Film Reviews by NP

When does a bad film become a good film? If you watch something and it's kept you entertained until the end, surely that proves it has something of merit? You'd think so, but the line between good and bad remains blurred.

By 1941, Bela Lugosi had ascended heights that only the lord of vampires could allow him, and the lows brought about by a subsequent purge of all cinematic horror in the late '30s. A possible result of this saw him rarely turn down a job, which led to him being treated shabbily by money-minded studios and also, that he would show up in some below-par productions. His run of films for Monogram Pictures was of a quality frequently treated less than seriously today - or even then. 'The Invisible Ghost' is the first of these. It's unimaginatively shot, resulting in many repetitive scenes and the plot makes no real sense, other than to present the audience with a few ghostly images and an unlikely murder saga.

And yet it has a certain something. Former silent screen star Betty Compson is excellent as Virginia, the confused, apparently doomed wife of Charles Kessler (Lugosi). Both of these actors are far better than the material, which nevertheless serves up a few sinister moments. John McGuire plays Ralph, but his limited range is stretched to also play twin brother John. Evans (Clarence Muse) is spared the usual wide-eyed eccentricities most coloured butlers from this era are afforded. He emerges as possibly the best-played character, and rather than being a comedy foil, is the one who stumbles across various killings.

There you have The Invisible Ghost. A slipshod, quickly shot delight, definitely worth your time.

This chatty French horror film has similarities with 2014’s ‘Up Above, So Below’. I found that film’s success surprising for such a lacklustre production, so my enthusiasm for ‘Bunker 717’ (sometimes known as ‘Deep Fear’) was muted. The results here are pretty good.

Three students decide to celebrate their graduation by exploring the catacombs underneath Paris. They appear to be followed down there by a couple of skinhead ne’er do wells.

Things start off slowly and it’s a pity some of the time wasn’t spent allowing us to get to know the characters better; they are all fairly likeable, but sketchy. The main antagonist, who is impressive but used very sparingly, would also have benefited from some semblance of a backstory.

This is low-key, but mainly fun. The claustrophobic setting is well conveyed and there’s a real sense of ‘things lurking in the shadows’. This, and a convincing level of gore, coupled with an effective ending, makes for a fairly effective 80 minutes. My score is 6 out of 10.

A curiously produced film, inconsistent in tone. Very talky scenes are followed by often boringly staged action sequences that tend to drag. Shortly after we’ve been introduced to the characters - Emily Whitcomb as Harriet, the lone survivor of a vicious attack and the gunman she hires Hawes, played by Mike Markoff – there’s a long scene with a widower and her young son, that serves no purpose, and is never referred to again.

Director and co-writer Rene Perez has proven prolific in low-budget horror and, despite the erratic nature of ‘The Legend of Hawes’, is an interesting name nonetheless. Visually, this has a washed-out look, as if the saturation has been filtered down, giving an oddly grey sheen to the often-sunny locations. Also, Perez has decided to liberally embellish the film with faux scratches and blurs from time to time, perhaps in a bid to liven up the very long dialogue-heavy scenes.

I find it hard to be too critical of this; it was clearly made with little budget and boasts a convincing cast of actors who do their best to breathe life into the lacklustre characters. The rampaging murderers who make lives miserable in this Wild Western location are a curiously interesting bunch of outlaws, growling behind their effective flesh masks, although we learn little about them. There’s a refreshing pro-religion theme lightly sprinkled throughout too, which doesn’t happen often. My score is 6 out of 10.

A nicely paced, carefully made low-budget horror film, with a small cast of convincing actors and some immersive sound design. Director and co-writer Ty Leisher creates here a character-based, claustrophobic nightmare featuring my favourite setting – a world within a world.

Four crime scene cleaners find the house they are refining is under the spell of a Nordic demon, which you might consider to be bad enough – but it also makes escape impossible and maintains that whatever goes on inside is imperceptible to those outside. That’s to say anyone calling will find the house impenetrable but there will be nothing of a suspicious nature, entirely impervious to the panicked cries of those inside the dwelling unable to make themselves heard.

