LIST: MY BOTTOM FIVE OF 2024

So I was browsing through Twitter the other day and I saw that the critics from Variety have done a list of the worst films of the year. This had been screenshot and quote-tweeted by one Joe Russo (not the one who did the Avengers movies) with the words "STOP. MAKING. WORST. MOVIE. LISTS.". (His allcaps and punctuation.) My response was "Why should we?" - a genuine question that elicited no coherent answer. Because there isn't one. Why shouldn't we list the worst films we've seen or the films we've liked the least? If it's perfectly acceptable to list the great ones, it's equally acceptable to point out the stinkers.

Listen: I've paid money to see all these movies. Either cash on the door, on my (soon to be abandoned) Cineworld All-You-Can-Eat card, through-the-post DVD rentals, or via streaming subscriptions. I'm not a critic or a broadcaster, I'm not a professional reviewer. I'm a paying customer. And like anyone who's gone on holiday and had a lousy time, like anyone who's bought a laptop or a PlayStation or a tin opener and it doesn't work, I have also paid for the right to say so. You don't want your movies ending up on people's Worst List? Stop making movies that deserve to be there.

As usual, my reference point is the Film Distributors Association website. And as usual, I probably dodged most of the bullets, particularly the endless superhero ones which, after the headbanging tedium of The Flash in 2023, I have given up on. I obviously avoided a lot of the films that clearly held no appeal for me (such as Transformers One or Harold And The Purple Crayon, because I'm neither a masochist nor a moron. Still, I did get hit by some fairly hefty artillery, and these were the most painful.

5. SOMETHING IN THE WATER

Yet another terrible shark movie, this time targeting a bunch of young women on a hen do in the Caribbean somewhere. Described by the director as Jaws Meets Bridesmaids, it begins with a brutal act of homophobic violence before dumping them all in the water to shout and squeal at each other while Sharky cruises around and chomps on them far too slowly. (This year also gave us a much better shark movie: Under Paris, but that went straight to streaming.)

4. HUNT HER, KILL HER / WINNIE-THE-POOH: BLOOD AND HONEY II

To be honest you can take your pick from the insultingly high number of bad horror movies this year: not just disappointments, but out-and-out rubbish. Baghead, Tarot, Night Swim, Imaginary and The Exorcism were all thoroughly tiresome (frequently taking place in near to total darkness which doesn't make for scary cinema, it makes for radio). In the end I've cheated slightly and gone for a tie: Hunt Her Kill Her is a deeply unpleasant movie in which a bunch of misogynist arsebags terrorise a woman working a night shift in a factory, while the second Winnie-The-Pooh slasher movie is a wretched splatter bore that, again, only exists because of copyright expiry. Both were garbage and frankly expressing a preference between them is like choosing which dog turd you'd rather step in.

3. GODZILLA X KONG: THE NEW EMPIRE

Staggeringly tedious and ridiculously expensive monster movie in which nothing makes sense, the numerous monster fights are CGId into pixelgasm oblivion, and the ever grander scenes of destruction and cities being stomped, nuked or otherwise destroyed become insanely boring given that no interest has been generated by any of the human beings relegated to the sidelines. (The year started with Godzilla Minus One and that was immeasurably superior because enough time was spent with the characters to make you care.) It's utter, utter rubbish.

2. GHOSTBUSTERS: FROZEN EMPIRE

Incredibly, that new Godzilla movie somehow wasn't the year's worst sequel beginning with G that had the word Empire in the title. This is a perfect example of a studio desperately flogging their "intellectual property" one more time because they have no other ideas: nothing original, nothing new, nothing innovative, just that thing we liked forty years ago even though, deep down, we know that it wasn't any more than perfectly fine. Two whole generations later: it's not remotely funny, the original stars are far too old and the new ones aren't interesting. Let it go.

1. TERRIFIER 3

Was there any doubt? I hated and detested this garbage more than any movie for quite some years and it's one of the few movies that I wish I hadn't bothered with: it's the kind of film that gives the horror genre a bad name. Twice I was tempted to walk out and I really should have. It's got absolutely nothing but gore and splatter, blood and carnage, dismemberment and slaughter. There's no wit, no character, no style and no emotion: just a succession of kill scenes showcasing the practical FX work. Mean-spirited, wilfully offensive and boring as hell, it comes across as the work of an overexcited 14-year-old boy who's just discovered Troma and couldn't tell a story to save his life. And while I don't generally single out directors, in this case I have to. Damien: grow up.

Disappointments abounded this year, including Longlegs, Poor Things and Argylle, plus unnecessary sequels Furiosa, Smile 2 and Twisters that didn't live up to their origins.

LIST: MY TOP FIVE OF 2024

I know there's still a whole week or so to go, but I'm not going to get any more of this year's films seen so why wait?

Of this year's UK cinema releases (as listed on the Film Distributors Association website), I've only managed to see 67. That doesn't sound a lot, granted, but it's still more than one a week and it doesn't count the numerous movies at FrightFest that don't appear on the official FDA lists. It does, however, include a number of titles which I saw on DVD or streaming, either because they disappeared from the circuits very quickly or they never screened anywhere near me. Pre-COVID I was seeing around twice as many new films as since, (in 2017 my score was 162!) so I'm guessing it's a combination of different releasing patterns favouring streaming rather than physical media, a tendency towards massive blockbusters which hog too many of the available screens for too long, and increased personal apathy towards a filmic menu that simply isn't aimed at me any more (the superhero parade in particular appears to be petering out a little, and not a decade before time). All this, combined with the closure of one of my two local plexes and the imminent closure of a very nice 9-screener in Northampton next month, rather suggests that my numbers are never going to reach 120+ again. C'est la vie.

So, having scanned the list of the films I did decide to see, these are my Top Five of 2025.

5. LISA FRANKENSTEIN

In truth there were quite a few possibles for fifth place, including one (Abigail) which also starred Kathryn Newton. I ultimately went with this one because it was just a really nice, sweet, charming and funny little horror comedy that benefitted in part from not having been hyped months in advance: it just turned up out of nowhere one week. Sometimes these things work better as a surprise and I went into this knowing absolutely nothing about it: absolutely worth the chance that these days I'm increasingly reluctant to take.

4. CIVIL WAR

A very near future America divided to the point of all-out war? That's precisely the dystopian vision we need right now. But it's persuasively done, gripping throughout, and quite unsettling in the idea that some ordinary people are just gagging for a green light to take up arms in a meaningless conflict, and the ease with which thise regular Joes could become stone cold killers. I liked it a lot.

3. CONCLAVE

A ripe political drama set against the ritual and rite of choosing a new Pope, as well as a string of fun mysteries with Ralph Fiennes essentially playing Cardinal Poirot uncovering the financial and sexual secrets of his peers (including the always welcome John Lithgow and Stanley Tucci) as they manouevre themselves for the top job. And it's a visual joy with many scenes framed and lit like Old Masters. More of this sort of grown-up fare, please.

2. ALIEN: ROMULUS

If we are going to have more and more followups to movies made decades ago, at least spend some money on them and make them look good. Yes, there are a couple of nostalgia callbacks which make absolutely no narrative sense and should have been excised during the rewrite stage. But it has brilliantly captured the look of the earlier movies (specifically the first two) and I enjoyed it far more than I was expecting, a better and more exciting entry in the Alien series than Covenant was, and also better than Fede Alvarez' take on The Evil Dead. Terrific stuff.

1. THE SUBSTANCE

There wasn't any doubt that this was going to place very high on my list when it practically took the roof off the Odeon as the closing film at this year's FrightFest. Exceptionally graphic in its latter stages, it's a geniunely bonkers melding of Society, The Fly, Death Becomes Her and Carrie, but there's a point to it: fear of looking old and not being seen as sexually viable. For women, of course: male stars can look like Piltdown Man but female stars still have to look like cheerleaders or they're deemed past it. And special kudos to Mubi for getting it out on the national circuits, despite the jawdropping bloodsoaked finale not being your usual mutiplex fare.

Honorable mentions: The Beekeeper (Jason Statham's best movie for some time), Immaculate (better than The First Omen), Heretic, Hundreds Of Beavers, Blink Twice, Borderlands (shut up, I liked it), Blink Twice, Megalopolis, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.

TERMINUS

CONTAINS SPOILERS?

Actually it would help if there were spoilers, because then there'd be some indication as to what the hell is going on in this mostly drab mid-1980s Franco-German future dystopia. Sometime in the future (2037, according to the IMDb trivia), Karen Allen is driving a huge truck across some wastelands: if she reaches the End Of The Line, she'll win her weight in gold. Meanwhile the gamesmaster, a 10-year-old genius, is reprogramming her onboard computer for reasons that are no more adequately explained than why that computer is a mechanically animated mouth called Monster, or why it's been given a jive voice.

Allen disappears from the action fairly early and is replaced by French pop star Johnny Halliday as a man with one arm called Stump. (I don't know what his other arm is called.) Stump takes over the truck accompanied by a small child who's escaping slavery. However, the evil mastermind behind it all (Jurgen Prochnow) has decided to close the operation down and sets another big truck against Stump. This has the power of invisibility and is driven by another Jurgen Prochnow. (Both Prochnow characters answer to a superboss known only as Sir, who is also played by Jurgen Prochnow, again for absolutely no reason, but this time he's wearing a silly wig.)

