Film Reviews by NP

Writer and director Steve Lawson produces a rare light-hearted film from his growing stable. Known for slim-budget, mainly studio-bound, dialogue-heavy productions, there is more location work and physical stuff going on here. As with most of his output, I found this very enjoyable.

Morgan Rees-Davies plays Turpin, here revealed as a scoundrel and trouble-maker, and not a very successful highwayman. The books about him, he admits happily, are heavily exaggerated. The hapless Elizabeth (Mollie Hindle) finds this out to her cost, her initial dislike of him inevitably melting as the film goes on.

This is a nicely paced adventure, not quite the bawdy romp it might have been, although lines like “I’m looking for Dick,” and “Yes, I’ll bet you are,” ensure we’re never encouraged to take things too seriously. My score is 7 out of 10.

Director William Eubank succeeds in making a Paranormal Activity film that isn’t like a Paranormal Activity film at all. I think this is the only time that the long-running central character Katie, whose story has been well and truly told, is not given so much as a mention. By this time (2021) there had been seven films in total since the unexpected success of the 2007 original, and the formula – found footage, often taken from static security cameras and protracted scenes – had been over-utilized to the point of stagnation. So this offering goes outside, to an open and detail-filled location, that of a farm run by a large Amish family. Leading the expedition to meet her estranged relatives is the appealing Margot (Emily Bader) and her small gang of filmmakers, determined to find out the reason why Margot was abandoned as a baby by her mother. Great use is made of the nicely shot locations, and the characters are believable and well-played.

The drawback is, without the signature ‘look’ of this entry into the series, Next of Kin becomes just another found footage film, albeit a very well-made, picturesque one. The variety of styles mixes things up, but there are some very obvious jump scares early on, which don’t bode well.

Luckily they are kept to a minimum; this is more about the atmosphere, about an encroaching feel of dread, and features typically illogical decisions from the characters. It has a folk horror, even a Blair Witch vibe, which further separates it from the usual Paranormal Activity films.

The final act is where the scares come out of the dark, and it’s all very effective. I get the impression the sound levels throughout have been set deliberately low so that the increasing number of bangs and crashes are unnervingly LOUD by comparison. Very enjoyable. My score is 8 out of 10.

Argentinian irector Martin Desalvo has created an understated horror film that is the epitome of 'a hidden gem'. The accent is very much on isolation, loneliness, seduction and sickness. Lots of sickness. The pacing is leaden, and there is very little in the way of spectacle - and no CGI (some consider this important). The atmosphere is the thing, and the viewer is given every reason to immerse themselves in it. Jorge Chikiar's haunting score embellishes this further.

Mora Recalde plays Virginia, a lonely woman living with her father in the midst of the bleakest of locations. Romina Paula is Anabel, a cousin who comes to visit - and it's very clear all is not well with her.

There is much emphasis on eyes, on furtive glances, of something vaguely sexual. This will be too uneventful for some, but it ticks all the boxes for me.

With subtitles.

The dangers of taking someone for granted!

We all get into a rut from time to time and it is human nature not to always respect others. This is very much how Herr Raab finds himself - or at least, how his nearest and dearest find him. Part of the perverse joy of watching RW Fassbinder films is that we're only privy to what he wants us to be privy to. We observe people, and hear their (often meaningless) small talk, but don't necessarily know what they're thinking. Raab seems to endure his lot with stoicism.

There are parallels within Fassbinder's to that of the UK's celebrated director Mike Leigh: the minutiae of the everyday takes on a new and often murky meaning under their lens. And yet their observational film-making is never boring. Such is the case here. Throughout the cringingly monotony, there is the feeling that not all is well.

Pressures to succeed, to conform, to literally keep up with the Joneses, delivered so casually on a day-to-day basis with no possible way out shows very well the smallness of existence. An unforgiving life study, this is well worth a watch.

This has been compared to ‘It Follows’; while I didn’t enjoy that, I had a great time with this. The nature of the evil being passed from person to person is much more solid here and smacks less of the superficial titillation the earlier film is guilty of. If it reminds me of anything, it would be ‘The Ring’.

Plenty of frightening moments and jump scares enliven a fairly slow-burning story that could easily have fallen into a pattern of repetition. Director Parker Finn accomplishes this with imagination, and a true sense of unease, helped enormously by Cristobal Tapia De Veer’s kaleidoscopically manic soundtrack.

