That statement above might sound a little ominous, but it’s not – it’s a polite warning. Although The Last Exorcism is very scary in places and genuinely terrifying in others, please don’t be mis-sold by the film’s current marketing campaign. Don’t let the posters fool you – this is not an all out green-goo vomiting screamfest full of f*ck me Jesuses and gravity-defying clambering on the ceiling. The campaign poster with a girl somehow spidering around the top corner of a room never actually happens. Not even close, unless you count someone squatting on a cupboard, which you shouldn’t. Nor should you be fooled by the “Eili Roth presents” tag, as the film doesn’t contain chainsaw wielding psychopaths, lots of breasts or bucketloads of claret-splattered teenage morons. The Last Exorcism is a film with an incredibly subtle build, it’s an entertaining “documentary” that gradually gains in intensity and creepiness until it throws in some utterly terrifying scenes that surprise, shock and horrify. It is smart, sharp and brilliantly constructed. Consider yourself warned – ignore the marketing and listen to Gorepress. Now you may go and see it. NOW.

Faith-questioning evangelical minister Cotton Marcus (Patrick Fabian) has been an exorcist for years, since a very early age, and he’s finally had a change of heart. Realizing that exorcisms might actually do people more harm than good, he agrees to do a documentary on his final exorcism. He wants to expose the tricks, lies and misdirection involved in convincing families across America that exorcism is real and that exorcists can actually “cure” people of possession. Picking his final case at random, he takes the documentary crew to a small farm in the backwaters of Louisiana. Here they meet the Sweetzer family, who believe daughter Nell has been possessed by a demon, apparently responsible for a spate of animal killings on their farm.

So far, so Channel 4 documentary. This build is very interesting, with snappy, kinetic clips of Cotton preaching in church and revealing his views on Catholicism and exorcism. It’s genuinely convincing stuff and you begin to wholly believe in the film. Patrick Fabian is superb as Cotton, creating a surprisingly likeable evangelist minister who no longer takes his religion seriously. He’s an entertainer first and a believer second, and this is why his faith is so critically damaged. The entire cast of The Last Exorcism is excellent – even the smaller roles provide the necessary comic relief that you normally expect in any documentary. Ashley Bell is exceptional as the “possessed” daughter Nell, providing both a country-girl innocence and a terrifying look of absolute psychosis from one moment to the next – it’s a brilliantly disturbing performance. The cast all do a superb job of convincing you to buy into the premise – which is what makes the latter half of the film so harrowing.

Once Cotton and the documentary crew arrive at the Sweetzer farm, Cotton sets about proving how ridiculous exorcisms are, cheating his way to revealing “miracles” and “signs of the devil”, using strings, sound effects and even electric-buzzer rings to convince the by-standers it’s all genuine. Satisfied he’s done a good job and exposed the audacity of fake exorcisms on camera, Cotton and the film crew head back to their hotel. Yet it’s not over. Not by a lot shot. Cotton wakes up to find Nell in his hotel room, disturbingly catatonic, and he’s forced into doing another exorcism. But this time it’s different – very different – and soon the faithless minister must reassess his beliefs to defeat something he never thought could ever exist…

To reveal any more would be unfair and spoil the surprises. And there are a lot. Most of them very scary. Although it does occasionally tick the “possessed person” cliché box, this is perhaps unavoidable considering the subject matter, but even when it does dip into unoriginal territory it does so uniquely, smartly and very convincingly, and mostly importantly for a horror film, it does it scarily. The Last Exorcism is frightening – it lulls you into a false sense of security then gradually eats your safety net away, until you’re dangling over an abyss of horror and unbelievable tension. It’s very well done.

The Last Exorcism is not perfect, however. The ending doesn’t hugely satisfy, although it throws out a lot of interesting ideas, and it’ll receive a mixed response from audiences – some will love it and understand it, while others may find it lazy and stupid. The only real quibble is the occasional directional choice, where the “documentary” camera switches to another angle instantly and impossibly. This betrays the film’s realism, but it’s hardly noticeable enough to really upset the style and pace. Daniel Stamm does an exceptional job and should be lauded for his achievements.

The Last Exorcism is excellent. It’s a genuinely terrifying horror film that gradually sneaks up on you, twists around your nerves and then pounces. Despite some jarring directional choices, it is realistic, well acted, fantastically created and very scary. Watch it at the cinema if you can, because this deserves your attention. Now.

Rating: 8 out of 10 stars

Robert Anderson (David Schofield) is on the brink of a nervous breakdown. Suspended from teaching after a violent incident with a boy in his classroom, secondary-school teacher Robert sees his life fall to pieces. His wife leaves him, his daughter hates him, the other teachers pity him and the pupils openly mock him. He turns to drink and loses passion for his job. Alone, desperate and sad, he believes his life couldn’t get any worse… He was wrong.

Staying late with his in-detention daughter, the school suddenly comes under attack. Not by monsters or terrorists or aliens, but by faceless free-running teenagers in hoods. And not just under attack, but murderous assault. Robert finds himself stuck in the school building with a smattering of teachers, school staff and an incompetent security guard. With his daughter missing and a gang of brutal killers on the loose, Robert has to finally take responsibility and protect his daughter from harm.

The synopsis above doesn’t do F justice. The build up is intense, the characters compelling and the dialogue sharp. The score especially compels, propelling the movie forward as the violence worsens and the siege becomes a battle to escape. It is initially well constructed, but becomes a little undisciplined toward the end.