It's possible that all the mysteries of Terminus are answered in the original French version which ran more than half an hour longer than this 82-minute edit that's lurking in the murky depths of Amazon Prime. Maybe that will explain why Prochnow plays three roles, exactly why Stump lost his arm and why there don't appear to be any other contestants in the game. But that would depend on your tolerance for glum, and whether you're motivated to find out why Prochnow II's truck has a bunch of animatronic children in the back. Terminus is not quite awful enough to be a one-star disaster, but it's a close call: most of the film is pretty terrible and almost entirely uninteresting and the short version was way more than enough.

**

TERRIFIER 3: MORE THOUGHTS

So I definitely appear to be in the minority on this one. Everyone seems to be going out of their way to express their deepest and most abiding love for Terrifier 3 and Art The Clown, and I seem to be one of the very, very few that care for neither. Well, that's fine: we can't all like (or hate) everything and there's nothing essentially wrong with wildly different subjective responses to a movie.

I haven't been back to see the film: I thought it was tedious, childish garbage, easily the worst film of the year and quite possibly the decade and I'm absolutely not putting myself through that again. Indeed, the more I think about it the more it bothers me: not just the pointless callousness, the sadistic brutality and the wanton wallowing in gory excess, but the joy with which it's been received. How come I didn't get it? How come I emerged from the cinema not just bored out of my mind but actively offended? Does the film count as actually evil? Hard to say, honestly, but I think it's interesting that the auteur's name is Damien.

But there were two particular arguments made on social media in Terrifier 3's favour that I frankly don't understand. The first is the defence of Art The Clown's odious murder of young children, which for most of the Great Horror Icons is never part of their routines. Now I'm no horror newcomer: I've been watching splatter and gore movies since the 1980s and very, very rarely have I been tempted to bail on the grounds of grotesque bad taste; the only times I have abandoned the film have mostly been projection problems and only once have I upped and walked solely because the film was just unwatchable rubbish. Admittedly DVDs and streams have a lower tolerance threshold and they will get switched off if they're plain bad movies. But the specific moments at which I seriously questioned whether I could just go home now, were the two moments when Art casually murdered small children. And they are children, rather than the countless teens in slasher movies, from Scream to Friday The 13th to A Nightmare On Elm Street. Yes, technically at least some of those are indeed "kids", but those in Terrifier 3 are single-digit-aged, going to the Mall with Mummy to see Santa, and getting blown up by a parcel bomb.

Those defending this particular line being crossed have not only cited numerous other movies in which kids have been killed, but pointed out that yes, Art is evil and horror is all about crossing the lines, and kudos to Damien Leone for vaulting over that particular line, for smashing that particular taboo. And it's true that kids get killed in horror movies all the time - plenty in Stephen King alone, from Pet Sematary and Children Of The Corn to It and Salem's Lot. But usually there's some kind of a reason rather than merely the villain's enjoyment of it. Conal Cochrane in Halloween 3 isn't planning to slaughter countless thousands of children just for the lols: he has some nonsensical plan to sacrifice them because of his old Oirish paganism. The shark in Jaws does eat Alex Kintner, but it's a shark. (It also eats the dog.) The death in Hereditary is an accident caused in part by a drug-addled driver. And so on. In Die Hard With A Vengeance, Jeremy Irons' villain is threatening to blow up a school, but the bomb is actually a fake: "Of course not, I'm...not a monster." Whilst in Die Hard 2, William Sadler's villain crashes a jet full of innocent passengers (including children) merely to teach John McClane a lesson in that otherwise ridiculously enjoyable film's only real misstep.

I found it curious that the two instances of pedicide in Terrifier 3 mirrored the exact moment I first felt that urge to wave the white flag: watching Hobo With A Shotgun, specifically when the villain's goons board a school bus and kill all the children with a flamethrower. In Terrifier 3, Art leaves a parcel bomb in Santa's Grotto. Where's the joke in that? Where's the humour? Why is that so "funny"? What is it that makes Art such a supposedly colourful and attractive character, when he's slaughtering primary schoolers for his own personal amusement and nothing else? It's the gloating sadism that makes me uncomfortable: Art The Clown and Damien Leone both know exactly what they're doing and are enjoying it, perhaps a little too much. In the same way that those venerable old video nasties The House On The Edge Of The Park, Last House On The Left and I Spit On Your Grave seem to be enjoying their sexual violence rather more than they should, and are expecting the audience to enjoy it as well.

The second argument in Terrifier 3's supposed favour is that it's raking in an absolute shedload at the box-office: internationally it's taken more than $60m and counting on a $2m budget. It's the highest grossing Unrated movie of all time, it knocked Joker: Folie A Deux off the top of the charts. Well, that may well be true - in fact I don't doubt it for a second - but obviously something was going to displace Joker 2: it wasn't going to sit there forever. Terrifier 3 is currently at #7 in the US (and no longer placing at all in the UK), knocked down the rankings by Smile 2 and the new Venom movie and Conclave the following week. More importantly: just because it's reached the top of the charts doesn't mean it's any good. The Exorcist: Believer reached #1 at the US box office. Tenet reached #1. All three of the Fifty Shades movies reached #1. Hell, even The Flash and Indiana Jones 5, two of last year's worst films, reached #1. Conversely, untold hundreds of great movies have failed to reach #1, or even chart. There's absolutely no correlation between box-office and quality.

And why should we give a damn about the numbers anyway? We're not accountants, we're not studio bean counters. Furthermore, this idea that Terrifier 3's financial success is indicative of horror's lucrative potential is entirely redundant given that horror is pretty much the only reliable genre there is. Look, the horror audience will almost always turn out: the films are pretty much critic-proof, and they don't cost $200 million plus the way that Marvel and DC films seem to (and to far less return on the investment). A low-budget slasher movie is a much better risk than an expensive superhero epic: how the major studios don't go bust spending such ridiculous amounts of money, when there simply aren't enough people in the world to put their films into profit, is beyond me.

But hey, I'm not an accountant or a studio bean counter. I'm a customer and consumer, a longtime aficionado of the genre, from slashers to hauntings to aliens to mad scientists to the remorseless undead, from social relevance to scattered entrails. I'm absolutely not averse to paint-the-room-red gore. But in this particular instance I'm not just deeply uncomfortable, but baffled as to Terrifier 3's appeal and applause. And whilst I felt it unlikely after the appalling Terrifier 2 that I'd bother with this third one, it's now an absolute certainty that I'll never sit through any more of these wretched films.

TERRIFIER 3

CONTAINS SPOILERS

Well, I've only myself to blame. I did wonder, when I saw Terrifier 2 a couple of years ago, whether I'd bother with a third instalment in a series that started very unremarkably and plummeted immediately into the lowest kind of loathsome, noxious sludge. It seemed unlikely that the series would immediately improve to the point where it suddenly became quality horror and its bogeyman figure Art The Clown would attain the status of bona fide slasher icon, up there at the top table with Michael and Jason and Leatherface. Yet even with the lowest of expectations, I was unprepared for just what a miserable, joyless and utterly boring experience this film turned out to be. On at least two occasions I was tempted to walk out because this is easily one of the worst, most despicable horror movies I've seen in years, if not decades. If there is such a thing as the pornography of violence then Terrifier 3 is probably as close as you'll get. 

The synopsis of this mindless, infantile drivel is basically: Art The Clown turns up yet again and butchers a bunch of people. He seems to be targeting Sienna (Lauren LaVera) from the first two movies, but will happily also hack to pieces pretty much anyone who turns up. Sienna has been in a psychiatric hospital since Terrifier 2 and is now released to extended family; meanwhile the reborn Art has sat in a chair for five years until a couple of demolition guys turn up to knock his hideout down. Then it's carnage galore: it's Christmas so Art dresses up as Santa... and butchers a bunch of people.

The trouble with Terrifier 3 is exactly the same as with Terrifier 2: it doesn't know when to stop. That's because Damien Leone, the auteur responsible for this utter garbage, doesn't know either. He's not even aware that there is actually a line in the sand, or that the line might be there for a good reason. Art's first victim here is a boy of about nine, hacked to death with an axe for absolutely no narrative reason at all. (The actual killing happens off camera, but the bloody mutilated corpse is presented for us all to enjoy, hahaha, pass the popcorn.) And midway through the film is a scene in which Art The Clown leaves a parcel bomb in a shopping centre Santa's Grotto to be opened by a small child. It's a cheap, tawdry shock moment that's only there for a sick laugh: if this is a joke, it's an Arthur Fleck joke. Even Leone is surely aware at this point of that line being crossed as one character reacts to the news coverage: "was it a terrorist incident?". To which the answer is actually yes, it was, and Art The Clown is actually a figure that should be dealt with by the FBI, SWAT teams, the Secret Service and Chuck Norris, and not a traumatised teenage mental patient with a magic sword.

The result is a film that wallows in its bloodshed and slaughter, that rejoices in the carnage and dismemberment, because that's all it knows how to do and that's all it wants to do. It doesn't have a charismatic villain: Art The Clown is a boring zero of a wannabe slasher icon: just pure unreasoning evil. In Halloween, Dr Loomis suggets that what was living behind Michael Myers' eyes was pure evil, but, as Kim Newman observes in Nightmare Movies (an essential tome, by the way), Myers "seems to enjoy scaring people more than killing them." Art is not interested in scaring people, merely killing them as bloodily and viciously as possible. Nothing Art ever does is remotely funny: granted, nothing Jason and Michael do are particularly funny either but the crucial difference is they're not supposed to be (let's ignore the fact that clowns aren't funny anyway). Art is enjoying himself far too much with the random killings and if we're supposed to be joining in the fun, we need some semblance of a reason. All the other horror icons of that pantheon, that Art so desperately and pathetically wants to join, have just enough story to make them scary - hell, just a few sentences - but (at least in their earlier episodes) not enough story to diminish them. Art has nothing, and is nothing.