The rising panic is well conveyed, and the occasional reminders of the characters’ personal situations cause additional friction. The marrying of the mundanities of every day relationships and the madness of demonic possession is effectively conveyed. Only the familiar modulated voices and glowing CGI eyes advertise any unoriginality. My score is 8 out of 10.

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the nastiest of them all? Hot-tempered philanderer Don (CM Punk, under his real name Phil Brooks)? He has a one-night stand while his pregnant wife is away working to keep him in money, and he explains the affair by saying ‘it is what it is’. Or maybe it’s sultry temptress Sarah (Sarah Brooks) who, knowing his marital situation, is more than happy to get her leg over? Certainly, it isn’t Cooper, his Alsatian, whose every glare can either be charming, intimidatory, funny or just plain hungry.

Whatever the deficiencies in the characters, they are at least interesting, and the continual haunted mischief of the house he is trying to renovate (“Who paints a room pink?”) is well-staged and eerily relentless. The unravelling story is strangely compelling and the flawed characters are well played. Director Travis Stevens does a good job of piling on the menace, and if it isn’t particularly scary, it is certainly brutal and something that makes an impression. I like the way Don’s beloved death metal music seeps into the incidental, providing quite a unique score.

Like Stevens’ 2015 film, ‘We Are Still Here’ (a favourite of mine), ‘Girl on the Third Floor’ leaves us with questions only generally skirted over – which I have no problem with. I’m not a fan of undoing all the carefully built-up atmosphere by explaining everything away, but we’re made to wait until near the end before Don’s behaviour is – partially – explained. My score is 7 out of 10.

The first few minutes of Rich Ragsdale’s 2022 film had me feeling cautious. I couldn’t see how this cosily directed story about an attractive, slightly annoying young couple could shift in style throughout its 91 minutes enough to be a convincing horror. I think it was about the time that Grace (top screamer Scout Taylor-Compton, probably best known for her enthusiastic turn as Laurie Strode in Rob Zombie’s two enjoyable ‘Halloween’ films) was having a shard of glass removed from the underside of her foot by her plank of a husband Jack (Nolan Gerard Funk). It’s a jarringly gruesome scene, and the camera is in no hurry to move away from it.

I can’t help but notice other reviewers have pointed out that this story is little more than horror set-pieces and clichés taken from other genre films. I can’t really disagree with this – there are certainly some familiar ideas here – but also should point out that you wouldn’t necessarily notice this sense of déjà vu if you weren’t an avid horror film watcher. As such, it’s unfair to expect every genre film to present something entirely unlike the plethora of other horrors seen. There’s bound to be a certain similarity with other like-minded productions, especially those of ‘folk horror’, a niche into which ‘The Long Night’ (also known as ‘The Coven’) happily falls.

There’s also a continuing thread featuring snakes, which doesn’t add hugely to the story, other than to allow a scene during the climax to look extremely unpleasant.

I liked this film a lot. To begin so meekly, and then to develop into something increasingly twisted ensures the gruesomeness during the latter half is satisfyingly unexpected, and its leaning into delirium is powerful indeed. My score is 8 out of 10.

This is a beautifully photographed thriller starring a cast of prolific actors, from Charlotte Rampling, Bruno Cremer (whom I recognised from the wonderful Vanessa Paradis vehicle ‘Noce Blanche/White Wedding’) and Hugues Quester (from Jean Rollin’s extraordinary ‘La Rose de fer/The Iron Rose’). If I was more familiar with French cinema, I’m sure a lot more actors would be recognisable to me.

Rampling does here what she always does – adds a lot more to her role (that of Claire) than is written. Yet, even she cannot make anything compelling out of this wafer-thin story, which involves little more than shunting her from one freezingly stunning location to another. There’s sporadic blood and violence, but the main attraction this has for me is to enjoy the way the story is told, rather than the story itself. Even that becomes somewhat laborious from time to time, sadly. My score is 4 out of 10.

A lonely housewife, bored and isolated in a foreign place, imagines she is being stalked; meanwhile, there are news reports of a killer on the streets. Is she imagining her predicament, or is it real?

