HALLOWEEN HORROR: The Witch (2015)

Robert Eggers' The Witch: A New England Folktale is a masterpiece of engrossing storytelling, a rare intelligent horror film that relies on character and atmosphere rather than cheap jump scares and excessive gore.

In New England of 1630, farmer William (gravelly-voiced Ralph Ineson) is exiled from his village for his particular interpretation of the Christian religion, and takes his family to live in an isolated farmstead on the edge of a creepy forest.

He and his wife, Katherine (Game Of Thrones' Kate Dickie), ban their children from going into the forest, telling them they must stay within the boundary of the farm.

One day, their teenage daughter Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy) is playing peek-a-boo with the family's newest arrival, baby Samuel (Axtun Henry Dube/Athan Conrad Dube) when the newborn suddenly disappears... and the family's real troubles begin.

William claims the child was taken by a wolf, but increasingly the family come to believe it was the work of witchcraft.

The Witch can be seen as a metaphor for the current problems in America, something unknown strikes at the heart of the devout family, then retreats back into the woods and watches the flames of paranoia engulf the insular community, occasionally fanning the fire from its hiding place in the trees.

Much of the horror, in fact, comes from the religious intolerance  at the core of the family's fundamental beliefs; in a very real sense they make their own fear by cultivating brutal ideas about eternal damnation, sins of the flesh etc that confuse and terrify the younger members of the family.

The family does more to tear itself apart than the overt actions of whatever is in the woods.

It is easy to see from this how such shocking events as the Salem Witch Trials could come about, with random (but ultimately explicable) events and misspoke words (taken at face value) ultimately leading to burning people at the stake.

As William's family try to move on from the loss of Samuel, good intentions turn to disasters. Then we find ourselves questioning the initial motivations of these deeds and we have to wonder how much of their situation arises from William's own pride and hypocrisy?

By no stretch of the imagination is The Witch a mainstream schlock horrorfest. If you thought The Boy was a slow-burner, then this is positively glacial by comparison (even though the first 'incident' happens within the opening ten minutes), but it all helps build the tension and draw you in.

So dismal is the family's world that much of the time it looks almost like a black and white movie - which makes the odd moments of red all the more striking and important - and the script's period dialogue gets a bit mumbly at times (although not approaching the near-comical levels of Tom Hardy's character in The Revenant), but there is no missing the intent of what is being said, even if the odd sentence eludes you.

The acting from all concerned is incredible, accentuating the sense of verisimilitude that makes the events all the more believable.

To really get the most out of The Witch, you need to close the curtains, turn out the lights, turn off all your mobile devices, and allow yourself to sink into the stark 17th Century setting, focusing on the unfolding drama on the screen rather than whatever drama is unfolding in the Twitterverse.

Overall, the film is more a well-researched historical drama and psychological thriller than a blockbuster horror flick.

With period folklore shaping the 'supernatural' elements of the story, The Witch is worthy to stand alongside The Wicker Man, Blood On Satan's Claw and, even, The Blair Witch Project with its understated, but unnerving, approach to the genre that is absent many modern horror tropes.

Now I love a good monster movie as much as the next man, but I do wish there were more subtle and smart horror films like The Witch being made to balance out the genre's offerings.

Venom - The Last Dance (2024)

Back from his brief sojourn on the MCU's Earth-616, Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) and his alien symbiote, Venom, find themselves pursued across America by both the military and extra-dimensional symbiote-hunting monsters called Xenophages.

The military want to study Venom in their underground base, concealed beneath Area 51 in the Nevada desert, while the monsters serve Knull (Andy Serkis, director of Venom: Let There Be Carnage), the god-like creator of the symbiotes.

With nebulous goals of universal suppression, Knull needs "the codex", part of Eddie and Venom's bond, to free himself from Klyntar, a space prison built for him by his rebellious symbiotes.

While on the run, Eddie meets up with a potentially-irritating family of hippies (Rhys Ifans is the alien-mad father, Martin Moon, and Alanna Ubach is his wife, Nova) whose aggravation quotient mellows as the story unfolds. Rather than being just amusing cameos, the Moon family ultimately prove pivotal in the film's third act.

Eddie eventually runs out of luck, is captured by General Rex Strickland (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and transported to the subterranean base, where Stephen Graham's presumed-dead Detective Patrick Mulligan is also being held.

But the Xenophages are still on Eddie's trail, leading to a final - grand scale - showdown at Area 51.

While the Venom trilogy peaked with its second chapter, The Last Dance has an easy-to-follow, straight-forward "chase-and-fight" plot that makes its 110-minute duration bounce along at an engaging pace.