So why do it? Leone must surely know that he can't actually make a good film, nor even a half-decent one, but what he can do is pile up the blood and entrails. He doesn't give a damn about character, about nuance, about storytelling: all he's interested in is getting to the next brutal overkill as quickly as possible and then gloating over it. Because that's all he's got. Like the previous instalment, this exists purely as a showcase for the prosthetics and make-up work and yes, that's a very impressive rendering of a guy being rectally chainsawed. But making the bloodiest slasher movie is like shooting the most explicit porn film, or playing the longest jazz accordian solo. These just aren't records anyone's really interested in breaking any more. Leone seems unaware that the highlights of the horror genre do not, as a rule, dwell on the splat for reels at a time: Halloween and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre operate on almost Merchant Ivory levels of bloodshed, and are acknowledged classics.

The great gore movies use their gore for a reason, to make a social comment or a satirical point, but they never use it for wanton cruelty and heartless sadism the way Terrifier 3 does. Merely emptying the steaming offal bucket over the audience does not make a horror classic, but empty schlock rubbish of the Olaf Ittenbach and Andreas Schnaas ilk. This is not a film from a Romero or a Carpenter or a Hooper or a Cronenberg or a Craven, it's a film from the mind of a fourteen-year-old boy who's spent too long under the bedcovers with the dregs of Troma Films and has no conception of the word "Enough", and he really, really needs to grow up. Terrifier 3 ends as a setup for Terrifier 4, and while I wondered whether I would come back for this instalment, I can guarantee that I won't be there for the next. Unlike Damien Leone, I've got better things to do with my time.

*

Further thoughts on Terrifier 3 here:

JOKER: FOLIE A DEUX

CONTAINS SOME MAJOR SPOILERS AND A LITTLE SADNESS

Maybe in hindsight it's hardly surprising that the new Joker movie didn't exactly wow me. Firstly, I wasn't a huge fan of the first one: it seemed to be as deliberately offputting as possible, a film that set out solely to make the viewer (and specifically me) uncomfortable and uneasy. Secondly, I have largely given up on Marvel and DC comicbook movies anyway on the grounds that I'm just fed up with them (The Flash still remains the only film I can think that's killed an entire subgenre stone dead for me). And I was largely right in my preconceptions: while I remain ambivalent about Joker I'm absolutely not so both-sides about Joker: Folie A Deux, a film that annoyed me far more than it entertained me, and a film which didn't do anything I might have liked but did a whole lot of things I definitely didn't. The main one of those is that it's a musical, one my my very least favourite genres: there are maybe five musicals that I can actually take and this absolutely is not one of them. 

We are back in the miserable world of hopeless standup Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix), in the midst of being assessed for competency to stand trial for the five (or six) murders Fleck/Joker committed in the first film. Is he sane enough to face the death penalty or is he unfit to plead, sending him to proper psychiatric care? In a music therapy group he meets and connects with Lee Quinzel (Lady Gaga), who's obviously some version of Harley Quinn - but is she connecting with him or Joker? Is it actual love, or just the obsession of a superfan? Even as the trial proceeds (with Harvey Dent as prosecutor, lest we forget this is a Batman spinoff), the chanting mob gathers outside...

Much of Joker: Folie A Deux is a prison drama and courtroom drama, but interspersed with stylised song and dance numbers taking place within Fleck's mind. Personally I found this distracting and with a running time of 138 minutes I could have cheerfully lost them, especially since there seem to be so many of them. (There were three points at which I almost said out loud "Oh, no, they're going to sing again, aren't they?" And they did!) And for a reported budget of $190 million plus: where's there big screen spectacle? A dialogue heavy film taking place in two main interior locations, and with no huge setpieces or endless CGI overkill, really should cost half that much at most. Worse: for any of us who might have actually been invested in Fleck's story and character, and who had given them 260 minutes over two films, the ending will feel like a swindle. Still, at least it rules out Joker 3...

Is it at least better than Joker? I'm not sure that it even clears that fairly modest bar. The first one was obviously trying to do something different with the whole DC/Batman mythos, but neither the Joker nor the perpetually downtrodden Fleck were particularly enjoyable company and to be honest it's the same here. It's hopelessly grim throughout (Hildur Gudnadottir gives us yet another glum cello-led score that's not going on any of my playlists), devoid of joy and lightness - why so serious? Frankly it's small wonder Fleck keeps escaping into showtune fantasias. That's obviously the point, but if you want to smuggle in an Author's Message about mental illness and insanity pleas then maybe this isn't the right vehicle for it.

As for the sadness: this was the last film at the Bedford Cineworld which closed Sunday night after thirty-three years. Since New Year's Eve 1990 I've seen precisely 1,037 films in that sixplex and it's a shame it's closing. Obviously I had to be there for the last house, whatever they were showing. But it's also a shame that they bowed out on such a whatever of a film: underwhelming, far too long, occasionally unbelievable, riddled with annoying songs and with a sour ending even for the sourest of characters. Though I liked the visual palette of the film, and I'm not about to deny the performances, it never wowed me, it never came to life and, even though one of the characters actually sets light to the building, it never catches fire. Maybe the joke's on me, maybe it's on all of us. But no-one's laughing.

**

MEGALOPOLIS

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

Well, it's a failure: a frequently ludicrous spectacular that has more going on in its excessive length and scope than any mainstream studio release this year, or indeed from the last few years. It's an allegorical fable that seeks to draw parallels (not necessarily subtly: some are less drawing parallels and more screaming "Do You Get It???" into your face through a luminous bullhorn) between the fall of the Roman Empire and the decline of the modern/future America, but there's also a pleasing parallel between the smaller story of a man determined to build his Megalopolis City Of The Future at whatever cost, his way, and Francis Ford Coppola's 40-year determination to make his beloved Megalopolis movie, at whatever cost, his way. Because that's what Coppola's done: sold his wineries and put up all the $120 million himself rather than compromise his vision for the moneymen. He is the moneyman: his dime, his rules, there is no-one standing behind him with a big stick telling him to stop it. And frankly I'd like this to happen a lot more: for films to be made by filmmakers with a need to tell stories rather than accountants with a need for a new Porsche.

Adam Driver is Cesar Catalina, chairman of the Design Authority of New Rome, trying to build his dream city from this revolutionary new material he's either discovered or invented called Megalon. He's fiercely opposed by the corrupt and unpopular Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) who just wants to build a casino there; his banker is Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight), his mistress is TV presenter Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), and his new-found muse is the relatively normal-named Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), who just happens to be Cicero's daughter. Oh, and he has a superpower for some reason.

So it's part The Fountainhead, part Caligula (only without all the humping). Much of it is actually pretty interesting and enjoyable, though there are times when Coppola feels the need to chuck in weird and surreal visual touches, like he did with his Dracula but he absolutely didn't do with The Godfather. (One of those is a great film, one of them isn't, and you know which is which.) The political machinations should be the most interesting thing, but sadly some of the dialogue is howling at the moon terrible, plot threads which should be seismic are resolved quickly and simply abandoned (Cesar is involved in a fake sex tape; ten minutes later it's forgotten), and Cesar himself isn't a sufficiently engaging character to make us care very much. Even a brilliantly timed shock moment doesn't really have any impact.

There's no question that it's a mess. Yet it's constantly fascinating, occasionally baffling, frequently barking mad and genuinely unique. And it's only out there at all because of the way FFC has done it: if he'd kept his wineries and let Netflix dictate terms for a limited series it would have just disappeared into the vague noise of a thousand other streaming shows. In the end, Megalopolis might be remembered more as a colossal financial and critical flop, or one crazy old man's last roll of the dice, rather than for its own merits. And it's a lot better than Twixt or Youth Without Youth. (I've never seen Jack: should I?) Some have said Megalopolis is one of the worst movies they've ever seen: all I can say is that they need to see more films because this isn't the worst movie I've seen this week. By a long shot.

***

HUNT KER KILL HER

CONTAINS SPOILERS

Tedious, arguably misogynistic drivel in which a young woman is chased round a factory by homicidal maniacs for no reason other than what might charitably be described as a study of toxic masculinity, and less charitably as brutal, knuckleheaded entertainment for lowlifes and sadists, suggesting that we really haven't moved on since the despicable likes of I Spit On Your Grave. "Women in peril" has been a staple of cinema for over a century but rarely has it been as crass, thuddingly nasty and devoid of entertainment value as it is here. If this had come out forty years ago it would have been straight on the banned list before you could say Deodato. Now it's somehow escaped with a 15 certificate. That's progress, I suppose.

Halfway through divorce proceedings and with an unwell child, young mother Karen (Natalie Terrazzino) takes a job as a night cleaner at a local factory. But on her first shift she is menaced by masked intruders intent on killing her. Why? Because one of them is her violent wifebeating ex and the others are his equally violent (and incredibly stupid) buddies out to murder her so he can get custody back. Extended scenes of run, hide and fight ensue: mostly shot in semi-darkness at best and none of them having any real impact.

