrors so gruesome it would redefine the American nightmare. Driven by isolation, psychosis, and an all-consuming obsession with his mother, Gein’s perverse crimes birthed a new kind of monster that would haunt Hollywood for decades.

From Psycho to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre to The Silence of the Lambs, Gein’s macabre legacy gave birth to fictional monsters born in his image and ignited a cultural obsession with the criminally deviant. Ed Gein didn’t just influence a genre — he became the blueprint for modern horror.

Chewing Over The Meat of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

Fifty years after Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre shocked the world and forever changed the face of global cinema and popular culture, Chain Reactions charts the film’s profound impact and lasting influence.

Directed by Alexandre O. Philippe (Lynch/Oz, Memory: The Origin of Alien). Featuring Stephen King, Patton Oswalt, Karyn Kusama, Takashi Miike, and Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. Only in theaters September 19.

Friday The 13th (2009)

This new telling of the story of Jason Voorhees - the indestructible, hockey-masked slayer - begins by subverting the twist ending of the original.

This version makes it clear in the opening flashback that it was Jason's mother who killed the camp counsellors because she thought they had let her deformed son drown in Crystal Lake.

But Jason had survived and made it back in time to see his own mother beheaded before his eyes by the last survivor.

The film then jumps to the present day and a bunch of potheads are going camping in the woods, near Crystal Lake, looking for a legendary field of wild weed... instead they are ambushed by the adult Jason (Derek Mears), who still inhabits the derelict summer camp.

All this in the 25-minutes before the title screen!

Six weeks later and another bunch of obnoxious college students, headed by chief douche bag Trent (Travis Van Winkle), have come to stay at a lodge owned by Travis' parents on the far side of the lake.

Meanwhile, Clay (Supernatural's Jared Padalecki) is in the area looking for his missing sister, Whitney (Amanda Righetti), one of the earlier band of delinquents, and getting nowhere with the unhelpful locals.

Little does he realise that Jason has actually kept her alive because she bears a passing resemblance to his dead mother.

There's even an underlying suggestion that the locals are somehow complicit in Jason's murders (the old woman who says: "He just wants to be left alone" and the total lack of follow-up by the authorities when one victim is impaled on the back of a passing pick-up truck), but this is never explored - to the detriment of originality in this movie.

Trent and his cohorts quickly discover the area's brutal secret though, and Clay is drawn into their nightmare as he tries to rescue his sister from the clutches of the iconic, unstoppable serial killer.

Directed by Marcus Nispel (who also helmed the far superior remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in 2003; not that the original needed remaking), Friday The 13th is very "by-the-numbers" with the requisite amount of female nudity and violent deaths, while, sadly, adding nothing new to the mix.

Where Nispel's Texas Chainsaw Massacre expanded on the characters of the original film and added new layers of subtext, Friday The 13th is just a re-imagining of the old story in a new location, with new disposable victims.

Perhaps we've been spoiled by such imaginative horrors as the Final Destination franchise, but even Jason's most creative attacks are actually quite mundane and there is certainly more luck than judgement involved in many of his killings.

The extended cut DVD gives us 101 minutes of mindless, low-brow entertainment, but totally lacking in lasting impact.

All the characters, even Clay and Whitney, are two-dimensional ciphers that we never get to really know - or care for - and, to be honest, most of the victims pretty much deserve what they get from Jason.

It isn't even made clear why, at the end, having defeated Jason (as the film structure dictated they would), Clay and Whitney roll his body into the lake rather than calling the police (as any sensible, right-thinking person would do), except that it serves the plotline and thus leaves the door open for a (wishful-thinking) sequel.

Friday The 13th is good for what it is: an urban myth-style retelling of a well-known tale for a generation that might only have known of the original second or third hand.

I still would have preferred a sequel to Jason X than this trite reboot, but perhaps I was just too sober (and too old) to fully appreciate the movie's nuances?

Friday The 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988)

Taking a leaf out the previous year's A Nightmare On Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, the Friday the 13th franchise is reinvigorated with an injection of psychic mayhem in Part VII: The New Blood.

After an atmospheric pre-credits exposition and recaps (narrated by Walt Gorney aka Crazy Ralph from the first two Friday The 13th movies) that focuses mainly on Jason Lives, we're introduced to a young Tina Shephard (Jennifer Banko) who accidentally drowns her abusive father (John Otrin) in Crystal Lake, when her nascent psychic powers run out of control.

I can't help thinking that young Tina is somehow a nod to Tia in the original Witch Mountain movies, but maybe that's just me.

