Poltergeist (2015) 8/10

Starring : Sam Rockwell, Rosemarie DeWitt, Saxon Sharbino, Kyle Catlett, Kennedi Clements, Jared Harris, Jane Adams
Director : Gil Kenan
Running Time : 94 mins

The Bowen family move into their new home only to be disturbed by strange noises in the night, with electrical appliances turning themselves on and a mysterious box of clowns being found in a closet. The youngest daughter of the family, Madison (Clements), starts speaking to an invisible friend, and when she disappears in a closet the family are forced to face the fact that their new home may be possessed by evil spirits.

Fans of the original should still enjoy this movie which pays homage to the original. A lot of the story is the same, but there are enough differences to make it just as interesting, and there are even jokes made at the expense of the original, with jocular mention of Indian burial grounds and the like. There’s plenty of action and creepy moments (though I still don’t understand how the box of clowns got into the house) and the special effects are good without overshadowing the storyline.

You’ll like this if you liked : The Conjuring

Ginger Snaps Back : The Beginning (2004) 7/10

Starring : Katherine Isabelle, Emily Perkins, Nathaniel Arcand, JR Bourne, Hugh Dillon
Director : Grant Harvey
Running Time : 91 mins

Sisters Brigitte (Perkins) and Ginger (Isabelle) arrive at a Canadian trader fort after being attacked by wild animals. They soon realise that the fort is surrounded by werewolves, and that one of them may already have become infected with the lupine syndrome.

Although not as good as the first film – in fact it is very different in almost every sense – this is a pretty decent mystery thriller where we have to guess who the werewolf might be. Obviously we know the girls are going to be affected, but that doesn’t detract from the overall storyline which is solid to say the least. Fans of the original might miss some of the humour and the whole teenage angst element of the movie, which are both pretty much absent here, but there is still a strong werewolf story here for horror fans.

You’ll like this if you liked : Red Riding Hood

What We Do In The Shadows (2014) 8/10

Starring : Jemaine Clement, Taika Waititi, Jonathan Brugh, Cori Gonzalez-Macuer, Stuart Rutherford, Karen O’Leary
Director : Jemaine Clement & Taika Waititi
Running Time : 82 mins

Three vampires sharing a flat together in New Zealand face the horrors of modern life, such as who to trust with their secret life, how to keep money coming in to the household, and how to keep up with the never-ending household chores.

This movie may not be laugh-out-loud funny, but it manages to find humour in every aspect of potential vampiric life. The leads keep the dry wit coming thick and fast, and it’s always surprising to find that the movie actually had a direction in which it was headed, rather than just being random comedic scenes. Fans of comedy horrors can’t go wrong with this hidden gem, which manages to mix genuine horror with a witty script.

You’ll like this if you liked : Shaun Of The Dead

Halloween II (2009) 6/10

Starring : Malcolm McDowell, Tyler Mane, Sheri Moon Zombie, Brad Dourif, Danielle Harris, Scout Taylor-Compton
Director : Rob Zombie
Running Time : 118 mins

Michael Myers (Mane) is still alive and trying to find his sister Laurie Stroude (Taylor-Compton), killing anyone who gets in his way. When Dr Sam Loomis (McDowell) releases a book on the life of Michael Myers, detailing the reasons behind his violent way, Michael realises where Laurie now lives and goes on yet another killing spree.

Even though this was better than the first remake, and in my opinion better than the originals which I was never overly fond of, there is still a little too much sympathy to be felt for the mindless killing machine known as Michael Myers. I did like that there were so many horror film actors in this, ranging from bigger names in horror like Brad “Chucky” Dourif and Danielle Harris, who appeared in a number of original Halloween movies as well as the sequels to Hatchet, to less remembered ones like Margot “Amityville” Kidder and Caroline “Texas Chainsaw & Leprechaun” Williams. Aside from these interesting homages, and a confusing double-bluff ending that actually worked quite well, this wasn’t that great, so only bother with this if you really love horror movies, or the films of Rob Zombie.

You’ll like this if you liked : The Devil’s Rejects

The Babadook (2014) 7/10

Starring : Essie Davis, Noah Wiseman, Hayley McElhinney, Daniel Henshall, Barbara West, Ben Winspear
Director : Jennifer Kent
Running Time : 94 mins

Following a car crash that killed her husband, Amelia Vanek (Davis) is forced to deal with the psychological repercussions that seem to be affecting her son Samuel (Wiseman) as his behaviour worsens, ranging from violent outbursts to fears of monsters under his bed, until one day she starts to suspect that the monsters might be real...