You could wonder why his dumbass buddies continue to chase her after she starts fighting back and killing them - indeed you could wonder why they showed up at all as accessories to murder - and you could wonder how the hell the dumbass ex-husband thinks he's not going to be a suspect given that he's already murdered someone else. While we're at it, why didn't these idiots just bring a bunch of shotguns? Finally, you might ask why anyone thought this tiresome, thicko macho garbage was any kind of good idea: it's not as if there's anything more to their persecution than "kill the bitch". Of course she's the Final Girl, but she's the Only Girl. She's going to win out at the end, but she has to go through Hell to get there and the balance between them is off: there's too much victimisation and nowhere near enough vengeance.

Hunt Her Kill Her (there's no comma in there) is honestly a chore. Story and character this thin and shallow and simple-minded means you don't have to think about them, but there's nothing else in there to think about, so all that's left is chasing and fighting and none of that's remotely interesting here. Coralie Fargeut's Revenge, as an example, was done with energy any vitality and style, but there's nothing like that here: it's just nasty and unpleasant, like its male characters. And also like its male characters, I hated the time spent on it and was glad when it was finished with.

*

WINNIE THE POOH: BLOOD AND HONEY II

CONTAINS MILD SPOILERS

The atrocity continues. Not content with making a sleazy and senseless splatter movie out of (supposedly) beloved childrens' characters purely because the copyright had expired, they've done it again: gorier, stupider, nastier and, for all the increased body count and upfront flesh-ripping, far duller. Reimagining Pooh, Tigger, Owl etc as homicidal maniacs dismembering pretty young idiots is a one-joke idea that would make for a semi-decent post-watershed sketch on Comic Relief, but not a full feature film and sure as hell not an ongoing saga that looks to be leading to a cinematic Poohniverse.

Christopher Robin (a different actor, but no less punchable) is now in therapy, not just for the massacre from the first film but also the childhood disappearance of his younger brother. He and his family are still hounded and blamed for the events of the first film: a succession of bellends keep wandering into the killing grounds of Hundred Acre Wood and getting ripped to pieces, and a bunch of local teens are planning a massive rave. But then Christopher's therapy uncovers a lost memory of his brother's abduction, ultimately leading to the horrifying truth about those creatures in the wood...

Obviously Winnie The Pooh: Blood And Honey II is utterly terrible. Whether it's better or worse than the first one is like asking whether Alsatians or Golden Retrievers produce the turds you'd least like to step in. Mean-spirited, with dozens of teens wheeled on merely to be slaughtered, and indifferently staged outside of the splatter highlights, it boasts an appearance by Simon Callow for no obvious reason, a search engine called Milne, occasional narration from the kind of voice that normally recommends Mr Kipling's Almond Slices, and a hilarious instance of Chekhov's Dishwasher. Fans of decapitations and wanton bloodshed might get a few laughs out of it, but really it's just poo(h).

*

PANDEMONIUM

AVEC LES SPOILIERES

The first 25 minutes of this French afterlife horror are brilliant: a dialogue on a snowy mountain road between Nathan and Daniel: two men realising they've both been killed in a car accident and that they're suddenly ghosts. What to do now? Are they stuck at the crash site for eternity? Or will they be guided into an afterlife? Heaven or Hell? What a crying shame that Pandemonium immediately nosedives into two thoroughly uninteresting stories of death, a surprise nod to Lucio Fulci and a genuinely bleak view of what comes post-bucket kicking.

While Daniel walks reluctantly through the (definitely not pearly) gateway and is never seen again, Nathan follows and finds himself in the last scene of The Beyond: a desolate corpse-strewn wasteland. And he discovers he can experience the crimes and cruelties that led those people there. One is a child who murdered her family, one is a woman who ignored her daughter's schoolyard persecutions. And then he finds the true meaning of hell and the punishment for his own crimes...

It's not as if either of the two illustrative stories had some kind of ghoulish twist in the tale a la Creepshow. You just watch these extended vignettes thinking there must be more to them that this - but there isn't. But it's not as if either of them had any bearing on Nathan's own story or there are any lessons to be learned because the film's own take on the afterlife is eternal suffering and despair regardless of earthly conduct (even though that explicitly doesn't happen at the start, although this is Hell and the demons might be lying), which makes no sense at all. And the final coda is completely out of nowhere and makes even less sense.

Some would argue that ghost stories are optimistic: they suggest life after death, that (as Stanley Kubrick said) oblivion is not the end. This depiction of What Happens Next emphatically is not optimistic: eternal, meaningless punishment without purpose or reason. Thanks for sharing your vision, Quarxx (whose real name is the far more normal Alexandre Claudin, apparently). Sadly, the intriguing promise of the first half hour is completely lost and the result is a film which got steadily more annoyed and irritated with, to the extent that I only just managed to resist the temptation to switch it off.

*

THE CROW

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

And the big question is.... why? Why bother doing another Crow movie? And. more specifically, why bother doing another Crow movie when you're not going to do anything that remarkable or massively innovative with it? What's the point? Surely there are plenty of other comic book stories - even ones in a similar vein - that haven't been tackled once yet, let alone four times? Ah, who cares, there must still be some money left in this IP, let's drag it out again and flog some more coins out of it.

Beyond a couple of character names and the basic thrust of avian-aided revenge from beyond the grave, this incarnation of The Crow doesn't appear to have much to do with the 1994 version, a film rendered uncomfortable due to the on-set death of Brandon Lee (leading the makers to finish the film with doubles and CGI). Eric (Bill Skarsgard) and his girlfriend Shelly (FKA Twigs) are still murdered, but this time it's because Shelly has an incriminating video of gangster Roeg (Danny Huston); because of Shelly's sins she's doomed to Hell, but Eric can only save her soul if he returns from Purgatory and kills Roeg and his associates...

It's okay. Save for the fact that it's one of those very rare occasions when someone from Blake's Seven turns up (Josette Simon), it's nothing remarkable, it's nothing innovative, it's nothing special. But who goes to the cinema for unremarkable? Yes, it's got enough blood and violence to get an 18 certificate (still a rarity these days): the sequence in which Eric slaughters all of Roeg's goons at an opera house alone would qualify for that. It does also have a soundtrack full of (what to me at least is) absolutely terrible music! The Crow 2024 has no less than forty-six producers of one stripe or another (co-, executive, line and so on) and one has to wonder what the hell they were doing all day: three minutes each? It just about gets by but it's entirely redundant and is that really enough for fifty million dollars? Personally I don't think so.

**

THE CRITIC

CONTAINS MINOR SPOILERS AND BIG WORDS

To the cinema once again, dear readers, and the latest motion picture from Mr Anand Tucker, which proves to be a modestly engaging little contrivance which might rank as a perfectly passable period potboiler were it not for the occasional sense that it might be pretending to profundity. One is always grateful for the film industry to step away from the wearyingly familiar from time to time, and amidst the mostly unremarkable summer attractions for the massed audiences, any offering that is not aimed primarily at easily distracted simpletons is to be seized upon immediately.

Jimmy Erskine is The Critic of the title, the Daily Chronicle's longstanding reviewer of the legitimate theatre and columnist of greasepaint gossip. He is, one must acknowledge, not a particularly pleasant fellow: too fond of the alcohol and certain other vices which, let us merely hint, are still against the law in 1934. He is also too cheerfully addicted to the vituperative vitriol of the reviewer's art: regularly denigrating the hapless thespians' nightly efforts with an almost childishly sadistic glee. Faced with the Chronicle's new owner, a man unwilling to subsidise his sybaritic lifestyle, Erskine concocts a fiendish plot against him, with the assistance of an actress whose performances he has viciously abused in print. Inevitably, however, his machinations must fail...

Erskine is a gift of a role for Mr Ian McKellen, an actor always worth watching both for moments of quiet, intimate subtlety or declamatory grandstanding, and here he does get to play to the close camera as well as the gallery. I must confess at this point that I yield to no-one in my ambivalence towards Ms Gemma Arterton, an actress whose work for some unfathomable reason has never particularly appealed to me, be it the schoolyard shenanigans of St Trinians or the cavorting around South America with James Bond (although in all fairness I was a great admirer of Byzantium); but here she does have the difficult task of playing a not-very-good actress, which I should say she accomplishes. She does well to differentiate between the "real" Nina and the "stage" Nina, though on at least one occasion she is aided by the production in which she is appearing being a clearly unspeakable disaster.

Having said all this, at least in its current form (following reshooting that substantially restructured the story) The Critic is a reasonably enjoyable yarn: sombre though not without humour, with excellent attention to period detail, a mixture of the glamorous and the grubby, as well as an insight into the nature and function of the critic (and whether he can create his own drama rather than merely report on others'). It is scarcely one of the greats - for one thing there are a few too many handy connections between the characters - but it is a mostly solid and well mounted melodrama that takes perhaps too much care to never really catch fire. Ultimately, however, it is Mr McKellen's show and, whether he's being mischievous, bitter or conspiratorial, you can not take your eyes off him. One wonders what Jimmy Erskine would think of it: for my mere part, dear readers, I commend it to the house, albeit with reservations, and exit with a flourish, stage left.