The violence in F is implicit rather than in-your-face, which is a welcome surprise after the plethora of Saw-esque “show everything” death fests we’ve been treated to recently. There are some truly disturbing moments – security guard barbeque, jaw-battered teacher, barbed wire facial – but it’s the moments of horrible realization on the victims’ faces, seconds before death, which really stick in the mind. Yet it’s also extremely frustrating that you never see the final fates of some characters – the policewoman, the security guard, even the evil hooded teens tearing up the building – and some may find this more annoying than simply acceptable. The ending may also frustrate, but I personally found it sharp and smart.

What makes F work so well is the acting. Every part is cast perfectly, with David Schofield playing the emotionally-battered Robert Anderson to perfection. He is instantly believable, and loveable despite his flaws. Schofield is startlingly truthful in his portrayal of a man holding his life together by minute invisible threads. Finlay Robertson is also frustratingly real. His portrayal of the slightly off-kilter, awkward security guard is so well created he’s phenomenally angering to watch. You want to reach into the screen and shake him awake – but this is testament to Robertson’s excellent skill and director Johannes Roberts ability to get the most of out his actors. All the actors do extremely well, even the smaller roles, and everyone we meet is recognizable to us, but far from being clichéd – a difficult thing to achieve in any film.

Johannes Roberts should be proud of F. It is by far Roberts’ best achievement, after the laughably poor Forest of the Damned and the enjoyably silly When Evil Calls. F is not without its flaws – the antagonists’ facelessness becomes more annoying that intriguing, for example – but it is a well created horror film that has some awesome moments and genuine scares at times. The acting alone makes F worth watching.

F is a well-crafted British horror film. It becomes inconsistent and conclusion-less towards the end, but this does not greatly damage it. Excellent acting, a quality score and some decent set-pieces makes this well worth watching. F may not receive full marks, but it definitely doesn’t Fail.

Rating: 7 out of 10 stars

Originally known in the USA as Deadwater, then changed to Black Ops, then changed to Nazi Dawn for the UK DVD release, the film’s creators and distributors seem keen to avoid a paper trail. A paper trail of terrible reviews, presumably. Nazi Dawn is a poorly constructed film. It doesn’t excite, intrigue or thrill. It merely happens. And badly.

Colonel John Willets (Lance Henrikson) is on a secret black ops mission for the US military. He must track down a missing battleship, which has fallen silent in the Persian Gulf. Col. Willets’ mission isn’t just militaristic, however, as his estranged son is on board the battleship and could be in serious danger. The ship was carrying an Iraqi war criminal, the Ace of Spades, and the US government believe he may have escaped his interrogators and taken over the ship. But they couldn’t be further from the truth.

Arriving with a Special Forces team and two scientists (with their own hidden agenda), Col. Willets discovers most of the crew dead, brutally murdered with whatever was lying around – ropes, wrenches, cutlery – anything. There are only a few survivors, including Col. Willets’ son, and they quickly realize that the Ace of Spades could not be responsible for all the violence onboard. No one could. No one human, anyway.

Intrigued yet? You shouldn’t be. It’s not coherent, or interesting, and the “thing” on board is so stupidly revealed, with utterly inconsistent actions, it’s bafflingly irrelevant. You already know this has something to do with Nazis, as the film is called Nazi Dawn (in the UK anyway), and we slowly discover the ship is a re-commissioned WWII-era destroyer that once held an imprisoned Nazi scientist. I say “once”, but he might still be there…

The main flaw with Nazi Dawn is everything. The direction is dull and lacks pace and urgency, which is no surprise coming from Roel Reine, director of The Marker, The Lost Tribe and The Marine 2. The score is militaristic and might work for a war drama, but it’s not the score of a horror film and wipes any tension from the film entirely. The script is perfunctory for the majority of the film, with the occasional quality one-liner thrown in, which is instantly given to Lance Henriksen to waste in his gruff seriousness. That’s not to say Henriksen is terrible – far from it – he’s just not known for his great comic timing. The acting is reasonable, with decent turns from Gary Stretch and D.C Douglas, and one great performance by Jim Hanks as the weary military mortician. The script’s characters, however, do not give the actors much to work with, being hugely stereotypical and uninspiring. Henriksen is definitely watchable, but (at the ripe old age of sixty-eight) he’s showing signs of tiring, and doesn’t quite suit the role of a Special Forces field commander.

Essentially Nazi Dawn is vastly confusing. There are twists thrown in at random, information gleefully ignored until later, two scientists sporting laughable Ghostbusters-style backpacks and uttering lines like “even ghosts can’t ignore the laws of physics and nature” (which turns out to be massively untrue), and a general sense that no one in the film actually wanted to be there. Name a horror cliché and it’s splattered haphazardly on the screen – splitting up, evil Nazi scientists, randomly unnecessary nudity scene – it’s so poor it should be laughable, but so dull it’s just boring.

Without the presence of Lance Henriksen, Nazi Dawn should’ve been torpedoed the moment Reine and Wiley put pen to paper. Even the violence and scares are poorly constructed and dull. Yet it’s arrived, and it’s out there, so please do your best to ignore it.

In conclusion: Nazi Dawn is not good. It will entertain you if you’re doing the ironing or tidying your room, but this doesn’t deserve your full attention. Confusing, badly constructed and simply a bit pointless – this ship sunk before it left the harbour.