Anyway, years later, an older Tina (Lar Park-Lincoln) and her mother (Susan Blu), are persuaded to return to their summer home by Crystal Lake (the whole renaming exercise from Jason Lives! appears to have been abandoned), by her personal mental health physician, the rather creepy Dr Crews (Terry Kiser).

He's trying to capitalise on her psychic powers, by pushing her to the edge of her wits and convincing her that her 'prophetic visions' are just delusions.

Co-incidentally, the neighbouring house is being used by a group of horny teens (including boob-flashing scream queen Elizabeth Kaitan) to host a surprise birthday party for one of their number (the actual surprise is that he never makes it!).

Railing against Dr Crews rather "in-your-face" therapy, Tina's psycho-kinetic powers end up releasing Jason from his bondage on the lake bed, and the killer rises from the waters, complete with tattered clothes and rib cage showing.

This was horror legend Kane Hodder's first stint behind the hockey mask and he definitely brings a certain character and manner to Jason Voorhees that may have been absent in the earlier films.

It's not that previous iterations of the franchise's antagonist were lacking anything, it's just that Hodder undeniably makes this role his own.

As he starts butchering anyone he finds "on his front lawn", we may think that it fortunate for Jason that one of his first kills was using a large machete to chop wood.

But in the end the slasher doesn't use his trademark weapon that much, instead relying on the many and varied domestic and forestry implements he finds laying around.

Of perverse note, The New Blood was the first of the films where Jason bludgeoned someone to death in a sleeping bag, smashing them against a tree (a scene extrapolated on in my favourite entry in the franchise, the sci-fi Jason X).

One thing I've realised not only do most of Jason's kills lack the finesse - and dark irony - of, say, Freddy Krueger's (being mostly brute force delivered to meat sacks) they're also actually not as gruesome as I either imagined or remembered them to be.

It's all in the suggestive way they are shot, being a combination of tense build-up and then - sometimes, but not always - seeing the gruesome aftermath.

These aren't the mindless torture porn of later years' horror, but following in the footsteps of well-crafted horror like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

And a recurring trope I've slowly picked up on is that every Friday The 13th - after the first, I believe - appears to feature people being thrown through windows: either in through a ground floor one or out of a first floor (or higher) one.

If I was still studying film at university, I'm sure I could come up with some deep meaning for this imagery, but, as it stands, it's just one of those cool, repeated shots that you start to anticipate as new episodes of the franchise drop.

As with Jason Lives, The New Blood is another solid entry in the series that tries to elevate the central conceit beyond "slasher targets horny teens" by expanding its paranormal elements while still keeping the film rooted in its central mythology.

Friday The 13th - Part Two (1981)

As with the original movie, Friday The 13th: Part Two appears to be taking us in one direction in its opening scenes, then dramatically pulls the rug from under our feet and sends us off in another direction.

The main action picks up five years after the massacre at Camp Crystal Lake, with the camp still closed off and Jason relegated to a campfire tale told to scare the fresh recruits at a new counsellor training centre that has opened elsewhere on the lake-shore.

In many ways, Part Two is the same film as before, even down to the third act cat-and-mouse battle of wits between Jason (Warrington Gillette) - who really is the slasher this time - and the final girl, Ginny (Amy Steel).

To be honest, the plot is negligible here: a gaggle of weed-smoking, pre-marital sexing teens arrive for camp counsellor training and Jason starts to pick them off (having tied up a few loose ends earlier on).

There's a touch of grubby Texas Chainsaw Massacre chic in Jason's derelict cabin the woods, which is a nice addition to the mythology, but otherwise Part Two is a smartly written but by-the-numbers, old school slasher flick with more suggestion than in-your-face gore.

Steve Miner's direction of Ron Kurz's script also makes 87-minute movie flash by in no time. When it hit the half-way point, I thought the TV had only been on for about 20 minutes.

There's slightly more flesh on display than in the previous flick, but Miner follows the directorial style established previously and doesn't linger on any of the kills in particular (in case you are taken out of the moment by realising it's all fake blood and rubber prosthetics).

It's a shame the ending is a bit of a jumble, as it appears to have been attempting to recapture the original's shit-your-pants shock of Jason erupting from the lake, but gets a bit confused in what the moment is trying to say in the film.

Of course, what you do realise, in hindsight, is that these first films are simply the warm-up act for the gonzo, supernatural, slaughter that is to come later in the franchise - and that people associate with Jason and Friday The 13th.

In Part Two, Jason is still very much human, albeit a deranged, disfigured, and delusional one.

And he hasn't even adopted his iconic hockey mask yet...

