Saltburn (2023)

We've seen this psychological thriller before, and in much, much better movies, but to cite the obvious inspiration constitutes a spoiler, so I'll just say, and leave you to guess, this is about a college misfit who gets noticed by a cool kid and ends up stepping up over Summer break into this hip cat's lifestyle of the rich and famous, with suspense ratcheting up as holiday's end nears and our misfit starts to feel his grip on this world and his new best-buddy friendship slip, but it is hard to engage when the story here is delivered not in the light of an Italian coastlime surrounded by European art and architecture but in a cartoony Dark Shadows colour palette, with only deeply repugnant characters, all bored - a laugh-free Addams Family - and with a crescendo of dismaying gothic flourishes that hardly seduce.

★☆☆☆☆

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28 Days Later (2002)

Even though the zombie action here is tried-and-true - an apparently lone survivor stumbles across other survivors, they argue about what to do, and eventually agree to seek out the source of radio-broadcast messages about a safe haven -  director Danny Boyle keeps things stylistically and visually fresh with rapid, rabid zombies - not the slow-moving hordes - and a gritty British rock aesthetic, right from the start, for example, pairing anti-establishment thrash with frenzied scenes of a virus breach at a research lab before cutting to a lengthy sequence of unnerving silence as Cillian Murphy wakes in a hospital in a completely deserted London.

★★★★☆

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Scream (2022)

I had to check with ChatGPT to find out at the halfway point whether, after all, this 'Scream' was a Scream episode I'd already seen, and when ChatGPT told me this particular one - informally known as Scream V - was made in 2022, features Melissa Barrera as Samantha Carpenter and Jenna Ortega as younger sister Tara and follows a thousand Woodsboro teens being hunted one by one by the masked killer Ghostface, with Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, and David Arquette reprising their legacy character roles as Sidney Prescott, Gale Weathers, and Dewey Riley, respectively, I was none the wiser - except to say I had definitely seen it all before.

★★☆☆☆

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The Relic (1997)

It starts like a tongue-in-cheek episode of Law & Order with Tom Sizemore's suited cop joining forces with Linda Hunt's museum director and Penelope Ann Miller's evolutionary biologist to investigate grisly urban deaths, and for as long as the investigation lasts, it is fun 90s horror nostalgia full of sassy lines and smirks, but the second half - once the hideous reptilian monster from South America is revealed - plays out in the near-total darkness of Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History's afterhours, and it doesn't matter how many times Penelope Ann Miller's biologist is able to find time to put her hair up and don glasses at a computer, the results of her scans of Brazilian leaf eggs - revealing a dizzying confluence of genetics, South American mythology, and something about hypothalami and DNA and a "Kothoga" - never help and merely drag out to overlong the shadowy goings-on.

★★☆☆☆

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Deep Rising (1998)

Imagine Die Hard banged together with Alien, without the sophistication, on a cruise liner at sea, with a cheesy Big Trouble In Little China sort of all-American goofball lead and BTILC-esque special effects, and you've got this zany cult classic, so bad it's fun, about a hijacked boat full of torpedoes, a cruise ship overrun with winding gnashing alien (?) creatures, some ghastly body horror, and if it sounds mad consider the rumors that the never-made sequel, Deep Rising 2, was to be set on Skull Island and feature King Kong, as if this original weren't already loopy enough!

★★★☆☆

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Wolf man (2025)

The poignant family drama at the start suggests something interesting will follow — perhaps the strong cast is getting you ready for creature chills and spills that mean something to the family psychology – and don't forget director Leigh Whannel did something interesting in 2020's The Invisible Man – except once Wolf Man's family retreats to a cabin in the woods, complete ennui devours the movie and the cast: there are scenes where the two leads literally stand opposite each other and appear not to know what they should do or day to continue the scene, and the whole movie amounts to one single tiresome werewolf-transition scene extrapolated to movie-length.

★☆☆☆☆

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Eyes Without A Face (Les Yeux sans visage) (1960)

It doesn't add up to anything terribly important, but Georges Janu's prefunctory 1960 horror is a visual pleasure and obvious inspiration for myriad horror movies to come - Vanilla Sky, Eyes Wide Shut, Halloween, Get Out, and The Silence of the Lambs are some of the horror movies I was reminded of watching many memorable scenes: a hard-to-watch face transplant, for example, and the haunting sight of a masked Ědith Scobe as Christiane picking her way through a mansion, its gardens, and dog kennels, like a bizarre marionette.

