NOTHING LEFT TO FEAR

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

Easily the weakest film of this year's FrightFest allnighter, this Slash-produced (and co-scored) religious horror nonsense was a subdued note on which to close. It wasn't terrible, it wasn't boring (it kept me awake even at six in the morning; it just wasn't particularly remarkable or unusual, and played like an entirely formulaic straight-to-disc B-movie with nothing to distinguish itself from the rest of the crowd on the rental shelves. Certainly it's well enough put together, and has some nicely unsettling moments, but overall it's just ordinary, anonymous and largely forgettable.

Pastor Dan Bramford, wife Wendy (James Tupper and Anne Heche, a couple in real life) and their children arrive in a small Kansas town where he's due to take over from the retiring minister (Clancy Brown). But it wouldn't be a horror movie if there wasn't something odd, something unnatural, would it? The townsfolk are too friendly (they even help the Bramfords move into their new home), their welcome cake has a tooth inside it, and an ancient evil is walking the streets....

Nothing Left To Fear might have suffered from being screened in a dawn timeslot, following the more grisly horrors of The Station and Mark Of The Devil, but even so it's still pretty lacklustre. And personally I'm as fed up with horror movies beginning with a family moving to a new town as I am with the ones that start with a van full of idiot teens: it's an opening we've seen too often already and the movie doesn't do anything new with it. It's a pity, but it just has the feel of another one of those generic horror movies, albeit with a few interesting ideas (the monster face is quite good), that you've never heard of but materialise unheralded at Blockbusters one Monday morning. Perfectly acceptably done, but it could and should have been more than that.

**