Not the most original premise for a plot. It’s been done many times before, but Chloe Okuno directs her story so artily and invests the Bucharest location with such an atmosphere, and the acting is so good, that it’s difficult not to become immersed in this. Every player makes the most of their roles without ever overdoing things. There’s a certain restraint all around, in fact, that the moments of revelation – and there are a few – are that much more powerful. All accompanied by a backdrop of seemingly endless city rain

Kudos to Maika Monroe as Julia, whom no one believes, Karl Glusman as husband Francis, who begins sympathetically before proving to be absolutely useless. Madalina Anea deserves mention as Irina, a welcome shoulder for Julia (at least for a while) to lean on and Burn Gorman as Daniel, whose sly glances and furtive gait are open to interpretation throughout.

‘Watcher’ tells its story well and then leaves the viewer to join the pieces together. Possibly there’s an overuse of un-subtitled Romanian chit-chat to convey Julia’s feelings of exclusion away from home, and it’s true to say that some of the cast could do with speaking up more. But I found this very enjoyable – and yes, it does all make sense. My score is 7 out of 10.

There have been many exorcism films produced in the fifty years since 1973’s ‘The Exorcist’. So how come none have come close to the original? It might seem unfair to compare possession films, but William Friedkin’s take on William Peter Blatty’s screenplay was so wholly dark and horrifying, and cast such a huge shadow, it’s perhaps not astonishing nothing since has come close.

Here we have a fairly formulaic exorcism film, featuring impressive production values and often very strong acting. The story goes through the usual paces and produces a few moments that might chill the viewer. If this is the first such film you ever saw, you might be impressed, if a little bored.

Daniel Stamm’s direction makes good use of the locations and goes through the motions of CGI which works some of the time and looks ludicrous at others. Performances from Posy Taylor as Natalie, Jacqueline Byers as Sestra Ann, Colin Salmon as Ojciec Quinn and a frail-looking Ben Cross as Kardynal Matthews (he died ten days after completion) are notable in a sea of good performances.

Yet ‘Prey for the Devil’ buckles beneath the shadow that falls across it, and remains a box-ticking exercise in emulating scenes from other such productions. My score is 5 out of 10.

I quite enjoyed this low-key tale of a young couple moving into a house in Spain. It has been inherited by Sarah (Elena Delia) much to her surprise, and her and boyfriend Jared’s (Luke Bailey) delight in discovering the spacious rooms and new home comforts endears us to them. So, when inevitably unpleasant things start to happen, we’re on their side.

Unfortunately, these occurrences are far from horrific and this isn’t down to the low budget. Director Nicholas Winter fails to invest anything that might frighten, or indeed much in the way of atmosphere. Instead, it falls to the small cast to react to and fall under the influence of the evil influence Sarah’s dead mother (whose house this was) has left there. This asks too much of the actors, who work hard, but aren’t helped by a lack of any tangible nastiness. My score is 5 out of 10.

Rib Hillis, whose name looks like a typo, has great fun investing the titular character with as much pantomime villainy as possible; he leads the cast of this TV Movie. It has an interesting, if not bizarre, premise. His character Carl Highstrom uses extreme storms to cover up his crimes.

There is an impressive arsenal of effects on display that do their best to convince us there is extreme storm activity, there’s overacting, and there’s a surprisingly undramatic story. Several unevenly staged effects are employed to make Highstrom appear as evil as possible, but he never rises above daytime television nastiness. My score for this is 6 out of 10.

In a film with this kind of title, directed by Jess Franco, it’s no surprise that not ten minutes have gone by before the two main characters are enjoying each other’s company intimately. Emmanuelle and her husband Andreus have chosen a curiously unfrequented wax museum to indulge in some brief sex. Franco regular Antonio Mayans, billed here as Robert Foster plays hubby.

Of all the many females to have adorned Jess Franco’s productions, Muriel Montossé is the one I find the most titillating. That’s a purely personal view of course, but apart from her stunning looks and shape, she is also a very good actress, really capable of selling the allure of the two – surprisingly similar – main characters she has played for Franco. In fact, the similarities between this film (which contains no orgies, by the way – the title is typically provocative more than it is accurate) and the following year’s ‘Cecilia’ are palpable. In both productions, the two actors play an equally fractious couple who find their rocky relationship fuelled by their peccadillos.

