Film Reviews by NP

It isn’t difficult to understand how this film received various negative comments on its title alone. One letter makes all the difference. To put myself in the position of independent film-makers – if I wanted extra exposure for a production, I would be tempted to give it a name very similar to a well-known franchise in the hope that some would purchase this thinking it was somehow related to the better-known release and hopefully like what they see. I can sympathise with that approach. Clearly, I’d be open to various accusations, but maybe even that would give my film an extra boost.

‘Hellriser’, as its title is supposed to suggest, is actually a parody of other horror films, with various references thrown in. Director/writer Steve Lawson clearly has very little money to play with and while I’m usually a fan of low-budget ventures that people have worked hard on, ‘Hellriser’ sadly doesn’t really succeed.

To be able to poke fun at other franchises, however well meant, you need to produce something of quality to be able to do so, otherwise the audience will spend their time noticing the lack of sets, the varied acting and the meandering story instead of appreciating attempts at comedy (mainly reserved for character names – Locke and Keyes for example, as well as the insane Dr. Unnseine). If you lack a certain sophistication, then either make an outright comedy, or an outright horror and allow that to become the main focus; ‘Hellriser’ tries to be both and ends up being neither, I’m sorry to say. A shame, because it starts off quite well. My score is 5 out of 10.

A found footage-style story elevated to pandemic life, and its need for Zoom conversations and face masks. However, this isn’t about Covid, although it was filmed under the restraints of social distancing etc. This is about six initially irritating friends and how they foolishly and unwittingly release an unfriendly spirit during an online séance. Actually, that’s unfair – Jemma (played by Jemma Moore – yes, the Blair Witch notion of naming characters after the actors is alive and well) is really the culprit, and you could shake her for her stupidity. Token male Teddy (Edward Linyard) is equally moronic in his reaction to what is going on – but without such characters, no drama would be allowed to unfold.

At just shy of 60 minutes, this film never threatens to outstay its welcome. It just has time to introduce us briskly to the characters – all played beautifully, and very naturally. It’s easy to believe they are friends getting together for a good time – and then crack on with scaring us.

With six screens for each character, there’s plenty of opportunity to catch subtle little moments that indicate all is not well. Definitely this is one for repeated viewings. Things don’t remain subtle for long though, and as things get more intense, there are plenty of reasons for the audience to jump out of their seats. Truly unnerving. After a slightly testing beginning as we get to see deeper than the characters’ often annoying personalities, this is a cracker of a film. My score is 8 out of 10.

Angvia is in space, in a different timescale or something. The first fifteen minutes are spent watching James (Robin Hawdon) and Ann (Yutte Stensgaard) paying cards.

Highpoints, at least as far as casting is concenred is Charles Hawtrey (as Swyne) and James Robertson Justice (Major Bourdon). These two legendry performers could be said to be playing their roles uncharacteristically straight – or possibly uninterested.

Zeta One attempts to be a sort of sci-fi, camp James Bond production. Viewed in 2021, it is pretty tedious and tame. The first scene features James coming home to find Ann barely dressed, having prepared a sumptuous dinner (which they never get to eat). I’m no fan of knocking productions that were very much a product of its time – it’s a very lazy and unfair thing to do – but if I say this lacks the wit and sophistication of the Carry On films, you’ll get some idea as to its level. Sadly, despite featuring a planned sexy alien invasion of swinging London in 1969, it’s also rather dull.

James Word (… is his Bond, get it?) sports a moustache that comes and goes, and spends most of the time pouting and posturing in bed with many lovely young ladies while trying to glue the paper-thin plot strands together. The inconsistencies in the execution (Word disappears for vast swatches of time, and Bourdon disappears before the finale) indicate some kind of troubled production. Actor Hawdon tested for the role of James Bond before Roger Moore got the role.

It’s odd rather than amusing, looks pretty cheap and every female character seems to be dubbed, which happened a lot in films around this time. A rather tedious curio. My score is 4 out of 10.

When a film decides to wrong-foot the audience with pretty large twists and turns, as this does, things could either become very good or very bad. It’s a risk I applaud the makers for.