***

THE SUBSTANCE

CONTAINS SPOILERS AND YIKES

Yikes. I mean, yikes. If you've been waiting impatiently for a genuinely extreme body horror, something totally unrestrained and boasting a final act that is honestly up there with the last reels of Peter Jackson's Braindead for sheer blood flood, then here it is. The Substance is one of the best full-on horror grossouts in years, possibly decades and, as a longtime genre fan, I obviously loved it. Finally: here's a movie that doesn't hold back, doesn't cut away, doesn't tone it down for the softer sensibilities, and also has so much to say in between the grotesqueries.

It's not about being old (to quote Citizen Kane, "old age is the one disease you don't look forward to being cured of"); it's about looking it. Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore, 61 and absolutely going for it) is a fading Hollywood star, fired from her regular fitness TV show because she's starting to look her age and Harvey (Dennis Quaid), the crass-to-the-point-of-caricature studio head, wants somebody younger and sexier instead. A young doctor gives her a thumb drive promoting The Substance, an apparently simple set of syringes, chemicals and nutrients which cause her to graphically birth her a younger, better version of herself (Margaret Qualley) - a spectacular scene in a cold, white-tiled bathroom. Calling herself Sue, the "newborn" replaces Elisabeth as the network's fitness star and is an immediate ratings smash. But whilst the procedure comes with very clear rules, she is so enamoured with her new self that, as Sue, she immediately starts breaking them...

The final act of The Substance is an all-stops-out overdose of monster mayhem: a body horror with the grisly flesh-twisting mutations of The Fly, The Thing and Society (along with the prom night spectacle of Carrie) presented with genuinely startling practical and prosthetic effects, now mixed with hilarious yet absurd comedy. Strangely, the closest film it's referring to is actually a comedy, Death Becomes Her (which even starred Mr Demi Moore): the quest for eternal youth and vitality at whatever cost, and the physical horror of when it goes wrong. (There's also an old Stanley Baxter sketch, substituting plastic surgery for body-cloning serums, in which the process goes spectacularly and hilariously awry at the presumed moment of triumph.) And yet it doesn't shy away from moments of actual humanity: after a chance encounter with an old school friend, who says she's still beautiful, Elisabeth is so thoroughly conditioned to the importance of youth that she can't conceive of the idea of just going out for the evening and looking her age. (Specifically this is more relevant for women: men are allowed to look like decrepit physical wrecks with no problems, but woe betide any womrn who shows the slightest signs of not looking like the Prom Queen any more.)

Questions do remain, however, concerning the procedure itself and the "science" behind it. If the mind and consciousness are transferred between the new and old bodies, then why are both Elisabeth and Sue active at the same time in the later stages of the film? And if they're separate people, then where's the benefit for Elisabeth? It's also left unexplained, though it probably doesn't matter, who's marketing this stuff and why, how it's ever supposed to be commercially viable or where it even comes from. And it's odd, though convenient, that Elisabeth doesn't appear to have any friends or family (or even assistants or domestic staff) to visit her in her massive apartment.

I'm delighted that The Substance is actually getting a wide UK cinema release rather than briefly playing a few arthouse screens before dropping onto streaming, though I do wonder how the Friday night popcorn audience will respond to what Coralie Fargeat has achieved. (The running time of 140 minutes might count against it as well.) But for my part, I thought it was terrific. The Substance is superbly made, funny, shocking, and consistently inventive (whether illustrating Elisabeth's decline through the construction and subsequent neglect of her star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame, needle-dropping an apposite cue from Bernard Herrmann's Vertigo score, or just including queasy closeups of an eye with multiple irises). Do see it.

****

THE LAST VOYAGE OF THE DEMETER

CONTAINS MILD SPOILERS, IF YOU HAVEN'T READ THE BOOK THAT WAS WRITTEN 127 YEARS AGO OR SEEN ANY OF THE HUNDREDS OF MOVIES BASED ON IT

Finally! This was actually supposed to come out in October 2023, but it's taken this long due to the original distributors being bought by another company and it's taken going on a year to sort out the legalese. And it's generally been worth the wait: a welcome return of full-on period Gothic Horror, and a new yet familiar representation of one of the genre's principal towering figures. What a pity it's taken so long.

If you didn't know already, given the vast number of Dracula adaptations there have been over the years, the Demeter was the ship on which Count Dracula travelled from Bulgaria to England, until it broke up on the rocks near Whitby. The disappearances of the Demeter crew are detailed in the Captain's log, presented as half of one chapter from Bram Stoker's original novel; this fills in all the gaps as to what we all know actually happened on board, as the crew are picked off one by one by a terrifying creature that surely doesn't have anything to do with either the fifty large crates of earth in the hold, or the mysterious, barely alive young woman who has apparently either stowed away in the hold or fallen out of one of the boxes.

One of the best things about The Last Voyage Of The Demeter is that it presents Dracula not as a tortured romantic lead or a suave and charismatic aristocrat, but a twisted, repulsive monster of the Nosferatu ilk. Which is absolutely right: the price for immortality should be a miserable existence spent forever in the shadows and darkness. The only real trouble is that by nature of most vampire tales the bulk of the horror takes place at night and sometimes, with events lit only by moonlight and candles, the film is visually too dark - a technique that's becoming increasingly prevalent for no apparent reason. I would recommend that you pick a cinema where they do actually turn all the house lights off, but unfortunately that's not an option as the film will be heading straight to home viewing platforms with no UK theatrical release. What a shame when terrible films like Tarot and Baghead get the wide exposure they frankly don't deserve, and a nicely crafted, serious horror movie like this one is pretty much thrown away. The Last Voyage Of The Demeter is still definitely worth your time, but do turn the lights out.

****

TRAUMATIKA

CONTAINS SPOILERS AND SPOILERS

The trouble with Traumatika isn't that it's a bad film: rather it's two perfectly good films that don't belong together. One is harsh, nasty and deals with very difficult issues and subjects that really need to handled very delicately and sensitively and should come with a battery of trigger warnings; the other is a satirical maniac-chases-women horror comedy that is far lighter and more typically entertaining. There's nothing wrong with either of them, in the way there's nothing wrong with, say, Munich and Carry On Matron: but they absolutely shouldn't be bolted together and the tonal shift is jarring.

Discounting a brief scene in which an unholy artefact is buried in the North African desert in 1910, the bulk of the first half concerns that newly discovered object's new owner, who opens it and becomes possessed by the evil within it, leading him to abuse his own young daughter, Fleeing, she aborts the unwanted pregnancy but is then compelled to abduct young children from the local area and raise them as potential vessels for the demon. All of this is bleak and deeply uncomfortable viewing, and rightly so. But twenty years after she was killed by the sheriff who found the bodies in the basement, her younger sister appears on a tacky true-crime TV show to tell her side of the story, as the evil appears to have returned just in time for Halloween...

And it's that part of the film which is lighter, jokier, and looks and feels like a more traditional horror movie, with satirical observation about crass media sensationalism, creepy trick-or-treat kids, actual gags (the masked maniac suddenly coming back for his hat), and the final sting that suggests It Might Not Be All Over and you should come back next year for Traumatika II. Which, again, is perfectly fine, but the gear change halfway through is too abrupt: incest and dead children don't belong in a multiplex popcorn horror, and Boo! jump scares and familiar genre tropes don't belong in a confrontational drama about rape and abortions. Either segment as its own separate movie would be fine: they're both well made and they're both interesting and absorbing, but the hitching of one to the other weakens both of them and the film as a whole.

**

BOGIEVILLE

CONTAINS MINOR SPOILERS

I don't want to spend too much time on this very low-budget British vampire movie (why should I? They didn't) but I suppose it should be mentioned in passing. A young couple on the run stop off at an abandoned caravan park and find themselves trapped there as caretakers to the resident warring vampires. Fine, except that it's set in Atlanta, Georgia yet is quite clearly and undisguisedly shot in Surrey: Godalming may be in the South but it's not the Deep South. All that has been done to suggest the setting is to have the all-Brit cast speak in American accents and drive a bunch of left-hand drive cars: they haven't even changed the road signs or redressed the obviously British petrol station to reflect US gas prices.

The best thing about Bogieville really is the vampire teeth that most of the cast have to wear; the trouble is they have to speak through them as well and a lot of dialogue is pretty well indecipherable. Some of the effects for the vampires burning in sunlight are perfectly okay, though Near Dark looked a hell of a lot better and that was over thirty years ago. It's fairly bloody, but there's really not enough in the movie to maintain interest.

*

ALIEN: ROMULUS

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

Hurrah! The Alien series gets back on track and back to its roots with this terrific SF horror. Whilst I absolutely loved Prometheus and kind of enjoyed Alien: Covenant enough (and rewatching them this last week generally confirmed both responses), it's nice to get away from the creatures' backstory as favoured by Ridley Scott and throw the saga back to a bunch of variously sympathetic types picked off by the supremely scary monsters as in the first four films. Alien: Romulus is littered with callbacks to those films - some subtle, some not so - and while much of it works magnificently, there's more than one colossal legacy callback which feel distracting and entirely unnecessary. The signs are promising right from the start - the film immediately looks like it was shot back in the 1980s, you can hear the flutes in Benjamin Wallfisch's score, and even the titles and credits font is identical to that of Alien.