This movie uses atmosphere more than anything to get its scares across, and it actually suffers a little when The Babadook starts to rear its ugly head. The pacing is slow to crawling, but that just builds up the tension, and the main leads do a decent job of keeping the scares coming. I’d love a copy of the book from this film, it looked so cool, but the movies ending felt like an unfunny imitation of the ending to Shaun Of The Dead.

You’ll like this if you liked : Sinister

Fright Night 2 : New Blood (2013) 4/10

Starring : Will Payne, Jaime Murray, Sean Power, Sacha Parkinson, Chris Waller
Director : Eduardo Rodriguez
Running Time : 98 mins

Charley Brewster (Payne) travels to Romania to study with his best friend Ed Bates (Waller) and his ex-girlfriend Amy Peterson (Parkinson), but when Charley discovers that one of his professors, Gerri Dandridge (Murray), is in fact a vampire he fears for not only his life but the lives of his friends, especially Amy who is a new moon virgin and as such would be perfect for one of Gerri’s vampire ceremonies.

Holy hell! I really enjoyed the 80s Fright Night movies, and I liked the remake with Anton Yelchin and Colin Farrell, but this sequel stroke reimagining was a mess! Here’s me thinking this was going to be a remake of Fright Night Part 2, but instead I’m subjected to a badly written, badly acted version which has no bearing on the original other than the fact that this time the vampire is a woman. There’s not even any references to the first remake, otherwise they would have recognised Gerri’s name at the very least. Do not watch this, it is awful!

You’ll like this if you liked : Dracula 2000

Devil’s Tower (2014) 6/10

Starring : Roxanne Pallett, Jason Mewes, Frances Ruffelle, Jessica-Jane Stafford, Emma Buckley, Eddie Webber
Director : Owen Tooth
Running Time : 85 mins

After a falling out with her mum Kim (Ruffelle), Sarah MacColl (Pallett) moves into a rundown tower block, filled with shady characters and shrouded in mystery. After someone is found dead in the lifts, she meets a squatter named Sid (Mewes), whose best friends has gone missing, so they team up to find out what exactly is going on in the tower block.

This had a lot of potential, but it just didn't measure up to it. I liked the idea of a sprit in the security cameras that was causing people to attack each other, but the execution was terrible. People start turning into animatronic zombies and go on a killing spree through a tower block filled with people who are other having sex in cupboards or trying to sell drugs. Some of the lines in the script make this sound like it’s meant to be a comedy, as do the makeup effects which are pretty ropey, and when you have to admit that the best actor in a movie is Jessica-Jane Clement (going by Stafford in this) you know you’re in trouble.

You’ll like this if you liked : Parasitic

Welcome To The Jungle (2007) 5/10

Starring : Sandy Gardiner, Callard Harris, Nickolas Richey, Veronica Sywak
Director : Jonathan Hensleigh
Running Time : 83 mins

Two couples on holiday in Fiji decide to journey into the New Guinea wilderness in search of the heir to the Rockefeller fortune who disappeared in 1961. Stories claiming he may have been captured and eaten by cannibals start to scarily ring true when the group find themselves running for their lives from bow and arrow wielding natives.

Not to be confused with the 2003 action comedy starring The Rock, this is a bit of a stupid film with nothing happening for almost an hour, in a sort of Blair Witch shaky-cam style which is getting really old. You’d expect a movie about cannibals to have plenty of gruesomeness, but this has very little. Maybe that’s a good thing – not going overboard – but people who watch this based on the skeleton-filled movie poster will be in for a very disappointing time.

You’ll like this if you liked : The Blair Witch Project

Demonic (2015) 5/10

Starring : Maria Bello, Frank Grillo, Cody Horn, Dustin Milligan, Megan Park, Scott Mechlowicz, Aaron Yoo, Tyson Sullivan, Alex Goode
Director : Will Cannon
Running Time : 86 mins

Five teenagers are killed while visiting a supposedly haunted house, and the sole survivor is questioned by the police and psychologist Dr Elizabeth Klein (Bello), who believes that the strange goings on in the house might be related to a murder spree many years earlier.

You can tell that James “Saw” Wan had involvement in this movie, because it has that same feel as the movie wraps up of wanting you to look back at what has gone before and look for the clues. However, this is poorly executed, and the twist at the end doesn’t feel as impressive as it should have, mainly because the majority of the film failed to be gripping in any way. This could have been interesting with a better script and better actors, but sadly that was never going to be.

You’ll like this if you liked : Devil

A Haunted House 2 (2014) 7/10

Starring : Marlon Wayans, Jaime Pressly, Essence Atkins, Gabriel Iglesias, Cedric The Entertainer
Director : Michael Tiddes
Running Time : 87 mins

A year after his girlfriend became possessed by an evil spirit, Malcolm Johnson (Wayans) has moved on and married mother-of-two Megan (Pressly). Along with her two children, Malcolm and Megan move into their new home together only to discover that their new home might be haunted by the same sort of demons as Malcolm discovers his new step children have an imaginary friend and an ominous old box, plus there’s an evil doll that won’t leave Malcolm alone.