To begin with, the characters are pretty obnoxious, but as events spiral, we are encouraged to feel sorry for them, and see that their lives lived on vlogs are merely self-promoting and not really doing anyone any harm. Then things go beyond that. Then things go beyond *that.* Do events become ridiculous? Oh yes.

For my money, the first third of the film is okay – we get past the hopelessly-in-love perfect-couple and into an intriguing premise. The second act is where everything is turned on its head and things get very creepy and entertaining. The third act is where another layer is added – but unfortunately this final twist is badly (and hurriedly) executed. However, it does go some way to debunking the mushiness of the opening sequences via some home truths from the character of Brooke (Amanda Delaney), and for that it earns an extra point.

A mixed bag then, but commendable nonetheless, despite a tepid finale. My score is 7 out of 10.

Astonishingly dull Blair Witchery taking place in the Amazon jungle. Characters with limited personalities are frightened by unsubtle animal noises. If the barks and warbles sounded as if they were deep in the jungle, or far in the distance, that would be more effective, but the snarls sound as if they have been recorded close to the camera in post-production. This is impossible, however, because we are told that the footage we are watching is actually real, even down to the ambient incidental score present during the rare moments of tension.

“I need to go pee.”

“Why are you filming this?”

“It’s in my blood.”

“OMG, OMG,OMG, OMG, OMG.”

I couldn’t get worked up about this at all. My score is 3 out of 10, with an extra point for a fairly satisfying revelation toward the end.

Tonight she comes

Bodily fluids and gore, with a Tangerine Dream-style score.

This darn thing starts off oddly and gets a good deal weirder, almost as if director and writer Matt Stuertz is out to tick as many ‘offensive’ (whatever that truly means) boxes as he can. If that is his intent, he makes a good effort.

We meet the dreaded ‘group of friends’. As usual, their number comprise of the drunken and the horny – but they are strangely appealing and quite funny too, despite dialogue that indicates their desire for sex overrides all concerns for their safety. So it’s a true shock when those you expect to make it to the final reel end up dispatched partway through, and in a fairly gory fashion too.

The gross concepts, carried out with a suitably gratuitous flourish, overwhelm the storyline, especially towards the shock-stacked ending. However, there are enough horrifically scenic moments and visuals not to let that bother us too much.

All the cast put in powerful performances (especially Larissa White as Ashley, Jenna McDonald as Felicity and Nathan Eswine as James), really buying into the growing series of extremes Stuertz has dreamed up. Brutal and ultimately often open to interpretation, I found myself tangled up in this gleeful weirdness. Maybe you will too, but it’s far from certain. My score is 7 out of 10.

At the time of writing, Sir Christopher Lee has recently passed away at the age of 93.

This is the final film he made for Hammer as Dracula, the role that brought him to the attention of so many. Derided by many over the years, not least by its leading actor, and released at a time when interest in Hammer productions had waned considerably, this once more reunited Lee with Peter Cushing as Van Helsing.

This was one of the films horror films I ever saw, and I am happy to say I loved it then (when it was shown on television in the late 70s) and I love it now. This is the second time Hammer made a picture featuring Dracula in the modern day, and this time they got it absolutely right. The Count had been secretly recruiting people to his cult for a while by the time the story starts, so he is already in a position of power. Living as the reclusive DD Denham, he is very rarely known to leave his tower-block office empire. What better place for a modern day vampire to exist, hiding in plain sight?

Van Helsing (and daughter Jessica, now played by Joanna Lumley) is brought in by the police when it appears that Denham doesn’t show up in photographs, suggesting something sinister. At first Van Helsing is treated with scepticism, but this changes when it appears The Count, sick of his undead unlife, is planning to sweep a plague across all of the Earth.