Here, we have rugged Tony Skios playing Marqués who the film is eager to show us from the opening voiceover onwards, is an absolute swine. His sharp-dressed swagger and smouldering looks paint him as a very laconic rotter, except other than proving to be less sexually impressive than he believes himself to be, he proves to be as much of a cypher as the other characters. The plot peters out into a flurry of thankfully non-invasive sex scenes, all accompanied by briskly plucked flamenco guitar music. No need to worry about missing any vital parts of the storyline because there aren’t any - but then, any aficionado of Franco would be familiar with this approach. By the end, it is unclear whether the viewer has lost interest in the film, or Franco himself; it does seem very slapdash in its final act.

Muriel Montossé has escaped the fate of some of Jess’s performers and enjoyed a prolific career, and she certainly gives Emmanuelle more overt sexuality and character than we might otherwise have got, but despite the lip-smacking locations, there’s not a huge amount to get excited about here. My score is 5 out of 10.

A 'mockbuster' from the Asylum company, who specialise in making films that have a startling similarity to a current big-budget production, usually of the horror/monster variety.

Eric Roberts has been spliced into this one, featuring in a number of scattered scenes apparently alone, although joined by other cast members toward the end.

There's not a huge amount to say about this that isn't obvious. The effects are variable, with the 'monster' appearing less but more impressively than the 'ape', who has the characteristics of a chimp - more cuddly than menacing. There's a passing plot regarding aliens and UFOs, purely to explain the outsized nature of the beasts, which isn't expanded upon.

The results are a curious mix of styles: a film made for youngsters, but one that is filled with long scenes of people talking that would surely bore younger viewers. The creatures are only briefly shown. My score is 4 out of 10.

The opening scenes are surely a homage to the beginning of 'Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman', but filmed in garish blues and greens. There are many little nods to classic horror, some of which are shown being enjoyed on an old television by the titular characters.

The humour, always difficult and subjective, is mixed. Some moments work, others do not - and often outstay their welcome. The performances take time to make an impact but manage to have an endearing quality, and the chemistry between the leads is good. Sylvester McCoy, the Seventh Doctor Who, is good value as butler Igor.

Such is the OTT-ness of it all, it seems churlish to mention inconsistencies, but continuity is not adhered to. For example, one of the main jokes is how terrified 'normal' people react to the Munsters, but in some scenes, like when they move to a new house, people are entirely unconcerned by their appearance.

The three leads - no Marilyn or young Eddie here - are all suitably eccentric and display good, manic comedy timing. They also strike a clever balance between bringing their own portrayal to the fore, but with enough echoes of Fred Gwynne, Al Lewis and Yvonne De Carlo to please those of us who remember the originals. Sherri Moon brings a real other-worldly innocence to her stylised Lily despite the actor's lack of a light touch often necessary in comedy.

Get past the excruciating first few scenes with smart-arsed kids and goofy adolescents and the unfolding story of young Corey is so enjoyable and well-played/written that for a while, you almost forget you're watching a Halloween film - much less, the final (?) film in the trilogy that began with the 2018 reboot.

I might be the wrong demographic for this; Michael Myers was initially an enigmatic force of evil, with a strong suggestion that he might be more than human somehow. The 1978 original showed he was particularly difficult to destroy, but no real answers were given until a stream of sequels had to somehow expand his character without giving too much away - which in my view made him, and the franchise his stories had become, ludicrous. That's why I applaud the way this production kept him very much in the background for the first half.

The kills, when they come, are often disappointing and bloodless, occurring off-camera or 'artfully' in the background. Some impress though - the local DJ, for example, comes to an impressive end.

The acting is suitably intense throughout; Jamie Lee Curtis really does convey a lifetime of fighting an unstoppable enemy. "Evil doesn't die, it just changes shape," she says at one point. In all, I enjoyed this closing caper a lot more than I expected to. After seemingly endless rehashes, the Halloween trilogy ends on a real high - not what many expected but imaginative and effective as far as I'm concerned. And there are a few punch-the-air moments like when John Carpenter's familiar music kicks in during the end credits. My score is 8 out of 10.