Don't get me wrong, The Last Dance is a chaotic mess - full of extraneous, undeveloped characters - but it simultaneously manages to finely balance absolute silliness and existential cosmic horror.

The scenes featuring Knull look as though they were lifted direct from the comic book source material, and the fact that his menace is never fully realised only adds to the overwhelming sense of dread he exudes.

Although it seems certain that this film is the end of Tom Hardy/Eddie Brock's involvement with Venom, it does leave the door open for an MCU symbiote (just with a new host) and the potentially multiversal threat of Knull and his legions of Xenophages.

As dumb as it was, I actually really enjoyed Venom: The Last Dance, and was genuinely surprised by the main movie's downbeat ending.

There's (of course) a mid- and a post-credit scene, but neither really add much to the story (except to remind us that Knull still very much exists in the Sony'verse, and possibly leaving the door open for further adventures).

Until I discovered the movies, I was never really that interested in Venom as a comic book character, but it's been Tom Hardy's passion for the character and this trilogy that really sold me on it.

I'm not sure, as it stands, how bothered I'd be about future cinematic outings for the character if Tom Hardy wasn't playing the lead.

• Venom: The Last Dance is now available on Blu-Ray in the UK.

Venom - Let There Be Carnage (2021)

We first met serial killer Cletus Kasady (Woody Harrelson) in the mid-credit scene of 2018's Venom, but he steps into the spotlight for the sequel, Venom: Let There Be Carnage.

The imprisoned killer, now shorn of his fright wig hairdo from Venom, has a fascination with washed-up journalist Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy), little realising that Brock is host to the alien symbiote known as Venom.

However, Venom manages to unearth a clue in Kasady's cell that leads to the buried remains of many of his victims.

This development cements Kasady's fate and propels Brock's career back to its previous heights.

When Brock pays a final visit to Kasady in San Quentin, the killer manages to take a bite out of him... accidentally ingesting part of the alien symbiote.

Kasady's execution by lethal injection then stimulates the creature in his blood, transforming him into the brutal, tentacled monstrosity Carnage.

They break out of the prison in a grand set-piece of mass destruction and murder, and set about tracking down Kasady's childhood sweetheart, Frances, as part of a deal that would see them ultimately killing Carnage's "father", Venom.

Frances Barrison (Naomie Harris) is a mutant codenamed Shriek, with powerful sonic abilities, who is being held in a secret research facility, but Kasady makes short work of its defences and the couple slip away into the night.

However, the seeds of romantic disharmony are sown quite early on as symbiotes are extremely vulnerable to loud noises and so Carnage isn't at all impressed by his host's paramour.

Frances and Kasady immediately plan a wedding, which involves kidnapping police detective Mulligan (Stephen Graham), who cost Frances her eye during an earlier escape attempt, Eddie, and Venom.

To get to Eddie, the bad guys grab his former fiancée, Anne Weyling (Michelle Williams), who is now engaged to Dr Dan Lewis (Reid Scott).

Directed by Andy Serkis, from a script by Kelly Marcel and Tom Hardy, Venom: Let There Be Carnage tries to temper the potentially brutal reality of a character like Kasady bonding with an almost omnipotent creature like Carnage with a tsunami of screwball comedy antics and bizarre attempts at black humour.

In all honesty, it shouldn't work... but somehow it does, thanks in no small part of the hard-boiled charisma of Tom Hardy.

There are echoes of Woody Harrelson's earlier performance in the divisive Natural Born Killers in the romance between Kletus and Frances, but these characters, drawn with broad, pulpy, brushstrokes are nowhere near as well-developed as Mickey and Mallory Knox.

Upon first viewing the original Venom movie was a disaster, and yet there was something about it that drew me back to it on its home video release and I've not only found myself enjoying it more on repeat viewings, but have been drawn into the world of Venom in Marvel Comics as well.

This is something I never thought would happen, as the whole idea of a murderous anti-hero really turned me off the character.

But thanks to Tom Hardy's performance in that first movie and then Donny Cates's phenomenal run on the comics in recent years has really won be round to both the character and its potential... in the right hands.

An overview of the plot makes you realise that Venom: Let There Be Carnage is actually a surprisingly small, and contained, film with the antagonists only being free to sow chaos in the wider world for, seemingly, less than 24 hours.

There is no great hunt for Carnage and Shriek, as they tell Eddie where to find them soon after they've torched the abandoned reform school they were both held in as juvenile delinquents.