Rating: 3 out of 10 stars

The premise for Piranha 3D is as crass and thoughtless as any B-movie monster flick. A localized seismic quake opens up an ancient underwater chasm, releasing thousands of evil prehistoric piranha into Lake Victoria. Coincidentally it happens to be Spring Break on the lake and thousands of teenagers are partying in the water. This unfortunate combination of events leads to a disaster on a catastrophic scale, but only if you actually like idiotic frat boys and brainless boob-flashing slags. If you don’t, then it’s some kind of welcome fish-instigated genocide and an absolute pleasure to behold.

Luckily for Piranha 3D there are actually a few characters you might care for. There is the long-suffering Sheriff Julie Forester (played affably by Elizabeth Shue), her likeable son Jake (Steven R. McQueen) and, oddly, Jerry O’Connell. O’Connell, in fact, is the only actor who seems to understand what kind of film he’s in. He takes the character of crappy porn director Derrick Jones and amps up the camp – he’s sleazy, over-the-top, ridiculous and genuinely a pleasure to watch. He relishes the stupidity the film embodies. Sadly the other named actors seem to flap around aimlessly in the dud script, with tragically pointless cameos from Richard Dreyfuss, Ving Rhames, Christopher Lloyd and Eli Roth. They’re all incredibly underused.

Piranha 3D’s major issue, however, is not the quality of acting but it’s tone. This is a film that would’ve benefited from a slightly more comical tone rather than the unfortunately po-faced one it carries throughout. As mentioned above, it’s only the scenes with Jerry O’Connell that invigorate and feel tonally right. This is perhaps the fault of director Alexandre Aja, who is more used to helming serious horror films such as Switchblade Romance, The Hills Have Eyes (2008) and Mirrors. Luckily Piranha 3D isn’t as appalling as Mirrors, but it’s not a patch on Switchblade or Hills. This tonal imbalance is irritating, especially as there are some genuinely decent moments – the scary walk across a rickety pier at night, the absolute carnage of the wet t-shirt competition and the oddly beautiful underwater scene with naked-nymphets Kelly Brook and Riley Steele – yet even these are so tonally different they could be a series of vignettes rather than a complete film. Especially since Piranha 3D also includes a scene involving a severed penis and a burping fish. Pathetically childish in places, beautiful in others, totally bonkers in some – it’s vastly inconsistent.

Often the failing in many monster movies is a crappy-looking antagonist and sadly Piranha 3D is no exception. Up close and vivid, the fish look excellent, but it’s the rush shots of them swimming and attacking that are just messy, especially the underwater attacks – it’s like a fleshy version of Transformers’ insanely-kinetic but ultimately dull bot battles. It’s shot in bloodied water and so zoomed-in that you could be watching someone farting into cranberry juice and you wouldn’t tell the difference. Also continuity-wise it makes absolutely no sense. The piranha’s just kill, sometimes eating someone to the bone and sometimes just biting them a little bit and leaving them to die. There’s no consistency, but it’s clear these evil fish aren’t hungry, they’re just a bit mental.

Okay, so this is not supposed to be smart or clever or terrifying – it’s called Piranha 3D for gawd’s sake! It’s a claret-splattered action horror film featuring a hoard of aggressive underwater beasties killing teenagers – it’s all about the killing! Sadly, however, the violence is expected and mostly uninspiring, although Aja does occasionally pull some excellent deaths out of nowhere (boat in the face, anyone? Ouch).

But wait – it’s in 3D! Yes. Yes it is. The 3D is pointlessly gimmicky, but a bit of a laugh while it lasts. Much like the film itself.

Piranha 3D is unoriginal, stupid, mildly pointless and feels like anyone could have made it. It’s certainly entertaining, and it’s good to see a full-blooded 18 certificate horror film unashamedly living it-up on the big screen, but this is by-the-numbers silliness that is instantly forgettable. Apart from the severed penis, maybe…

Rating: 5 out of 10 stars

The premise is this: rich, vacuous self-centered “teens” attend an ostentatious prom at a luxurious hotel. Unfortunately, a psycho murderer turns up and stabs people. A lot. It is “slightly” more complicated that this, as the murderer is an escaped prisoner who is obsessed with one of the prom girls (Donna Keppel – played by Brittany Snow). He’d previously murdered her family because he was in love with her, and now he’s back, and he will do anything to… um… well, his motivation isn’t exactly clear. Kill her, rape her, look at her from stairwell windows – one of the three. Maybe all three. What’s important is we know he’s obsessed with Donna and he loves to stab people with an embarrassingly small knife.

Based incredibly loosely on the Jamie Lee Curtis-starring original of 1980, this unrecognizable remake feels like someone took the alcohol out of the punch bowl and replaced it with raw coffee. Mixed with shards of glass. Prom Night 2008 is woeful on a tremendous number of levels. The script, penned by J.S. Cardone, is so perfunctory it could’ve been copy and pasted from a thousand other sub-standard slasher flicks. This is no surprise, considering Cardone is responsible for such yawn-fests as The Stepfather and The Covenant.

The acting is by-the-numbers and vastly uninspiring, even from the normally fantastic Idris Elba, and the only real survivor is the hotel desk clerk (Hugh Clark), who actually gives a believable and sympathetic performance. The responsibility, however, for most of Prom Night’s cavalcade of failures, has to be director Nelson McCormack. Also responsible for The Stepfather remake, along with J.S. Cardone, this is a director / writer team-up that should be eradicated immediately. The characters are unsympathetic, the jumps are non-existent and the tension is totally absent. How Prom Night received a 15 certificate in the UK is also baffling as the violence is mostly off-screen or horribly repetitive. It is teeth-gratingly terrible.