While Prometheus and Covenant (and even the first Alien Vs Predator movie) centred around experts and scientists, Alien: Romulus goes back to the first four instalments, using regular characters who have absolutely no idea what they're suddenly dealing with. Rather than space hauliers or prisoners, they're basically youngsters stuck on a miserable mining colony, with no hope of passage to any other planet where there might actually be sunlight. Rain (Cailee Spaeny) and her companion Andy (David Jonsson), a damaged synthetic, reluctantly agree to help raid a suddenly discovered spaceship, to steal the cryogenic pods that will enable them to hypersleep long enough to reach another, better world. But, inevitably, the craft is not entirely deserted...

From there on it's ticking most of the expected boxes: armies of facehuggers skittering like spiders, rotating lights and clanking metal corridors (the production design is a glorious recreation of the original Alien look), people trapped in rooms with the monsters, a strong female lead (even standing in a Ripley pose at one point), physical effects rather than digital (the CG is mostly reserved for the exteriors and the planet's rings). Much of this is exciting and enormously enjoyable, spectacularly mounted, solidly put together and well played (David Jonsson's android gets an upgrade halfway through and becomes a completely different character). And, unlike Fede Alvarez' earlier Evil Dead movie, it's actually scary in places.

Skip this paragraph if you don't want the really big spoiler. What lets it down is the use of callbacks, many of which are mere background touches and perfectly good fun, such as another appearance of that drinking-bird toy, or musical nods to the earlier scores (Jerry Goldsmith and James Horner are both included in the end credits). Others are more serious, two in particular. Much has already been said of the other synthetic on board, a CG simulated Ian Holm pasted in a la Rogue One, reprising his sinister android role with several lines of verbatim dialogue. This makes no narrative sense: Rook is not Ash, and is never suggested to be Ash, so given that Ash didn't look like Bishop or Call (or indeed David or Walter), why should Rook look like Ash? And if Rook and Ash were the same android model, then why didn't the original Nostromo crew recognise him/it immediately? Secondly, the iconic Aliens line "Get away from her, you bitch!" is dropped in, but out of context it's just taking a sledgehammer to the fourth wall for no logical reason beyond fan service.

To be honest I could have done with a little less of the council estate swearing and a little more depth to the characters besides Rain and Andy. You could also ask why no-one other than the Double Deckers has noticed this massive spaceship that's suddenly appeared out of nowhere. And perhaps it starts to flag a little in the last stretch with a new creature suddenly introduced, that to be honest the film didn't really need. Or you can put all that aside and just enjoy the movie for what it is: a gory (15-certificate) horror romp with scary monsters big and small, and enough Big Ideas to engage the brain without getting in the way of the thrills. I had a great time watching it and whilst I still do like the previous two films, I'm really happy that the Alien saga has gone back to basics and back to what it does best.

****

IN A VIOLENT NATURE

CONTAINS A FEW SPOILERS

Unstoppable masked killer picking off teens? Check. Maniac's origin story told as a cruel and tragic campfire legend? Check. Annoying young victims, at least two of whom frankly deserve it? Check. Local law enforcement powerless to assist? Check. At least one outrageous gore highlight? Check. And yet... not. Because while In A Violent Nature certainly ticks all the boxes on the eighties slasher template, it does them in completely the opposite way. This is the antithesis of the standard woodland slasher, which does the exact opposite of everything that makes a typical teenkill horror movie. This is the anti-Jason, the anti-Cropsy, the anti-Madman Marz.

In content, it is precisely what you remember and love from the Friday The 13th sequels, The Burning, Madman and all those other slight variations on those themes. His wasteland grave disturbed by a bunch of charmless youngsters, the wordless, remorseless bogeyman figure Johnny rises, methodically tracks down the intruders and dispassionately kills them. And that's it. Where this film differs from the Fridays and similar is in its style: shot in 4:3 squarevision, with minimal editing as the camera forever hovers behind Johnny's shoulder as he stalks and slashes, accompanied by the sound of utter silence rather than shrieking violin stabs or low sawtooth synths; the film has no music score. The shouldervision and lack of editing also means it allows us to fully relish the ludicrous overkill of one particularly gruesome death scene, by not cutting discreetly to a blood spurt or something else entirely while the murder continues off-screen.

It's an interesting experiment: to take the standard 80s stabfest and rip out any semblance of artifice or style. But what you end up with is a series of very slow plods through drab fields and woods as you just traipse along behind the monster murderer. We're obviously not getting the killer's POV you'd expect, because he's on screen pretty much the whole time, but we hardly ever get anyone else's perspective either. Only in the final reel, when it looks like the Final Girl might actually be getting away, does our viewpoint tear away from Johnny's shoulder blades.

Is that enough? Personally I'm not sure: this new angle on familiar territory dispenses with a lot of the usual tropes and techniques, but those are the things I liked about those slasher movies - Harry Manfredini's strings, subjective camera, editing to speed the movie along. Not to suggest that The Final Chapter or A New Beginning were particularly involving, but In A Violent Nature absolutely and deliberately isn't.

**

MULHOLLAND DR.

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

In a BBC Culture poll of critics back in 2016, David Lynch's film was voted the greatest film of the 21st century, incredibly beating the likes of Pan's Labyrinth, Zodiac and The Grand Budapest Hotel. (For the record, Jason Statham's Death Race remake didn't even place.) That's the level at which it's revered: it's the most highly rated of Lynch's feature films on the IMDb, a co-winner for Best Director at Cannes, Oscar-nominated for Best Director... Granted that a lot of awards have been won over the years by absolute tat, is it really that much of a masterpiece?

Just as Sunset Boulevard is actually Sunset Blvd., so Mulholland Drive is actually Mulholland Dr., as seen on a road sign under Angelo Badalamenti's sinister, typically Lynchian title music while a black limousine twists through the Hollywood Hills. It's involved in a spectacular accident leaving only one survivor: an amnesiac (Laura Ellen Harring) who takes the name Rita off an old poster for Gilda and holes up in an empty apartment. The new tenant, newly-arrived aspiring actress Betty (Naomi Watts) turns up and the two women try and work out who she really is.... Well, that may be how it starts, but at some point reality breaks down completely, with most of the events of the previous two hours completely abandoned and Watts and Harring playing entirely different people. Or are they? What really happened? How much of it is fantasy, hallucination, dreamscape?

Even the people who love it don't claim to fully understand it (that's one of the reasons they love it) and it's apparently one of those movies you have to rewatch numerous times to get to grips with. I've never been a fan of obscurity for its own sake, and the apparent lack of resolution annoyed me when I first saw the film (in Denver, Colorado) and to be honest it still annoys me. But this is a David Lynch film so there are any number of agreeably weird byways to explore: a pair of creepy mobster types (Dan Hedaya and composer Angelo Badalamenti) apparently under orders from a silent, wheelchair-bound man in an windowless room, a cuckolded film director (Justin Theroux) forced to cast an actress he doesn't want, a psychic who turns up, claims "someone is in trouble" and is never seen again, and more memorably the nightclub in which Rebekah Del Rio performs an a capella version of Roy Orbison's Crying in Spanish. More memorable still is a stunning scene in Winkie's Diner concerning a dream of some unspeakable, primal evil hiding in a back alley behind the building, and it's as unsettling and freaky-creepy as anything.

Any number of those elements may or may not have recurred in the TV series for which this was originally the pilot episode, until ABC turned it down and it mutated into a feature film. That may also be why there's hardly any strong language because of network standards (and presumably it was the extra material that involved the nudity). But these strange characters and odd little moments - including a hilariously botched murder in a private eye's office - are frustratingly never allowed to develop as everything that has apparently been set up is ignored, forgotten or switched around.

For hardcore Lynch fans it's a no-brainer. But personally I'm still not convinced as to either Mulholland Dr.'s cult appeal or its alleged masterpiece stature; I did enjoy it more as a rewatch, and there's enough actual narrative in there to get to grips with (unlike Inland Empire, which I absolutely hated), but it's no Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, for me Lynch's best film by a mile. But's it's ultimately too frustrating and too wilfully obscure, even with a handy explanation in one of the BluRay's extras, and there's not enough reward for working out exactly what the hell is going on.

**

(This is an edited version of a review originally written for FrightFest's Gore In The Store section.)

LONGLEGS

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS???

"The scariest film of the decade". "A must-see". "Stunning". "Terrifying". "Masterpiece". "Masterpiece". "Masterpiece". Five stars, five stars. And I'm sitting there in Row D and thinking: are we watching the same film? In the way that I remember watching The Hangover with friends, on the same sofa in the same room at the same time and struggling to reconcile their laughter with my total lack of it, I'm currently struggling to understand how the rapturous raves fit with the definitely not "the scariest film of the decade" that I watched. Furthermore: in an effort to be scrupulously fair and to make sure I hadn't missed anything, I actually went back and saw it again, last night. And to be brutally honest: I haven't changed my mind at all.

Ah, the voices tell me, but you're a diehard horror enthusiast who's been watching horror movies on a regular basis for forty years now: you're immune to this stuff and your terror threshold is far higher than that of non-nerdy Real People. Nope: for one thing it's not as though I don't still get scared in modern movies sometimes: some of Blumhouse's ongoing Conjuring series and spinoffs have certainly done the job, for example. And for another, it's not like those above laudatory quotes were from My Little Pony Monthly or the review pages of a Cliff Richard fan magazine. They're from sites like Flickering Myth and Dread Central who, I think we can agree, know about horror. If they're getting that scared by Longlegs, why oh why aren't I?