Retro Grindhouse Horror Pays Homage To Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes

In 1976 a group of people in the desert for a photo shoot, stumble upon an abandoned town called Savage. But they are not alone. A family of masked psychopaths have claimed Savage as their own and are hell bent on living up to its name.

Brute 1976 is scheduled to carve up VOD from August 26, Stateside.

H/t Pun

Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (1990)

I won't bore you rambling on about my long-term affinity for this messy franchise - since writing my university dissertation (in part) on the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre - but when a spiffy new Blu-Ray edition of Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III was announced I was 98 percent sure I hadn't actually seen this particular entry.

Trouble is there seem to be so many sequels and reboots it's difficult to remember which are connected to which, and which of those I've actually watched.

For instance, the most recent offering was 2022's Texas Chainsaw Massacre from Netflix which was a direct sequel to the original and brought back a key "victim" from that movie.

However, 1990's Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (not to be confused with 2017's Leatherface) immediately declares itself a continuation of the original story (conveniently sidestepping and forgetting the deranged slapstickery of Texas Chainsaw Massacre II) with its opening text that declares the character who appears in the Netflix sequel to actually have died in 1977!

TCM III isn't just a sequel, it's really a retelling of the original story, just in a more condensed form.

Bickering student couple Ryan (William Butler) and Michelle (Kate Hodge) are on a roadtrip from California to Florida when they pull into a Last Chance Gas Station, in the middle of nowhere, Texas, and encounter its sleazy owner, Alfredo (Tom Everett).

While filling up the car and using the facilities, the couple also meet a hitchhiker called Tex (The Lord of The Rings' Aragorn himself Viggo Mortensen in an early appearance).

Although Ryan won't give him a lift, he does listen to Tex's talk of a shortcut down a road that isn't on their map.

A fight erupts at the gas station between Alfredo and Tex and, as the young couple flee, they believe they see Tex getting blasted with a shotgun.

To escape the clutches of the perverted gas station attendant they take Tex's shortcut, but end up lost and in the dark... and being chased by a mysterious, giant four-wheel drive truck that forces them off the road.

In the ensuing chaos, they have their first encounter with Leatherface (R.A. Mihailoff), and end up running into 'weekend warrior' Benny (Dawn of The Dead's iconic Ken Foree), who was heading into the mountains for a "survivalist camp".

Leatherface captures Ryan, while Michelle discovers a large house that she hopes will offer her sanctuary and/or a way to contact the authorities.

Of course, she's clearly never seen a horror movie... because this is the home of Leatherface's creepy, cannibalistic family!

Honestly, there isn't really much to Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III. It's only 85-minutes long and retreads a lot of familiar ground, but it's also a helluva lot of gonzo fun.

Directed by Jeff Burr and written by David J Schow, there's a surprising attention to detail that I really appreciated - such as Leatherface wearing a leg brace (after he injured himself swinging his chainsaw at the end of the original movie) and the little girl (Jennifer Banko) naming her dolly Sally (after the Final Girl in the original movie, Sally Hardesty).

The legend Kane Hodder (best known for his turns as Jason Voorhees in the Friday The 13th franchise) was stunt co-ordinator on TCMIII and, apparently, even doubled for R.A. Mihailoff as Leatherface.

The film tries to emulate the suggested violence of the original by having the most brutal moments occur off camera, but TCM III comes up short on atmosphere because the grit and grim of Tobe Hooper's classic are replaced here by an air of cheapness.

Yet while Leatherface himself seems a bit bargain-basement, there's no escaping the fact that this is a small-scale rollickin' adventure that thematically, with its frequent reliance on a nearby swamp, foreshadows Adam Green's Hatchet series of slasher movies.

The addition of Ken Foree's Benny adds an interesting dynamic, as he's able to bring some genuine firepower to a chainsaw fight, even if the film's heavy-handed plotting does feel obliged to stick to the obligatory Final Girl trope.

And, no, it turns out I definitely hadn't seen Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III before. But I'm glad I have now.

MONSTER MAYHEM: Tarot (2024)

A clichéd group of generic college students have AirBnB-ed a spooky mansion in the Catskills for a drunken (yet, admittedly, rather tame) birthday party for one of their number: Elise (Larsen Thompson).

Low on drink, the group search the house and discover - behind a "keep out" sign - a basement reminiscent of the Warren's 'storeroom of evil' from The Conjuring franchise.

Of course, the kids poke around. Of course, they find a deck of creepy, hand-drawn tarot cards in a wooden box. Of course, one of the students - Haley (Harriet Slater, aka Fran from Indiana Jones and The Dial of Destiny) - knows how to do readings.

Breaking the 'golden rule' of tarot (that you don't use someone else's deck), Haley does tarot readings - tied to the subject's horoscope - for all her friends and herself.