If Prom Night teaches us anything it’s how mind-meltingly incompetent the Bridgeport police department is. They’re not just one step behind a killer with a clearly obvious plan, they’re also wildly idiotic and do everything the hard way (they kick down every single door in a massive hotel, instead of just borrowing some master keys). The police report afterwards would probably just be a long printout of P45s and a badly-spelt apology.

Zero points also go to our antagonist Richard Fenton (Johnathon Schaech), who is such a typical fictional serial killer it’s almost a parody. He walks incredibly slowly, must have teleportation skills, can hide in plain sight and can walk around looking like an absolute psychopath and no one seems to notice. Which is incredible since he’s just a mentally-deranged school teacher! He is a walking cliché who is utterly devoid of originality, and is vastly unthreatening.

Maybe in 2036 someone else will re-make this cursed film again. Well, they couldn’t do it any worse… although critics probably said that about the 1980 version. History has a horrible way of repeating itself.

Prom Nights have never been a safe event to attend according to Hollywood – Carrie, Dance of the Dead, Idle Hands – yet none have been so disastrous as Prom Night 2008. Epically terrible throughout, it bores, angers, frustrates and irritates. Prom Night is overwhelmingly awful. Never watch this.

Rating: 0 out of 10 stars

When the SS Lane Victory, reactivated and deployed in the Persian Gulf for black-op interrogations, falls radio silent, an elite Marine task force are sent to apprehend the terrorists. Led by Col. John Willets (Lance Henriksen), the team find one survivor, John’s son Colin (Gary Stretch).

But as the soldiers search for the men responsible for the bloody butchery of the ship’s crew, they soon discover a more devious enemy than any of them had ever imagined and all hell breaks loose as they become locked in brutal battle to the death…

Gorepress have very kindly been given a couple of copies of Nazi Dawn to giveaway to two lucky folks who can provide us with the correct answer to this question;

How many of the movies within the Alien quadrilogy did Lance Henriksen appear in?

• a) 4
• b) 1
• c) 2

Send entries to mail@gorepress.com with the title ‘Win a DVD’. The winners will be chosen at random and notified shortly after the competition closes on 30/8/10.

The plot seemed intriguing enough. Two years after a mysterious moth-like figure caused a car crash that resulted in the death of his wife, journalist John Klein (Richard Gere) inexplicably finds himself in a small backwater town nine hours from his native New York, with no idea how he got there. However, it appears the residents of the town have seen Klein roaming the streets of Point Pleasant before, despite the fact that he had never visited the place. After hearing that the moth-like figure has also been sighted there, Klein teams up with a local police officer, Connie Mills (Laura Linney), and starts to unravel the history behind the Mothman to try and discover what his purpose is.

My curiosity piqued, I ordered it. A few days later it arrived and I eagerly put it on, looking forward to being thoroughly creeped out. What followed then was certainly engaging, but sadly not the nerve-jarring rollercoaster I was led to believe.

The Mothman Prophecies isn’t a bad movie by any stretch. In fact, it’s quite entertaining. The trouble is, it isn’t a horror film. To me, a horror movie at least requires a presence – whether physical or otherwise – to generate a feeling of fear both in the characters and the audience, but this is where The Mothman Prophecies is lacking. Short of a few unsettling moments it’s just not scary. Which is a real shame. It could potentially have been quite an unsettling horror film about the eponymous cryptozoological Mothman, but instead he barely makes an appearance at all. It’s like A Nightmare on Elm Street without Freddy. Or The Thing without the…thing. As a result, the film seems more like a psychological thriller than a horror movie, and that’s where it disappoints. There’s barely any tension in The Mothman Prophecies because you rarely feel like Klein is under threat from anything. Sure, there’s the Mothman himself, but he’s spooky in a vague sort of way. A little like Lady Gaga.

That said, though, there are certainly some great moments in the movie and director Mark Pellington demonstrates his ability to keep things subtle, hiding brief flashes of the Mothman throughout the movie. Similarly from a cinematographic perspective there are some smart match cuts, allowing certain shapes and figures to echo across shots; and the camerawork compliments the moody lighting well.

You have to feel sorry for John Klein though. It’s like The Mothman Prophecies exists to screw him over; within the first half hour, he loses both his wife and house, and he’s nearly shot and arrested. Richard Gere plays the part suitably low-key and melancholic, and it’s certainly a relief to see a character that treats their investigation with caution, knowing how bat-shit crazy they may seem to other people.

It is an honest shame. The Mothman Prophecies certainly had potential. I just couldn’t quite work out where it was going; was it about a mysterious creature known to portend disaster, or the disaster itself? Had the film diverted its focus on just one of those avenues (preferably the former) then perhaps it could have been a better film. But as it stands, it’s certainly not bad, just…unfocused.

A little like Lady Gaga.

Rating: 6.5 out of 10 stars

Steve Isles is the co-director of British horror film The Torment (A.K.A. The Possession of David O’Reilly). Gorepress’s Scullion spoke to him on the release day of the UK DVD, Monday 9th August – Steve was in America at a fresh 10am, while Scullion was in London at a tired, post-work 6pm. Both places, however, shared impeccably crap weather…

Happy to chat to Gorepress, Steve discussed horror, accidental comedy, his own personal paranormal experience and why the loss of the UK Film Council doesn’t particularly matter. Friendly, chatty, honest and sharp – and despite the Skype connection being a little dodgy, Steve was a pleasure to chat to.