There's certainly nothing wrong with the idea of making (yet) another FBI-vs-serial-killer movie: cinemas and video racks were full of them following on from The Silence Of The Lambs and they're usually a reliably enjoyable genre. It's 1995 (the prime era of The X-Files before it went off the rails) and rookie agent Maika Monroe is either highly intuitive or slightly psychic, so gets quickly assigned to a (surprisingly small) task force investigating a string of mysterious murder-suicides and coded messages left at the crime scenes. The clues, some of which are directed at Monroe specifically, lead to an incident in her own childhood and ultimately to Longlegs himself, a long-haired, whiny-voiced weirdo played by Nicolas Cage in a performance that makes his usual bug-eyed shouty freakouts look like Anthony Hopkins in The Remains Of The Day. But how and why is he doing it? And who's the man downstairs?

By far, by far, the scariest, creepiest, wrongest thing in Longlegs is the man himself. Cage has clearly been directed not just to turn it up to eleven, but to then turn that up to eleven, eleven times. The trouble is not only that, with his baffling choices regarding hair, make-up and apparel that immediately flag him as the most obviously suspicious man in the county (even the clerk in the local grocery recognises him as "that gross guy again"), but it overbalances the film and you're half-wanting Nic Cage to come back on screen and do his bonkers thing again, because there are few things in modern cinema more perversely enjoyable than watching this particular Academy Award winner go so completely off his medication. But that then forces the more interesting part of the film - the plot, the narrative - into the back seat.

But that's because this is very much Un Film De... and the stylistics and visuals of writer/director Oz (Osgood) Perkins just get in the way of the scares. Long, static shots, sometimes from unusual vantage points. Ambient, frequently non-musical music score (the Zilgi credited is actually Perkins' regular composer, his younger brother Elvis). Flipping between 4:3 and full widescreen. Low rumblings on the soundtrack that make it sound like a Transformers movie is bleeding through from the cinema next door. (I checked, it wasn't.) Longlegs isn't primarily a thriller or a horror movie, it's an Osgood Perkins film. And of course there's nothing wrong with that, but not only isn't Longlegs the scariest film of the decade, it's not even the scariest Osgood Perkins film (which I think is probably the splendidly titled I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House, though it is a fairly long time since I saw it).

Maybe I just wanted an exciting, entertaining popcorn potboiler and I got a weird, unsettling Name Director movie instead. It's certainly interesting and it's undeniably creepy and offputting, and there's no question that it conjures up an indefinable mood of dread. But it's not by any measure the scariest film of the decade and it's not by any measure a masterpiece. And having now seen it twice, in cinemas, I really don't get why anyone is saying that it is.

**

TWISTERS

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

Let's twist again, like we did twenty-eight summers ago... Another example of a studio rummaging down the back of the Intellectual Property sofa and discovering something that must surely have some nostalgia mileage still left in it. Twister was a hit a generation ago and mysteriously never generated any followups at the time; perhaps a wise move to leave it as a one-off because it didn't really leave room for any kind of development other than mere repetition. And it's hard to see what's changed because Lee Isaac Chung's film has literally only one thing in common with Jan De Bont's, and that's the presence of the Dorothy device that dispenses the sensors into the tornadoes. (It doesn't even share the title font, except on the artwork!). None of the original's characters are even mentioned, none of the main crew have returned, not a bar of Mark Mancina's score is quoted. Which raises the question of why bother to give Michael Crichton and Anne-Marie Martin a credit in the first place.

Yet the similarities are endless: a traumatic opening reel tragedy for the heroine, lines of SUVs and pickups driving through cornfields and running each other off the road, small towns reduced to shattered debris, a support team of techies and loveable eccentrics, a Jo Grant character who's basically there to say "But Doctor, I don't understand" so everyone else can funnel the exposition to us (Jami Gertz in the original, an out-of-his-depth British journo in this one), a cinema ripped to pieces by the storm even as the film keeps playing, endless awful soft rock on the soundtrack. Daisy Edgar-Jones is even wearing the same costume Helen Hunt wore.

Missing, however, is any sense of character or chemistry: any sense of why the science gang are doing what they do. We do get why the rival group of stormchasers are in it: they're a bunch of thrillseeking YouTubers and swaggering dumbasses, more concerned with getting amazing drone footage and selling merchandise; they're led by a charmless and immediately obnoxious egotist (Glen Powell) and I spent the first hour plus hoping he'd get hit in the face with a combine harvester: he's no Bill Paxton There's a slight wrinkle in the motivations, in that the apparent good guys and loudly yeehawing idiots aren't quite as initially presented (can a film called Twisters have a twist?), but there's no depth to any of them so it's impossible to care.

I actually rewatched the original Twister on Blu the night before - hardly a chore as I've always liked it - and to be honest there isn't a level on which Twisters triumphs. Sure, there's not a huge complexity to the original's characters but at least they're likeable. The effects work, which was cutting-edge back in 1996, still stands up incredibly well; today's effects are undeniably terrific but so they damn well should be for the insane amount of money they spent on it. Benjamin Wallfisch's score is perfectly alright (when you can hear it) but nowhere near Mark Mancina's instantly memorable themes from the original. It looks wonderful, certainly: another example of how film stock will always be superior to digital.

So what was the object of the exercise? Without any of the original cast (two of whom have since passed away) or crew, this is more remake than sequel and it's nowhere near as good. On its own terms it's a spectacle, but that's all it is: a lot of loud noise, widespread destruction, and a plot that's basically a succession of increasingly large storms. That's true of the original, of course, but Twister was so immensely likeable and entertaining that it absolutely worked on the wild rollercoaster level. Twisters adds characterisation that's barely even thumbnail, a romance that doesn't remotely convince, and needless nostalgia for a film that's managed perfectly well as a one-off for nearly thirty years. I can't figure out why, but the original will always have a place on my Blu shelf and I'm pretty confident that I'll probably never watch Twisters again.

**

SOMETHING IN THE WATER

CONTAINS SPOILERS GLUB GLUB GLUB

There may well be Something In The Water but there's nothing on the screen. Director Hayley Easton Street (who, let me state right from the start, is no relation) has apparently described this film as "Jaws meets Bridesmaids", and it sounds like one of those improv party games where you're given two random movie titles and you have to come up with an immediate pitch that combines them. And I suppose it's accurate, given that it has a shark and some bridesmaids in it. But that really isn't enough.

It begins with a vicious homophobic assault in London that's unnecessarily brutal, in that it feels like it's from a different, nastier film entirely. A year later, the two estranged lovers who were targeted that night meet again in the Caribbean for the wedding of one of their lifelong friends: their hen night festivities include a boat trip to a deserted island paradise. But on the way back the boat leaks and sinks, there's no phone signal, one of the gang can't swim and there's something in the water...  

Cue the usual shouting, screaming, recriminations, truths and reconciliations, while a mostly unseen menace munches them one by one. If you've seen Open Water, The Reef, The Shallows, Adrift, And Many Many More, you'll know very quickly where this is going, who is going to survive and what's going to be left of them, offering no surprises along the way. Granted, we're not down in the Mariana Trench of films like Shark Attack 3, but it's still just another shark movie and it's hardly worth the effort. (Side note: I haven't actually seen Bridesmaids, but if it's basically Something In The Water but without the shark, that hasn't sold it to me.)

*

THE EXORCISM

CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR THE BLEEDIN' OBVIOUS

Priests? Check. Creepy music? Check. Moving furniture? Check. References and connections to a certain early 1970s horror classic? Check. Swearing and grisly makeup effects? Check. People wandering around in the dark for no good reason? Massive check. The Exorcism really is one of the blandest and least shocking horrors in ages. Originally (and far more memorably) called The Georgetown Project five years ago, it's now been saddled with the dullest title imaginable and its content is so thunderingly unshocking that it's got away with a weedy 15 certificate.

It does have a fairly decent idea, with Russell Crowe as a washed-up actor with one last shot at getting his career together post-rehab and quashing his own inner demons: playing an exorcist in a remake of a certain early 1970s horror classic. Like that certain early 1970s horror classic, it appears to be cursed: Crowe's character (Anthony Miller, presumably named after Jason Miller, star of a certain early 1970s horror classic, who also happens to be the father of this film's director) is a last-minute replacement for another actor who suddenly and mysteriously died in the opening scene; a studio light suddenly falls from the gantries, just missing someone as it lands. Meanwhile Miller can't remember his lines or get into character and behaves increasingly erratically...

This is the second Russell Crowe exorcism movie in the last couple of years (even though this one was apparently mostly filmed first) and it's easily the weaker of them. It does very little of any interest and a whole lot of stuff we've seen many times before, and trots it out to no real effect. And it's yet another brand new horror film that seems to think that switching the lights off is scary. Darkness is one thing, but  shooting extended scenes in almost total darkness, to the extent that any image still discernible is all but lost in the ambient light from the cinema's exit signs, is something else entirely and a regrettable trend in current genre offerings. (Night Swim, Baghead and Tarot are particular offenders this year.) The Exorcism really should be a lot better than this: it certainly had the potential, but it's just so crushingly ordinary, a massive box of very, very ordinary. And while it's a tossup as to whether it's as bad as last year's dismal Believer, it's unarguable that even the lesser actual sequels of that certain early 1970s horror classic - even the second instalment that almost everybody hates - were better.