I actually quite like the Haunted House movies, in spite of their obvious humour. They might not be all that clever, but they try their best to focus on parodies of horror films instead of throwing in references to whatever pop star or genre movie might be popular at the time. The only thing that does get annoying is the over playing of sex and drug references, though I guess that’s what the younger Wayans are famous for in their comedy. Quick aside, what the hell has happened to Shawn Wayans? He hasn’t been in a movie since Dance Flick in 2009!

You’ll like this if you liked : Scary Movie

Wrong Turn 5 : Bloodlines (2012) 4/10

Starring : Doug Bradley, Camilla Arfwedson, Simon Ginty, Roxanna McKee, Paul Luebke, Oliver Hoare, Kyle Redmond-Jones, Amy Lennox
Director : Declan O’Brien
Running Time : 92 mins

Some college kids head to a small town in West Virginia to have fun at the annual Mountain Man festival that commemorates the disappearance of an entire town on Halloween in 1817. As they drive through town they crash their car and end up in jail for possessing drugs, but they’re in the company of a man named Maynard (Bradley), whose ‘boys’ are inbred hill folk who like nothing more than murdering and eating people.

Well, this was a disappointment. Don’t get me wrong, I expected it to be bad, but at least make it logically bad. The whole tone of the movie is wrong based on what has come before; it feels cartoony in places and there seems to be a sadistic sense of humour about the inbred cannibals, plus it’s supposed to be Halloween but there are no decorations up, which is unheard of in middle America. The town appears to be deserted, and even exploding shop fronts can’t draw the attention of locals who may have decided to stay in for the night. Even Doug ‘Pinhead” Bradley was terrible, making jokey references to his character in Hellraiser while saying the same thing over and over again in slightly different ways. Plus the whole idea of the characters being cannibals has become secondary. Instead they find random ways to total butcher their victims. Leaving nothing left over for them to eat. This series should have stopped with number two, which was pretty good. This, however, is cheap and lazy.

You’ll like this if you liked : Wrong Turn 4 : Bloody Beginnings

ABCs Of Death 2 (2014) 5/10

Directors : EL Katz, Julian Barratt, Julian Gibney, Robert Morgan, Alejandro Brugues, Aharon Keshales, Jim Hosking, Bill Plympton, Erik Matti, Dennison Ramalho, Kristina Buozyte & Bruno Sampler, Laancelot Oduwa Imasuen, Robert Boocheck, Larry Fessenden, Hajime Ohata, Todd Rohal, Rodney Ascher, Marvin Kren, Juan Martinez Moreno, Jen & Sylvia Soska, Vincenzo Natali, Jerome Sable, Steven Kostanski, Julien Maury & Alexandre Bustillo, Soichi Umezawa, Chris Nash
Running Time : 123 mins

Another movie bringing a collection of 26 short stories focussing on the subject of death, directed by a variety of directors from around the world, though this time most of them seem to be British.

This just wasn’t as varied as the first movie, with too many British directors, especially at the beginning of the movie. Some of the better segments include E Is For Equilibrium with two men trapped on a desert island having their friendship tested by the arrival of a beautiful woman, M Is For Masticate which is beautifully directed as a man falls victim to the effects of bath salts, I Is For Invincible where a family try to kill their eldest family member, Q Is For Questionnaire which portrays an intelligent man having his brain transplanted into a gorilla, F Is For Falling with an Israeli paratrooper being discovered by an Arab boy, and N Is For Nexus which shows the before and after effects of an accident on Halloween. Unfortunately this also featured such drivel as C Is For Capital Punishment which just felt like violence for violence sake, J Is For Jesus which was just odd, G Is For Grandad which felt out of place, L Is For Legacy which looked really cheap, and T Is For Torture Porn which was terrible. In spite of a handful of decent shorts, the terrible ones unfortunately dragged my overall score down.

You’ll like this if you liked : Bad Compilation Movies

The Coven (2015) 3/10

Starring : Dexter Fletcher, Cloe Mackie, Holly Mackie, Mark Harris, Tony O’Callaghan, Howard Lee, Magda Rodriguez
Director : John Mackie
Running Time : 87 mins

Five friends decide to go camping in the woods so that they can witness a pagan ritual, but little do they know that the witchcraft in the area is real.