The grand finale in the cathedral where Kasady and Frances are getting married, is reminiscent of many similarly-staged climactic confrontations, from the Quatermass Experiment to 2003's Daredevil, but this has the added cachet of battling Lovecraftian abominations... and a surprise cameo by the League of Gentleman's Reece Shearsmith.

Talking of cameos, though, the biggest 'shock' and dollop of fanservice comes - once again - in the mid-credit scene, which sets up Venom's potential appearances going forward with a most exciting development.

This 'squee' moment is almost worth the price of admission alone.

Venom (2018)

Stretching the limits of my "only Marvel movies at the cinema" rule, I bought my ticket to Venom (on the strength of Tom Hardy) before the reviews started to appear.

Then I got a bit concerned, not that I give too much weight to professional critics' opinions as, generally, I don't see them as the target audience for superhero movies.

Therefore I am sadly disappointed to say they were right.

Venom is a dreadful film. Not so bad that I wished I wasn't there, but there's a language and structure to cinema - from Sharknado to Citizen Kane - that Venom just didn't seem to grasp.

Feeling like a throwback to the bad old days of superhero cinema - pre-MCU - it took an age to get going and then suddenly, almost without warning, was into its final act.

You catch yourself thinking: this seems like the climax of the movie, but surely it can't be the end yet? But it is.

The fault lays squarely at the feet of those behind the camera, from the writers (Jeff Pinkner, Scott Rosenberg, and Kelly Marcel) to the director (Ruben Fleischer), the editors, and - almost certainly - some suits at Sony who must have stuck their oar in at one point or another.

Since the first shockingly poor - Venom-free - trailer, it's been clear that things could be going seriously wrong with this film, but given the talent in front of the camera I had hopes that something might have been salvageable.

Even though his character is wildly inconsistent as the story unfolds, Tom Hardy is clearly enjoying himself as Eddie Brock, the investigative journalist, who becomes the unwilling host for the alien parasite known as Venom.

Thankfully, he isn't actually using his strange parody of Christopher Walken's voice that provides the voice-over in some of the trailers, but instead, for Hardy, is using a remarkably 'generic' (and easy to understand) American accent.

But nowhere is the crass stupidity of the script more evident than in Venom's sudden switch from a head-chomping monster to would-be saviour of the human race, with no convincing rhyme nor reason for the major change of heart.

Then again, internal logic is not this film's strong point (you have to love a conquering alien species that blurts out its fatal weaknesses when asked!), which is a shame because there are moments of great fun and even humour along the way (although you might find yourself thinking you've seen 90 per cent of them in the trailers).

Michelle Williams is rather wasted, phoning it in as Eddie's ex-girlfriend, who doesn't really contribute much to the story, except as Eddie's initial "in" to the corrupt world of businessman Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed).

It's Drake's attempts at private space exploration that discover a nest of alien symbiotes on a comet and bring them back to Earth.

Unfortunately, one escapes containment, causing the space shuttle to crash in Malaysia.

The free alien, Riot, then takes six months to work its way back to San Francisco, where its siblings are being held and experimented on by Drake. Arriving at exactly the right time for the story.

The simplistic plot culminates with Riot, on his own host, fighting Venom - a mass of black jelly entangled with a second mass of black jelly - as a new shuttle is about to be launched to retrieve a whole army of symbiotes to return for an all-you-can-eat buffet.

An unadulterated mess, Venom's never boring, and it's certainly action-packed and stupid fun all the way, it's just structurally the film doesn't hold up.

Venom, himself, is an impressively imposing monster, but not enough is done - especially for those not au fait with the source material - to differentiate the various symbiotes from each other or explain why Riot's ability to produce certain weapons was any different from everything that Venom could do.

More cheesy sci-fi than true superhero film, I traditionally have a problem with stories that promote murderous villains as the protagonists, but I was swayed by the prospect of seeing Tom Hardy do his thang in a comic book movie.

And, to be honest, it's his performance - as unconvincing as his character is written - that makes Venom worth seeing.

If you don't want to be spoiled, don't read on...

As is fashionable these days, the film has a brace of credit scenes.

The one mid-credit one is clearly setting up a potential sequel, and features a big name scenery-chewing cameo.

However, the post-credit scene is brazenly not even from the same movie, but an advert for another Sony film that could cheekily be taken as a possible hint that Venom is supposed to be set within the wider Spider-verse.

Given that Venom was originally a Spider-Man villain - and his appearance clearly apes that of the traditional Spider-costume - this was an audacious move.

* This review was based upon my first viewing of Venom, actually upon its release in the cinema.