Steve has also given Gorepress access to an exclusive alternative / extended ending to The Torment. Watch the film first, though, otherwise it’s a little bit of a huge SPOILER (and wouldn’t make a speck of sense anyway…).

He explains more in the interview below… so read it. Now.

Gorepress: How did you get involved with The Torment?

Steve Isles: It’s a bit of cliché but I was down at my local video store, where I used to live in Battersea in London, and there was this guy that runs the store and we got chatting about horror films, as you do. His name was Andrew Cull and it turns out he’d written scripts and was an aspiring writer, and he’d been working on a little YouTube series called In The Dark with another local bloke called Steve Smith, who was an established writer. This In The Dark series was basically about a young girl who’d come to London and was blogging about these supernatural things that were happening to her, and I did some soundwork on it, because my original background is lighting and music and doing sound. It was like this sort of Lonely Girl, but supernatural, and it did really well. So I asked Andy if he had any proper scripts and he gave me a couple. One he gave me was called Inside, which ultimately turned out to be The Torment. It was one of those ones where I read it and hairs pricked up at the back of my neck and I realised it could be really super-scary. It was also set in one location, and when you’re trying to make a film you’re thinking about the budget and because it was one location with a few actors it seemed very doable. So that came about because of a video store!

How was it working alongside Andrew Cull?

It was great. We spent quite a long time developing The Torment. This was my first film and Andy has done a bit of writing – he’d done an episode of Urban Gothic – but this was the first bigger thing either of us had done. We worked on the whole ideas of it, and working on the creative elements of it – we collaborated closely on everything. We both had a shared vision – we wanted to go old school on it and avoid CGI and use real prosthetics and creatures in the room, so the actors had something to react off. And our influences came through films like The Thing and The Shining and The Omen. With the whole emotional, documentary style, we liked the idea of shooting it with a handheld camera, with quite a lot of point-of-view shooting – that sort of first person gaming experience can be quite intense. You never feel it’s a documentary per-se, however.

Was there never the temptation to go down the full-blown documentary route?

It was interesting, because it was always about the story and the narrative features, and it would be very hard to keep the conceit of having the camera there. Like in [REC] it’s a TV crew and Paranormal Activity it’s a couple investigating their own house and Blair Witch and so forth. But how you get that made convincingly, it’s very hard and it’s always with hugely varying success. We wanted to go down the route of films like Hidden or even Gomorrah –

Hidden especially seems relevant, as there’s a lot of still shots in The Torment focusing on a wall or window rather than a person. Is this also an influence from Andrew’s work on In The Dark?

In The Dark was more “found footage”, filmed as if it was real and put on the internet. People were commenting on it online and even advising the girl what to do. She’d wake up in the bed and find one side colder than the other, checked with a thermometer, and people are telling her “Definitely a haunting, love, you better get out of there”.

A lot of people believed it.

It was definitely done to get that reaction. So the point of view stuff in The Torment is to vary the dramatic points of the film. Most films do have some point of view shots in them, cutting from close ups to P.O.V. shots. I think the idea here was to shoot a lot of it that way, but there’s quite a fine balance, because some of the most terrifying things are in seeing people’s reactions in the room. Their fear makes your fear.

Those people in the room you mention – the cast – how were they to work with?

They were brilliant. We literally had a couple of thousand people apply to be in this, we auditioned maybe a hundred and fifty, and these four or five people who ended up in the film were an absolute success – they were brilliant. We were so happy we got such great performances from them.

It must have been a pretty gruelling shoot – at night, lots to tense emotions flying about. How was that to deal with?

Giles had just come from an emotional split-up himself –

Wow, that’s proper ‘Method’.

Yeah! So he was able to bring a lot to his character, and he put a lot of work in, really really pumped it up and a huge amount of energy came off him and everyone raised their game to match that. We talked to him about key performances we’d liked – like Jack Nicholson in The Shining – very intense roles. We also chatted to a psychiatrist about the experience of schizophrenia, and found that schizophrenics actually believe what is happening in the room is real, so their reactions to it are totally normal. They’re seeing a little army of people, marching towards them, and they’re jumping out of their chair yelling “there’s tiny people!” and expect you to react in the same way. And they’re confused when you do it. It sounds quite comical, but it’s not at all. So when Giles is seeing these monsters and he’s reacting completely appropriately and his friends are just thinking “he’s having a serious breakdown here”.

You mention the comical side of how people can react to schizophrenia – there were moments, during the screening I saw, where people laughed at Giles’ descent into mania. Was there any intention to make it comical?

Interesting you say that, actually. I talked to Giles after the premiere and he said that people laughed in some places, and I thought it was quite an interesting reaction there. Were they laughing because he was genuinely comedic or were they laughing because he was so freaky? He’s got quite a high pitched voice and a high pitch scream at one point, so some people may have found that funny, but there was no intention to make it funny. In any of those stressful situations people react in different ways.

It’s odd to see a man break down in the way Giles does, as it’s normally reserved for women in horror films or Hollywood in general, as clichéd and sexist as it sounds. Perhaps that’s why people laughed.

He’s at the end of his tether and it’s a strange thing to see, especially in a man. You’re right.

What was your biggest challenge working on The Torment?

The same old thing – the time and the money. We had a very tight schedule and we literally did it in three to four weeks and we were lucky because we had a big old house there, so we could put people up there in different departments. With a little bit more time we could’ve done more shooting and had more options, but I think it was really that. Also we were trying to avoid all the usual horror clichés and references that might present themselves.