I love that anyone who comes in to contact with Count’s plan dies (Freddie Jones’ Professor Keeley is the most memorable); I love that he doesn’t dirty his hands with the mundanities of his mission, rather leaving all that to the various political members of his cult. I love that an effort has actually been made to integrate Dracula into society – even when he is not in the story, he directly influences everything that happens. Equally, his victims are confined to Pelham House, which is not a shambling church or sprawling castle. His seduction/attack on Valerie Van Ost’s Jane takes place in a seedy backroom prison, lit only by a swinging bulb. Into that scene Dracula enters, backlit and surrounded by mist, and his impressive frame lights up the dilapidated chamber and Alan Gibson’s fine direction encourages the allurement to be an almost hallucinatory experience.

The ending, and Dracula’s final despatch, has also been slated by ‘fans’, but again, I like it. No elaborate theatrics (that is left to Michael Cole’s Inspector Murray’s spectacular rescue of Jessica), just two deadly, veteran rivals, slugging it out alone. The hawthorn bush is added to the list of ‘all things deadly to a vampire’ (it provided Christ with His crown of thorns after all), and that together with a stake through the heart and Hammer’s Dracula is gone for good. This final, and significant film, is the only one of the series – and possibly Lee’s only picture – that doesn’t currently enjoy an official DVD release. There are low quality efforts available, but this surely deserves a release more worthy, allowing more people to re-value it.

*Since writing this review, the film has finally been officially released in a cleaned up version. Hooray!

You’re not to worry too much about period detail and accuracy in this ridiculous but entertainingly grim film.

Visually, this is superb. There’s a Dario Argento flavour to the rich colour canvas used by director Neil Marshall (who co-wrote this with leading actress Charlotte Kirk). Things are briskly paced too, sometimes too much during important scenes (the Squire’s lacing of one character’s drink in a fairly crucial bar scene, for one; blink and you’ll miss it). The 106 minute running time never stands still for long.

Despite this, some explanations might have helped my appreciation. Does heroine Grace hallucinate that she sees, and gets intimate with, the devil, or is he real? There’s a scene that indicates that his night-time visits might be real, but as Grace is closely guarded at all times and no-one notices anything out of the ordinary, this is far from clear.

If this is about female empowerment, it doesn’t convince because Grace’s Herculean recovery from the relentless and staggered punishments she receives are preposterous. She suffers nothing more than a slight limp which doesn’t impede her overpowering various powerful people and freeing prisoners. At the end, I wondered – jokingly – if she was going to swim across the lengthy moat as well. Blow me, she did! An alternative view is that she was indeed willed to survive by the demon, which would make sense, but doesn’t do a lot to underline her own strength.

The torture she endures never quite makes the us hide behind our hands because we’re spared truly graphic scenes – but we’re left in doubt exactly what will happen to her, as it is often described in loving detail by terrific villains Moorcroft (Sean Pertwee) and The Squire (Stephen Waddington).

This is a ‘Witchfinder General’-type film given the 2021 ‘final girl’ treatment. Whilst Grace looks every inch a modern day lass and her physical prowess under the circumstances is ludicrous, I had a good time with this. It’s colourful, has some terrific imagery and displays some committed acting. My score is 7 out of 10.

Condensing Stephen Fry’s mammoth story into a 90 minute film cannot have been an easy task, with its bulging cast list and wealth of set-pieces, but director John Jencks makes a good fist of it.

I’m not sure anyone other than Fry himself could do justice to the role of Ted Wallace, or at least so I thought before watching Roger Allam in the role. Ensuring a jaded, disillusioned, permanently bad tempered alcoholic is so likeable must have been tricky, but it works here. In fact most of the characters as written, are distinctly dislikeable – or perhaps flawed would be a better word. If they were not, they wouldn’t be so interesting, or the story so entertaining. Bringing Wallace’s endless tirade of expletives to life so hilariously is done as well as it could possibly be.

It’s true to say that, with so many characters, some are distinctly under-written and don’t feature quite as heavily as they might, but as far as I remember from the book, no relevant scene has been excised, and no character has been forgotten.

Greatly entertaining. My score is 8 out of 10.

Imagine if family favourite ‘The Dukes of Hazzard’ had been produced by Freddie Krueger, this is the kind of thing you might have ended up with. Raucous, coarse, loaded with every variation of every expletive you have ever heard; brutal, violent and completely ridiculous, ‘Hidden in the Woods’ is, if you’re in the right mood, highly entertaining.