★★★★☆

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X (2022)

What makes this slasher unique is also, unfortunately, what makes it so tedious: it isn't until the last thirty minutes when grisly death starts being meted out in tried-and-true slasher style that the energy picks up and the heavy-handed exposition (that really only serves to longwindedly establish the lore of all slashers always) finally lets up; it hardly seems to matter (and in fact I didn't even realise until later when I read it) that actress Mia Goth plays both the villain and the heroine.

★★★☆☆

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八っ墓村 (Yatsuhaka-mura) ('Village of Eight Graves') (1977)

Author Seishi Yokomizo's convoluted mystery has thankfully been trimmed of several characters and the action streamlined in this ripper adaptation of his book, which connects sixteenth-century feudal events in Japan to a modern-day Japanese murder mystery in the village of Yatsuhakamura (Village of Eight Graves) and, though a mystery, it enthusiastically embraces horror — the body count is exorbitant, there's a chilling link to the real-life 1938 Tsuyama incident, and scenes of maniacal villains chasing victims through labyrinthine limestone caves amid ghastly 70s giallo stylings.

★★★★☆

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The Cursed (2021)

Like The VVitch, the attempt here is to elevate horror with history, so the first stretch of the movie involves gypsy encampments being razed by colonists in grey miserable scenes that depict real historical horrors, but then we are expected to care about a monster horror that in comparison is turgid and plodding, not half as interesting as the history.

 

★★☆☆☆

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Halloween Kills (2021)

A "kill" isn't over until the camera has come to rest on the blood pooling in the cavity left by, say, a fluorescent tube or a broken stairpost in this especially unedifying 2021 Halloween movie that starts up right where 2018's Halloween left off (Jamie Lee Curtis's Laurie Strode is being rushed to hospital believing herself to have killed Michael Myers for good) and ends some time later that same loooong Halloween night after the townfolk of Haddonfield form lynch mobs to hunt Michael Myers (still alive, afterall -- or, well, nevermind...) while Laurie literally does nothing - she gets up from her hospital bed just once, only to get straight back in again to spout some never-before-uttered dubious Michael Myers mythology and that's all.

.

★★☆☆☆

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A Quiet Place II (2020)

The start takes audiences back to "Day One" when the extremely sound-sensitive creatures first land on Earth, an arresting sequence that has debut director John Krasinski demonstrating Shyamalan-at-his-best flourishes, but long before the audience is satisfied with this backstory and before any point to it is established, the movie abruptly gives way to three concurrent story threads in the present, post-the original movie, in which three different characters simply walk heel-to-toe on three different sand tracks to three different destinations, hardly enthralling and full of directorial looseness, with the alien threat along these boring paths not much more worrying than if, say, you were hiking in an area inhabited by wild dogs (but wild dogs that, although certain to appear at each significant landmark, only turn up in ones or twos, never more, irrespective of how much noise you make).

★★☆☆☆

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Stir of Echoes (1999)

Released in the same year as The Sixth Sense, this paranormal thriller also has a cute-ish kid seeing dead people, but the focus of the plot is on Dad, following a more Amityville Horror-type of same-old trajectory in which the 'he' (Kevin Bacon) becomes increasingly erratic, subject to paranormality that renders him unable to maintain happy relationships with his wife and child - it's all very predictable but some effective sfx chills helps to overcome the stock-standardness.

★★★☆☆

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Zombeavers (2014)

Both words are stressed on the first syllable, making the portmanteau cumbersome — 'zɒmb(i)vəz and zɒm'bivəz are more natural, but the far more awkward 'zɒm'bi'vəz is probably correct — and a lexical horror that will gnaw at you as this low budget creature feature pretends to be meta but remains utterly derivative for its first two-thirds, setting up as disposable meat objects a threesome of scantily-clad sorority girls in a cabin in the woods, letting three revolting boys get their turn before the 'zɒm'bi'vəz are set upon them, leaving the surprisingly funny stuff — perhaps two or three intentionally ridiculous scenes of humans transforming into zɒm'bivəz and gnawing at trees to create roadblocks — for the far-too-little-too-late end.

★☆☆☆☆

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Piranha 3D (2010)

This is one of those 3D-enhanced creature features that pretends to pay tongue-in-cheek homage to its trashy roots when it fact it simply perpetuates the genre's crimes, stripping unrealistic women of their bikinis, having their naked forms ogled by frat boys and a Weinstein filmmaker type played by Jerry O'Connell, and then for their trouble they are referred to as "bitches" and eaten alive by person-eating fish.

★☆☆☆☆

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