Well, you didn’t have any cats jumping out of cupboards, thankfully…

[LAUGHS] Or the shadow under the door – the usual things that spring to mind. We also wanted to play with the colours, to create a dirty street-lamp yellow rather than the green of Dark Water, for example, or the blue of Paranormal Activity – we wanted something different thrown into the mix.

It did have a real feel of being set in London, with the dirty yellow and browns – was this intentional?

Totally, yeah. We wanted it to feel like a typical London suburban flat, Victorian house, and that colour pallet was supposed to be particularly unglamourous. You see a lot of films with lovely moon-lit houses and rooms and you think “I don’t know anywhere like that!” We definitely wanted it to reflect on it being slightly documentary-like, more realistic. It does feel like people could live there, if you suspend your disbelief.

As this is your first film, what one piece of advice would you give to any budding film director?

I just think, given the journey we’ve had on this film, I think you need to be very passionate about the film. It’s a very long journey to write the story, raise the money, make the film and then get it out to distributors. I went to Cannes 2009 to get a sales agents and then the American film market in November last year to start selling the film and getting distribution for it. We’d started talking about this in 2007 so it’s been a really long journey and you have to have a lot of passion for it. You have to feel it in your heart that you’re creating a great movie and you want to get it out there. Also get as much feedback and advice as possible – don’t necessary take it all! Often some people want to change it entirely.

The creatures were fantastically created and realised. Who came up with the designs, and who made them?

Initially Andy did the description in the script and then we found this brilliant concept artist called Sharon Smith, who’d just done some of the creature work on the Harry Potter films and we thought “There’s no way she’ll do horror – why would she?” and she came back with these most incredible designs. So we went back-and-forth with her and came up with these really great drawings, and some of them you get to see in the diary in the film. Then we found these two guys – Paul McGuiness and Alexis Haggar – and they’d done some work on Outpost and Sherlock Holmes. Paul has been doing this for years and years, back even on the original Doctor Who, and a lot of BBC stuff – if you go to his workshop there’s corpses hanging everywhere like a horror fan’s dream! These guys were fantastic. If you get the DVD with the Making Of, Paul shows how he does that nine foot, huge creature, which chases them around the apartment. It took them two months to build it, sculpt it, mould it, and get it in there. And it’s actually Paul in there, and he’s six foot four and has three foot stilts. The creatures were so good I said “keep them in the cupboard for a possible sequel!”

The moments of shadows and suggestions of something horrific lurking in the dark provide the greatest scares, for me personally, and I felt perhaps that showing the monsters in such clarity wasn’t actually necessary. What’s your view on this?

I agree. It was a real battle. The original script was much more terrifying when reading about it than when showing the creatures. Again, it all depends on the budget – take in a high budget movie like Alien where the creature is realised in such incredible detail, and it’s so iconic you want to see it, and it’s a main character. Here [in The Torment] it’s not supposed to be and you’re questioning whether you’re actually seeing them, so it was a real balance with how much we showed and how much we didn’t. But then again there’s a balance on how you plan a movie, and a lot of marketing people are like “you’ve got to have the money shot, with all these big creatures running around”, and those sort of things can excite interest. The intention here was to do a very supernatural movie where the intention was to build it more slowly, and get glimpses of the creatures to begin with. I hope we achieved that balance.

The film poster claims the age-old tag of “Based On True Events”. How factually accurate is this statement?

When Andrew wrote the story several years ago he’d basically been looking at various stories about events that had happened, and the various episodes within the film are actually true, and if you care to Google the various things you’ll see there are elements we’ve cobbled together to create the story. I think a lot of people ask what it‘s based on, and it is based on real events, but they’re so shocking you question how it can actually be true. They really did happen. So we created a vaguely fictional story based on these events – breakdown, murder, even the scene with Anna – which are based on real events. When he scans up the wall you see the headlines on newspapers, all of those are true. It’s testament to the fact that real things are more horrific than fiction. That’s where it comes from, and that’s what it’s stuck to, the origins of the story.

Are you a believer of the paranormal – possession, ghosts etc…?

Well, you know, I had a freaky experience once when I was fifteen and staying at a friend’s place. I was woken in the middle of the night by this rustling noise in the bedroom of this old house, I think it was Tudor, and I listened to this rustling going around the room. Then it finally stopped. In the morning I told my friend about the really weird rustling and he said “Oh, I haven’t heard that for ages. It’s supposed to be from an Elizabethan woman who walks around that room with a long dress”. Whether that was a cat or something I don’t know, but the night before he was telling me about this Cromwellian soldier that walks around the corridor and walks into the kitchen, and that was the main ghost in the house, so I was all set up for a Cromwellian ghost, but not a Elizabethan lady! I think it’s one of those things that is open to question and interpretation, and in a way I hope it is real, from the point of view of having an afterlife and so forth. I know other people can be pretty sceptical. I mean, Andy is very sceptical of it, even though he’s fascinated by it.

The film has two different titles; The Possession of David O’Reilly in the USA and The Torment in the UK. Which title do you prefer?

You know what, the original story was called Inside and when we went to the market, we were told we couldn’t call it that because too many films were already called that. We had a little problem with the title clearance, so we went with a name that reflects the events within the story, which said what it was all about instead of being something obscure. So we came up with that name – The Possession of David O’Reilly – which said exactly what it was on the tin. Then we brought it to the UK, and they said they wanted a shorter name. It’s very normal for English films to have different names to American films, so we said “let’s talk about what we can call it” and we went around a few different ideas there and came out with The Torment. I think it’s a strong name. In terms of my preference, I’ve always been quite fond of The Possession of David O’Reilly. I like the imagery it creates, but then again The Torment is really strong and a lot of people like that name.