There’s nothing like a father’s love, is there? “Nobody messes with my babies,” says Oscar Crooker (Michael Biehn) at one point. To list the depravities this man has subjected his ‘babies’ to would be to venture into spoilers. He’s a phenomenally diabolical character – and he’s in good company.

The atrocities heaped on various characters are relentless and appalling, but there’s a dank humour in there also, and despite being shocking, the films is a highly entertaining way of spending just over 90 minutes. 7 out of 10.

‘The Other Lamb’ tells its slim story amidst some beautifully shot Irish locations. The acting on display from all concerned is very persuasive and convincing.

There is, however, an element of ‘is that it?’ as the final scene rolls along. There are no real surprises here, and the audience is allowed instead to follow events until the inevitable occurs at the end. That’s not to say the influence of Shepherd (Michiel Huisman) isn’t convincing – because it is - and his flock’s devotion to him equally so.

We’re not given any reasons, other than Shepherd took girls from their ‘broken’ lives to be with him, as to how he achieved his status, where he came from or what his aims were/are. Perhaps this is to perpetuate the view that he is truly as benign and timeless as he is seen to be.

Enjoyable and scenic, this won’t thrill you with its story; but that doesn’t seem the intention. My score is 6 out of 10.

Written and directed by Sam Farmer, this film involves a recent widow (Camille Keaton) – and occasionally her equally resolute daughter – and her fight against the sons of a local extortioner. That’s about it as far as the story goes.

My favourite aspect of this is the level of most of the performances, in which the actors go to town to let us know how thoroughly despicable they are, particularly Scott Peeler as Wayne McMahon.

As Marsha, Keaton begins the story as a gun-wielding no-nonsense taker, and that’s how she stays. Little progresses in this story, and with an equally thin pay-off, it doesn’t make for a hugely rewarding experience. My score is 5 out of 10.

Directed by Louisa Warren, (who brought us ‘Pagan Warrior’, ‘The Tooth Fairy’, ‘Scarecrow Rising’ and ‘The Ghosts of Borley Rectory’) this clearly low-budget venture has once more been written off by a number of online critics because … it’s a low-budget venture. With that in mind, one can either admire the ambition of such a production as this, featuring much physical conflict and extensive location filming, or moan about the occasionally stilted acting and tepid fight choreography from the performers.

I’m a big fan of low-budget films. Any lack of resource is often more than made up for by freedom of ideas and lack of pandering to high-flying producers (no pun intended – this is distributed by High Fliers films) and demographics.

I enjoyed this. There’s a good story being told, some impassioned performances and a genuine build up of tension as the tale progresses. There are some pacing issues, and some characters’ antics suffer from a certain repetition. Lead Ingrid (Darcie Rose) in particular, looks far too modern, as do some of the others, but is played well enough to excuse that. Darrell Griggs is especially good as the unhinged Gunner and Peter Cosgrove snorts and snarls nicely as Snorre. Technically, the production is faultless – great use is made of locations. Mr score is 7 out of 10.

Produced on a micro-budget, ‘Night Kaleidoscope’ makes every moment count – at least visually – with varied camera effects and sweeping, distorted panoramas across Edinburgh, usually at daybreak.

Director Grant McPhee provides us with a grim and dangerous world, and the cast are very good; much better than is often the case with films like this.

The story is a thin one, which may annoy some people. I loved every grimy, seedy second of it, and I hope it isn’t the last we hear from Grant McPhee. My score is 8 out of 10.

Very odd to see genre beauties Ewa Aulin and Gina Lollobrigida brandishing dead chickens, but this giallo goes out of its way to perplex and stupefy us, thanks to director and co-writer Giulio Questi’s vision. The music, usually sweeping and inviting in these kind of films, is a series of tuneless flourishes here, as if Bruno Maderna had been instructed to provide anything as long as it wasn’t melodic.

I found ‘Death Laid an Egg’ too 60s-kitsch-quirky to become completely involved in, although Ms Aulin is ridiculously cute throughout. The story is a thin one, and engages mainly because of the performances. My score is 6 out of 10.