As the threat becomes more tangible, the ghost of CGI threatens to cartoon-ify some climactic scenes, but they are subtly used and so much more effective for it. While the story uses many set pieces that have been done before, the acting is strong enough to keep it entertaining. I was pleasantly surprised by ‘Smile’, and am glad it appears to have become 2022’s Halloween ‘hit.’ My score is 8 out of 10.

This is a very good, intelligently scripted film. The cast comprises three people mainly and contains many long conversations. For such unrelenting dialogue, most of it one-note, nearly 100 minutes is far too long. Shorn of twenty minutes, things would be so much more effective.

Having said that, the acting on display is excellent, with the intruder suggesting a number of possibilities that remain largely unexplored, leaving the implications to the audience. The ending, for example, is largely open to question.

Filmed in cold black and white, and featuring some memorable haunted-house imagery, often beautifully lit, ‘The Righteous’ is unquestionably a fine film, and although the attention wandered a little once or twice, I ended up enjoying it a lot. My score is 7 out of 10.

… the ‘original’ living vampire, not this pasty-faced newcomer ‘Morbius (2022)!’ From Asylum films, this ‘mockbuster’ set in designer-Victorian times, takes its title from the original Marvel Morbius comic strips, always subtitled, ‘The living vampire.’

There are some atmospheric recreations of Gothic castles and general Victorian-looking panoramas. I couldn’t work out if they were model work, enhanced actual cityscapes or CGI, which is the whole point, I’m sure.

The historical accuracy is loose at best but looks good, and the actors do a fair job of getting their tongues around some very olde-world dialogue - and fangs - and some very interesting things are done with many characters from the original novel – different genders, different sexual preferences and different beliefs. The result is very talky a lot of the time but features occasional effects that are pretty impressive, and ultimately, I enjoyed this.

Charlie Steeds, who has brought us ‘The Barge People’ and ‘Winterskin (2018)’, brings forth Victorian-era England, and with it, a selection of characters so eccentric, I pictured them being played by bawdy UK series ‘Carry On’ performers. It’s not a bad mix. The humour is of the coarse – sometimes perhaps too coarse - bodily-function variety and delivered with a raw, knowing twinkle.

It looks good throughout – some subtle effects give the sets and locations a rich period ambience, and the werewolves during the brief periods when we witness them, are surprisingly effective, although their choreography is a little peculiar (perhaps this is deliberate?).

A mix of raw humour and genuine horror, this is an acquired taste – as Steeds’ films often are – but I enjoyed it.

This is a British found footage film and, as such, is similar to the template set out by the phenomenally successful ‘Blair Witch Project’.

The three characters take time to like. Raz (Parry Glasspool), the sole male, is a cocky, good-looking lad who will say inappropriate things for ‘a laugh’; Lucy-Jane Quinlan plays Charlie, who spends most of the first half of the film frowning at Raz’s antics, and Lydia Orange plays Jess, possibly the ‘nicest’ of the trio – while their very patient teacher Mark is played by TJ Herbert. He is openly ridiculed by Raz, particularly for his ‘four stripe’ trainers – a detail that is worth remembering during the closing shots.

It takes too long to get going, but during that time, I warmed to the three youngsters. Raz is a bit of a twit, no question, but he’s often genuinely funny, if foolhardy.

The third act is where the scares finally come along, with the kind of stumbling confusion and terror synonymous with the found footage genre. The descent into dark, isolated tunnels is creepy and unsettling, and the final scene serves us with a good twist.

This is a Welsh-language rural folk horror which, as the title suggests, focuses on the (very) slow build-up to, and commencement of a much-anticipated dinner.

Annes Elwy stars as the central character Cadi, and yet she spends most of the first three thirds of the film very much on the periphery. Her humble, freckled features are markedly different from rest of the sleek, chatty ensemble. Much is made of the atmospheric sense of isolation of the house, but any suggestions of horror are few and far between. My advice would be to stick with it, because things become surprisingly nasty as they progress – with the finale jarringly uncharacteristic of the previous 93 minutes - but we have to wait for it!

Some nice ideas are mostly squandered by repetition and an incomprehensible story. The characters are fine, the actors fine, but nothing can really rescue this messy production. It’s a shame because some of the direction is imaginative and the fleetingly seen monster is enigmatic and effective (it reminds me of the depiction of the titular creature from 2005’s ‘Reeker’). When it dawns on you – as it did to me – about halfway through that things aren’t going to progress much further, then the rest of the film becomes a little flat, I’m sorry to say.