How come it was released in the USA before the UK? It is a very British horror film.

Yeah, it’s interesting. The sales agent we got – I mean, the big Hollywood studios distribute their films themselves, but the independent filmmakers need sales agents – was an American one, and they took it to the American film market in November and sold it to IFC Films, who are part of the Sundance Festival. They were very keen to release it quite quickly, I think as there was a lot of interest in Paranormal Activity and they wanted to push it as a British version of it, and they would sort of jump in on the wave of that. Which is fair enough. We had a little trouble in the UK, as things got pushed to the end and then the World Cup came along and we couldn’t do it then. So it got pushed to August.

What with the government recently killing off the UK Film Council, how do you view the British film industry at the moment?

I’ve always had a view that they’ve [the UK Film Council] always had a specific idea of the sort of films they wanted to make. I read somewhere recently that the music and book publishing industries don’t have their own councils. If you let filmmakers go out and make films that would genuinely interest people, people will turn up for it, and then you can start building from there. You look at the American way – and I’m not saying Hollywood is great, by any means – but they make films without government subsidies and they dominate. I do feel that filmmakers should essentially make something that’s going to put butts on seats, and interest people, and you’d get a more vibrant film because of it. If you go to a council, they’ll decide what sort of project it should be. You can still make local, cultural stories without it, but as long as it travels. Why can’t we have very successful films? I’d love to see what happens now.

Talking of which – what are you working on now?

There’s a few things; depending on money, and seeing how The Torment goes so I can do something off the back of it. I have a couple of supernatural films, which I’m developing, and also another script which is a thriller and another script which is actually an action film.

Interesting. So we’ll be seeing a lot of you in the future.

Hopefully.

What’s your favourite horror film?

I think it has to be The Shining. I love the book, I love the film – it’s a great adaptation. What’s yours?!

Oh, blimey, erm… I think it’s got to be John Carpenter’s The Thing.

I was going to say The Thing or The Shining. It’s a brilliant film. I was a little nervous to hear they’re doing a remake of that.

So was I… but luckily they’re not carrying it on. Or remaking it. It’s a prequel set in the Norwegian base camp you glimpse in the original. I don’t know how that’s going to work or how it’ll be any different, but we’ll see…

It won’t damage the original.

I hope not. Now, you’ve also given us some exclusive footage from The Torment [accessible above] – can you tell us a little bit about it?

Yeah, absolutely. In the original story you’re left to conclude what actually happened, and you’re left wondering. I don’t want to give anything away, but this exclusive gives a more definitive ending.

I rather liked the ambiguous ending, actually.

Oh yeah, but this still isn’t on-the-nose. It let’s you go “okay, so that’s happened and that’s happened, so…” – it gives you more of a nudge.

Is that how it was released in the States, or is it exactly the same over here?

It’s never been seen anywhere. This is the first anyone would’ve seen it. It was shot and then cut out for various reasons. It’s not an alternative ending, more of an extension of what’s there already. It gives a slightly different conclusion, nudging you in one direction.

Thanks for talking to Gorepress, Steve, all the way in not-so-sunny America.

Great talking to you, Dave.

Have a good brunch. I’m going to have some dinner.

[LAUGHS] Cheers, Dave. Thanks.

Do-joon has been arrested for murdering a school girl. He signs the police confession, but not because he thinks he did it – he’s very slow, simple and easily led – Do-joon is bullied into becoming the only suspect in a vicious murder case. His doting mother is the only person who openly believes in Do-joon’s innocence, and Mother decides to launch her own investigation when the police unceremoniously close the case, deciding it’s solved.

Mother’s questions and searching lead her down some dark paths, with conspiracy, break-ins, kidnap and torture suddenly cascading around her. But a mother would do anything to prove her son innocent. Anything.

Mother is not as simple as the above premise suggests, and it twists and turns from one scene to the next, laying down a story the writer / director team clearly wanted to tell. It’s compelling enough, but at times feels it could’ve been edited better and some of the flab sliced away. The plot is tight, but the scenes fall short of a brilliance that seems tantalizing close.

Luckily, even when the scenes begin to drag, the direction and cinematography make up for it. It is shot smartly, occasionally beautifully, and there are some excellent moments – car crash, murder re-enactment, sneaking through the house – which makes Mother always watchable. The soundscape is also brilliant – a raw, crunching sound that can be beautiful and threatening from one moment to the next.

Director Bong Joon-ho is responsible for insane monster-movie The Host and the quality crime thriller Memories of Murder, and Joon-ho thankfully retains his kooky, sly humour within Mother. Occasionally it is laugh-out-loud funny, but also incredibly subtle at times, with Mother director / co-writer Joon-ho fusing drama, horror, satire, suspense, love and comedy together expertly. He creates a labyrinthine thriller that heads in unexpected directions at all times. This may prove too awkward or feel undisciplined to some, yet it kicks the thriller genre in the crotch and takes it to bizarre and interesting new places.

Essentially Mother focuses on the relationship between Mother (Kim Hye-Ja) and her son (Won Bin), who are a bizarre family unit. They are played to perfection by Hye-Ja and Bin, utterly believable in their strange situation. Bin especially excels, depicting the mentally deficient Do-joon realistically and with a pitying charm that makes him instantly likeable. The majority of characters in Mother, however, are exceedingly difficult to relate to – this could be a cultural issue or simply because Joon-ho’s sense of humour is seriously off-kilter at times – and although you recognize the people and understand them, you find it hard to love and sympathize with them.