Well, what can I say? This was pretty awful. The acting was bad, the writing was bad, the directing was bad, everything about it was bad. People have referred to this as a found footage movie, but it isn’t even clever enough to be that. If you have a sense of humour and can find fun in watching god awful films, then you might enjoy this, but even then you might get put off by the unexplained ending and the ridiculously cheap special effects. I know, this cost less than a million pounds to make (barely a million dollars), but that’s no excuse for bad storytelling, and claiming something is based on true events doesn't make them any less boring.

You’ll like this if you liked : Soul Survivors

All Cheerleaders Die (2013) 7/10

Starring : Caitlin Stasey, Sianoa Smit-McPhee, Brooke Butler, Amanda Grace Cooper, Reanin Johannink, Tom Williamson
Director : Lucky McKee & Chris Siverston
Running Time : 90 mins

Following the death of her childhood friend in a bizarre cheerleading accident, Maddy Killian (Stasey) tries out for the cheerleading squad in an attempt to seek revenge on her friends ex-boyfriend Terry (Williamson), but when things go horribly wrong and the entire squad is accidentally killed, Maddy resorts to black magic to bring them all back to life, but on their resurrection they start to exhibit strange symptoms such as a desire for human flesh and blood .

What starts out as a simple revenge movie soon devolves into a supernatural horror, with cheerleaders turning into flesh eating undead creatures in a comedy fashion. Fans of silly humour that largely arises from people falling over and getting killed will thoroughly enjoy this schlock horror, but those with a weaker stomach might find themselves flinching throughout – hell, even I flinched when the first cheerleader died!

You’ll like this if you liked : Detention

I, Frankenstein (2014) 6/10

Starring : Aaron Eckhart, Bill Nighy, Yvonne Strahovski, Miranda Otto, Jai Courtney, Socratis Otto
Director : Stuart Beattie
Running Time : 94 mins

Frankenstein’s monster, having now adopted the name Adam (Eckhart), is taken in by an order of Gargoyles to protect him from a group of demons that want him dead. More than two hundred years later, Adam discovers that Naberius (Nighy), the leader of the demon hoard, wants Victor Frankenstein’s journal to discover the secret to resurrecting the dead so he can create an army of soulless humans in which he can place his demons.

Once again the producers of Underworld have taken a mythology and turned it into an action movie, in so doing inadvertently sucking the very soul out of it. I can’t see this having any sequels, though the ending leaves things open for one, as the acting and script are so hammy. I couldn’t get to grips with why Adam had an American accent, considering everyone around him seemed to be English, and his Punisher-like personality wasn’t assisted by the casting of Thomas Jane lookalike Eckhart, but if you like mindless action movies with a sliver of a plot – basically if you enjoyed Underworld – then you might like this.

You’ll like this if you liked : Underworld : Awakening

30 Days Of Night : Dark Days (2010) 3/10

Starring : Kiele Sanchez, Rhys Coiro, Diora Baird, Harold Perrineau, Mia Kirshner
Director : Ben Katai
Running Time : 93 mins

A year following the vampire attack on the small Alaskan community of Barrow, Stella Oleson (Sanchez) has been trying to convince the world of the existence of vampires. He works come to the attention of the FBI, and also of a small group who believe her story and have a plan to destroy Lilith (Kirshner), the vampire responsible for the attack.

Holy hell, this was awful. Given that it is such an interesting concept of having vampires attacking at a time when daylight and salvation is a month away, this takes all of that fun and throws it in the bin, transferring the location to Los Angeles of all places. Recasting the lead just confused me as I couldn’t remember who Sanchez was supposed to be without looking it up, and even the wonderful acting ability of Katherine Isabelle – who basically plays ‘random victim number whatever’ here – couldn’t rescue this movie from its loss of the claustrophobic feeling the original managed to sustain so well.

You’ll like this if you liked : Queen Of The Damned

Maggie (2015) 6/10

Starring : Arnold Schwarzenegger, Abigail Breslin, Joely Richardson
Director : Henry Hobson
Running Time : 96 mins

Wade Vogel (Schwarzenegger) finds his missing daughter Maggie (Breslin) in a quarantine section of the local hospital, having become infected by a deadly virus that turns its carriers into mindless zombies. As he takes her to spend her final days as a thinking human at the house of her stepmother Caroline (Richardson), Wade ponders the fact that the moment he will have to take her life before she transforms is growing ever closer.

This drama is not what most zombie movie fans want to see, but it is still pretty interesting. There is very little gore or death to speak of, instead we have an in depth look at how difficult a decision it can actually be to kill a loved one who has become infected, with zombification acting as a sort of parable for any life threatening illness. Schwarzenegger is an odd choice in the lead, but it works well enough and if nothing else it is interesting to see him in a dramatic role.

You’ll like this if you liked : Carriers