A mixed bag, with more that is bad than good. The dialogue through the last half hour seems to comprise of the name ‘Rachel.’ And lots of screaming, of course. My score is 5 out of 10.

This is the debut film for Peter Benson and Andy Thompson, and is infused with enough directorial touches to keep things entertaining.

It isn’t perfect. The male characters are not only grotesque but one-note grotesque. Endless sex-bragging and leery pub jokes ensure that none of them will win the sympathy of the audience. The supposed good guy of the group, for example, is more than happy to betray his partner for a quick fumble in the hay. It’s difficult to know how the audience is supposed to react to these people – are they intended to be funny? Is the intention that we long for their death? Are they supposed to represent real people?

This is a shame because with a lightness of touch sadly missing, they might have been people we believe in, which would have improved things. As it is, I enjoyed this as a slightly unusual hybrid combining a Hammer-esque horror feel in places with the video nasties of the ‘80s. The gore is impressive and convincing for a low-budget venture such as this.

The three female characters are rather better realised and well-played. The temptation could have been to overact, but that’s not the case here. There are some mild sex scenes which curiously fail to carry any kind of erotic charge. My score is 6 out of 10.

“First you call Priscilla a bitch, then you question me.”

This is a fairly dire experience, with lacklustre acting and absolutely no atmosphere or pacing. It doesn’t help that the pretty Mom is completely unaware of her daughter’s ridiculous change of personality, her attention sapped by attempting to seduce the equally pretty, and wooden, local doctor.

Mom’s not the only one who doesn’t notice anything strange about the girl’s demeanour, despite the actress trying her best to be ‘well creepy.’ The scenes where characters chat cheerfully with this unblinking, somnambulist are laughable. Only the vicar asks ‘Is something wrong?’

As the story rolls on, it gets less convincing, almost as if the cast and crew are themselves becoming demoralised by how half-hearted this all is, and how juvenile the scares are, although the music does its best to unsettle us.

When the plotline is spelt out so very blatantly to the audience, only for the characters to constantly lag several steps behind is deeply frustrating and sadly the whole thing is workmanlike and distinctly lacking as a horror.

Events echo some of those in The Exorcist but are played by (excepting mom) uninspired actors who behave very illogically. My score is 5 out of 10.

It's not always easy to empathise with the alleged heroes in giallo films. Take Enrico - he's a married teacher, and he's first scene trying to have sex with the student with whom he's having an affair. When she's distracted by what appears to be a murder taking place, he gets angry. That's your central character, folks!

We're so preoccupied with Enrico (Fabio Testi)and his wife Herta (Karin Baal), and the subsequent murders of course, that it escapes our notice that the titular character Solange does not make an appearance until a large proportion of the film has taken place.

Giallo films - described by Wikipedia as '‘20th-century Italian slasher genre of literature and film, usually with mystery elements and often with either supernatural horror or crime fiction elements’ - is a fairly broad and far-reaching genre, usually involving a killer dressed in black wielding a serrated knife or somesuch. There's a lot more to that set-up here, and at the centre of it, a grim and upsetting story.

Before this film is even ten minutes into its running time, we have had naked vampires, sex, gore and two 'You've got to be f****** kidding me's. I'm surprised at how much I like it. The initially dreaded 'group of friends go on a road trip' is as unpromising as these things often are: 'crazy' kids tearing up the countryside to the soundtrack of rock music never fills me with a desire for anything other than to skip forward. The characters are given the first names of characters from the John Hughes teen flick 'The Breakfast Club (1985)'. The results are oddly American names for a very British collective, this decision hardly adding to their already scant credibility. Outwitting and out-glaring each other at every opportunity, it isn't long before they are accosted by a raving man at a petrol station - this brief scene actually explains the main thrust of the story: angels have been rejected from Heaven because of extreme sexual desires and apparently frequent the nearby woodlands. Problem is, this is all relayed so briefly and in the form of such extreme ranting, that the details are very easy to overlook.

The rest of the film plays out in a series of repetitive attacks and naked seductions that won't please everyone - but I found myself becoming entranced by this world within a world where creatures of the night rule.

There's an appearance from horror author Shaun Hutson which continues the rest of the film's run of unconvincing acting but is an interesting way to end nonetheless.