They all have a good chuckle, except Haley's ex-boyfriend Grant (Wrong Turn's Adain Bradley), and then settle down for the night.

After a long drive back to the university, the gang all go their separate ways... and that's when the killing starts.

Elise is the first to die, then Lucas (Wolfgang Novogratz).

Only then do the survivors realise that their friends are being bumped off in ways that are literal interpretations of Haley's vague, metaphorical tarot card readings.

Searching for answers online, the first name their Google search throws up is a discredited - and kooky - expert called Alma Astrom (Olwen Fouéré, the most recent Texas Chainsaw Massacre's Sally Hardesty).

Alma, of course, knows all about this cursed deck of tarot cards and their origin, and even has a personal connection to the cards - as a survivor of a similar murder spree to the one our protagonists are caught up in.

In a nutshell, the cards were cursed by a Hungarian peasant - known only as The Astrologer - who transferred her essence into the cards so she could kill any who receive a reading from them.

Now, our heroes have to find a way to remove the curse before too many of them are brutally slaughtered by The Astrologer's manifestations of the demonic forms she drew on the Major Arcana.

Written and directed by Spenser Cohen and Anna Halberg - based on the 1992 novel Horrorscope by Nicholas Adams - Tarot feels like an '80s throwback, direct-to-VHS, monster flick.

However, as the film is really on-the-nose with its unsubtle, supposedly spinetingling, goings-on it also comes across as a parody of the genre for the most part.

The characters are so two-dimensional that we can't really get invested in their fates beyond a surface level, yet - for some reason - all the kills (essentially the 'selling point' for this kind of teen flick) are either off-camera or overly shy about showing anything resembling gore.

The script oscillates between wanting to be the foundation of a serious horror franchise, stylistically suggesting Final Destination and Nightmare on Elm Street during its 92-minute runtime, and being a tongue-in-cheek send-up of the same.

As the plot gets increasingly silly, characters are forced to exposit about how these unconvincing twists could actually have happened, which compounds the suggestion that this really could be a parody.

To be fair, Tarot isn't awful (we've all seen a lot worse), but the most terrifying thing about this would-be horror movie is its mediocrity.

Child's Play (2019)

Single-mum Karen Barclay (Parks and Recreation's Aubrey Plaza) works on the returns desk of ZedMart in Chicago, and brings home a faulty Buddi doll as an early birthday present for her deaf son Andy (Gabriel Bateman).

The Buddi doll is a robotic companion for children, capable of adapting to their owners, syncing with smart technology etc

Only this Buddi, which says it's name is Chucky (voiced by the legend that is Mark Hamill), has issues.

Once it has bonded with Andy, declaring him his new "bets friend", he becomes psychotically protective, taking punitive measures against anyone, or anything, that it feels has slighted Andy.

Written by Tyler Burton Smith and directed by Lars Klevberg, Child's Play is a brilliant, clever, reworking of the original Child's Play from 1988.

Voodoo possession has been replaced by the vengeance of a pissed engineer in a Vietnamese sweat shop/toy factory, and 2019's Child's Play has great fun with the modern penchant for "smart homes", integrated devices etc

Its resemblance to the original is purely superficial, and that's a great thing because this Child's Play is very much its own thing.

Andy even acquires his own, rather Stranger Things-like, gang of amusing and entertaining young friends, who both help and hinder him in his growing troubles with the overly possessive android (perhaps letting Chucky watch Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 wasn't the best call?).

As bodies start to drop in the neighbourhood, local police detective Mike Norris (Atlanta's Brian Tyree Henry), whose mum, Doreen (Carlease Burke) lives down the hall from Mike and Karen, gets involved.

Matters come to a head at a midnight launch for the Buddi 2 doll at ZedMart, when Mike thinks he has his culprit.

The climax of the movie is a gruesomely over-the-top splash of Grand Guignol, that skirts Saw-sensibilities to lean more into Evil Dead II (but without any supernatural involvement).

A heady blend of suspense, excitement, creative kills, dark humour and a top-notch cast, Child's Play is one of the strongest new mainstream horror flicks I've seen in ages.

While I love the whole voodoo shtick of the original Child's Play franchise, I think rooting the new movie firmly in the realm of modern technology was a stroke of genius.

Not only is there a tongue-in-cheek lesson here about society's rapid embrace of inter-connected technology, but the pathos Mark Hamill brings to Chucky makes the killer doll almost sympathetic.

He's just responding to societal stimuli to do what he thinks is right to look after his "best friend".

But he doesn't know any better. To paraphrase Brian Conley: "It's just a doll!"