*

A GLITCH IN THE MATRIX

28347568 CONTAINS 826589002 SOME 8976598765 SPOILERS

Are we living in a giant computer simulation? Are we all just incredibly advanced aliens who've jacked into a sandbox videogame so we can spend seventy Earth years pretending we're living in Stevenage? Is this the real life, is this just fantasy? Are we all stuck in the Matrix? Er, no. No, we're not and it isn't. Director Rodney Ascher seems to specialise in movies asking Questions To Which The Answer Is No - from Room 237 (does The Shining contain proof that Stanley Kubrick faked the moon landings? No, it doesn't) to The Nightmare (are the figures seen by sleep paralysis sufferers something more sinister than too much cheese and bondage porn before bed? No, they're not). Now: is the entirety of what we call Earth just another multiplayer day in Grand Theft Auto XII? Actually: no, it isn't. Wow, that was easy.

This absolute hogwash of a pretend documentary seeks to explore the possibility that we're all Sims. To this end there's a vast number of film clips from The Matrix (obviously), The Truman Show, They Live and The Wizard Of Oz, along with Blade Runner, Total Recall and Starship Troopers because one of the experts making the case is Philip K Dick via a 1970s videotaped lecture. The other experts on view aren't actually on view: they're hidden behind CGI costumes of a robot, a space alien and some kind of lion, blathering nonsensically.

A Glitch In The Matrix is named after the phenomenon that you occasionally see, where two people in identical clothing are sat next to each other on the tube, or three green Nissan Micras are parked together outside Tesco: seen not as a mere chance coincidence but a coding error in the randomness generator that suggests a deeper hidden layer of reality. Oddly, this glitch is something the film doesn't mention, being more concerned with utter, utter dribble at the expense of any actual evidence beyond anecdotal what-if from people wearing CGI spacesuits and animal avatars. And when your main spokesmen are those guys in their bedrooms, Elon Musk and a guy who watched The Matrix hundreds of times and then casually killed his parents with a shotgun, I'm thinking it's fair to say the case is pretty weak.

Essentially it's nothing more than another version of what an afterlife might bring - Heaven, Nirvana, Valhalla, or just Level Two. The fact that you can build things in Minecraft doesn't mean we're in a gigantic Minecraft ourselves: you can build things in Lego as well but that (and The Lego Movie, oddly) never gets mentioned either. There's a certain measure of Terror In The Aisles fun to be had from naming the film snippets as they come up (bonus points if you spot The Thirteenth Floor), but the idea behind it is tinfoil hat silly and the eyewitnesses entirely unconvincing. (But then I'm really the Zargon Overlord Xarqak who invented the game, so I would say that.)

*

GHOSTBUSTERS: FROZEN EMPIRE

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

Enough, please. This latest (and very, very hopefully last) entry in the series is perfect only in its encapsulation of everything that's wrong with modern Hollywood cinema. On any other level it's a massive, lumbering failure: not funny, not scary, not entertaining, a thorough and comprehensive waste of a hundred million dollars of Columbia's money, six quid of yours and damn near two hours of your afternoon. Like pretty much every franchise or series, from Indiana Jones or the Carry Ons through to Die Hard or Saw, Ghostbusters has gone on for maybe two films more than strictly necessary but nobody ever sensed the right moment to stop.

And it the case of Ghostbusters that moment was about thirty five years ago. Looking back at the first film, it was okay.... it was perfectly alright, the effects were great and it was funny and scary and the leads mostly likeable, but it's scarcely a masterpiece. Ghostbusters II was more of the same: perfectly alright but genuinely no more than that. Afterlife, however, was a travesty and its use of the late Harold Ramis was unforgiveable - and that leaves the non-canonical The One With The Gurlz In It as the most enjoyable of the four. And to be honest, that's the one I'm most likely to rewatch any time soon.

Ghost Busters: Frozen Empire (incidentally, the on-screen title is Ghost Busters and not Ghostbusters) is so scared of doing anything new that the only thing it can do is more of the same. All the Spenglers are now back at New York (because...?) and in the old firehouse (because...?) which is again in danger of being closed down by Mayor Walter Peck (because...?) - until Ray Stantz is sold a mysterious orb containing an ancient demon that if it gets loose will freeze the world. And Winston Zeddemore now runs a massive paranormal lab and has just such a machine that will set it free...

The answer to all the becauses is that Frozen Empire is stuck in that trap of having to move forward while standing still. We're at the firehouse because that's where the first two films happened. Walter Peck is not the mayor because that's any kind of logical character progression, he's the mayor because William Atherton was in the first film. Slimer and the Stay-Puft things are in it not because they have to be, but because they were in the previous ones. The film is so scared of doing anything different, anything innovative, that it can only tap into nostalgia: all it has to trade on is the goodwill we (supposedly) feel to the characters and trappings forty years down the line.

And nostalgia is the trap, of course: they're so busy trying to recapture that old magic that they're not creating any new magic. They're so obsessed with harking back to what they loved forty years ago that they're not making anything for today's youngsters to get nostalgic about when they get to old age. Do something new, create something different. Maybe it won't work but at least you're trying. No-one's going to hark back to something that's designed wholly for harking back even further. Despite the inclusion of teenagers central to the story, this isn't a film for today's audience, it's a film for the 1984 and 1989 audience. But we're not who we were back then: we've changed, we've grown up. (Well, some of us have.)

I wouldn't mind so much if Frozen Empire had been at least passingly funny, but I didn't laugh once and I doubt I even smiled. I'm even wondering whether I should tag this one as Comedy. It's not that the jokes don't work, it's more that there aren't any real jokes, just pointless callbacks. And despite all the action and mayhem, much of it is just plain dull, it's way too long and messy, too much is happening and none of it is particularly interesting. Instead it's the stench of the studios just flogging the cash cow yet again because that's all they've got: the belief that an intellectual property is just banknotes waiting to be grabbed. The sense that if Ghostbusters '84 had failed but The Couch Trip or Doctor Detroit had been megahits, Dan Aykroyd would be making The Couch Trip VI and Son Of Doctor Detroit instead. (Be honest, no-one was that devastated when Ghostbusters 3 didn't happen in the early 90s.) 

I would have had more respect for this if they'd left the old guys out of it entirely and just concentrated on the Next Generation: they'd already passed the proton pack in Afterlife and that should have been enough of a farewell to them. Winston even says at one point "we're too old for this" and frankly he's right. And maybe so are we. Time to retire?

*

DUNE: PART TWO

CONTAINS SPOILERS

Well, it's not terrible. But that's about they best you can say about this second helping of Denis Villeneuve's epic adaptation of the Frank Herbert doorstopper that I couldn't get into thirty years ago and don't regret giving up on. The most important thing you need to know going in is that this isn't the end of it: it's merely the continuation and maybe we'll get a third one in three to four years' time that does actually wrap everything up. At least we knew Part One wasn't a standalone; but it was assumed that Part Two would be the second half and not just the second instalment, so there's a real sense of disappointment that this episode stops rather than ends.

Though it handily begins with a brief "Previously On Dune...." recap, it's vital to have seen the first one because frankly you'll be lost if you don't. We're back on Arrakis: the Harkonnens have wiped out most of the Atreides and, with the Padishah Emperor's Sardaukar troops, are now seeking to wipe out the native Fremen; Paul (Timothee Chalamet) and his mother Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) have escaped into the desert, avoided the sandworms and met up with Fremen leader Stilgar (Javier Bardem). Paul falls in love and becomes a Fedaykin (whatever that is), Jessica drinks the water of life and becomes the tribe's Reverend Mother, while the Bene Gesserit plot to manipulate the bloodlines to bring forth the Kwisatz Haderach...

Or something. (There may be spelling mistakes in this review because it's impossible to spell-check.) I actually rewatched Part One on Blu the previous night and even then I struggled with Dune: Part Two because for all the star names, for all the near-perfect special effects and visual design, for all the obvious skill and effort that went into it, it can't get away from a sense of self-importance. You can read into it any number of real-world parallels about holy wars, genocides, or rival superpowers fighting over other lands to plunder their natural resources if you want, or you can just watch it as a silly SF spectacular about people in silly costumes with sillier names. The trouble is, Denis Villeneuve is more interested in the former. Whatever else it might be, Nu-Dune is no fun. I'm not asking for Paul and Feyd to settle their differences with a custard pie fight, or for Emperor Christopher Walken's trousers to fall down, but 166 minutes is a long time to go with no amusement, intentional or not. "Shorter than Oppenheimer" is all that can be said for it on this level. While we're at it: Hans Zimmer's ethnically flavoured score adds nothing but decibels; it doesn't enhance the drama or emotion at any point and (while I accept this isn't its primary function) it isn't even a satisfying or interesting listen on its own terms.

Say what you like about David Lynch's stab at Dune: at least that moved. (Most people were just flat out wrong about that film anyway.) If nothing else, it was fun, it was entertaining and it had a proper ending, and none of that can be applied to the new ones. I regularly go back to the Lynch film, but I doubt I'll ever bother with either/any of the Villeneuves except as obligatory revision for when the next one comes along. Dune: Part Two is perfectly well done, perfectly well crafted and played, but it's ponderous, overlong and never sparks into life. Maybe if they'd injected a little more wild and crazy into it this incarnation of Dune could have been great. As it is, it's fine, but has no zip to it and it badly needs it.

***