Mother is well directed, acted and visually stunning in many places. It is over-long and impossible to emphasize with, but it is never boring and always compelling. A good piece of work that just falls short of being superb. Director Joon-ho is certainly a talent to watch in the future.

Rating: 7 out of 10 stars

The PCC is currently showing westerns, horrors, singalongs, every single Star Trek film and is giving out free tickets for a film called Big Tits Zombie… as long as you turn up dressed as a zombie… with big tits. The PCC is fun, brash, shameless and light-hearted. It loves film and celebrates everything about it, happy to host quality double bills of Jurassic Park and Jaws and equally as happy to show the absolutely crudtacular likes of Birdemic. The staff are welcoming and clearly love the PCC dearly, happy to answer questions from idiots who can’t read signs and direct people to the alcohol. People like me.

The PCC doesn’t get funding from the Arts Council, any film bodies or even the National Lottery, but manages to “thrive” through putting on a huge array of films, old and new, and hosting previews, premieres, Q&A sessions and special events for the smaller, more independent films. One such film is The Torment (released as The Possession of Dave O’Reilly in the U.S., fact fans).

Kicking off at 8.30pm prompt, the Downstairs screen at the PCC has comfortable, massive seats and smacks of old school cinema, where the screen isn’t perfectly lined up but no one cares. It’s the ideal setting for The Torment, which is not Hollywood standard gloss, but more shaky-cam, guerilla filming on a personal scale.

After sitting through 87 minutes of darkness, screams, blood, horrible creatures and Giles Alderson wailing at shadows, we’re invited to stay for a Question and Answer session with the Writer / Co-Director Andrew Cull and the films four stars Giles Alderson, Francesca Fowler, Zoe Richards and Nicholas Shaw. They’re all easy-going, funny and open people.

Hosted by co-producer Nick Isles, the following is a slightly cut-down transcript of the Q & A session… cut down because some of the people didn’t quite speak into the microphones provided. The result was a recording of their voices saying this “_________” and “________”, which isn’t particularly interesting…

This is how it went.

FRANCESCA FOWLER: I need a loo break, sorry.

Francesca Fowler and Giles Alderson disappear out to the “restrooms” whilst Andrew Cull, Zoe Richards and Nicholas Shaw clamber onto the stage, microphones poised in their hands.

NICK ISLES: What was it like to make a film like that? Was it intense?

ZOE RICHARDS: Yes.

Everyone laughs, and we pray her obtuseness is intentional.

NI: How intense?

ZR: The crying scenes were intense. Twelve hours crying is not normal. If you cry in reality you cry for maybe ten minutes, and then you stop, and you laugh and say “oops, I cried”, but with this I had to keep crying. Every take, and then they stop to fix the lights and then re-set, and then you get your hair and make-up done and you have to cry again. Tough.

NI: The shoot was three weeks?

ZR: Yep.

NI: And you’re doing long, twelve hour days?

ZR: They were night shoots, so we didn’t know the time.

NI: What was that like? Filming at night. Dislocating? Tough?

ANDREW CULL: I think it is quite tough to do night shooting. As a whole, when we set out to do the film, we wanted to do something that was pretty intense, that was pretty character driven, so people like Giles had a pretty tough time getting that performance. I think he was absolutely fantastic. I think before this he’d done primarily lighter roles…

Giles Alderson takes this moment to return from the toilet, along with Francesca Fowler (N.B. They didn’t go to the toilet together, before you begin reading into that…) to much applause.

NI: So, Giles, how do you prepare for a role like that? What goes into it?

GILES ALDERSON: Um… oh, Jesus. Everything. Mentally, physically. Andy really took us through it. We were given a whole week of rehearsal too. All of us went through a lot, spending an entire week in that house, it really helped us get into it.

NI: What about you, Francesca? You have one of the goriest, most distressing scenes. How did you prepare for that?

FRANCESCA FOWLER: Well, I got pregnant…

We all laugh, and pray she’s not mad or insanely Method. Luckily she’s just got a good sense of humour…

FF: I don’t think you can prepare – I mean, you can prepare mentally – but I always find you have to go with what comes up at the time. I like to keep it fresher that way, so I keep my best performance until I’m doing it, if that makes sense? It’s always challenging when you’re doing a night shoot and you don’t have much time. The pressure’s on and you just have to go for it. I think we had to do [the “pregnant scene”] in two takes, because of costumes.

AC: Yeah.

FF: In two takes, because we only had two costumes that we could get bloody. You just have to do it, really.

NI: How different was that to doing the other things you’ve worked on, like Doctor Who. What’s the difference? Do you prefer this type of intense film?

FF: It’s just very different. It’s always a luxury when you have time, but sometimes if you have too much time you can overdo things. Each job is so individual, so I don’t know what I prefer.

NI: Nick, you have the sort of straight role in The Torment [as Alex], where you’re sucked into the situation. Were you surprised by anything?

NICHOLAS SHAW: Well, like Giles said, we rehearsed it quite intensely the week before – it was also filmed quite chronologically – so we could get into the journey of the people. It was interesting being in the middle of two points of view, and it’s about the loyalties you have with different people in your life and how you respond in certain situations – I don’t think Alex responded to it very well. He gets a bit hysterical, but it’s how you deal with a particular situation.

NI: Andrew, you wrote this.

AC: Yes.

NI: Where did this come from?

AC: I wrote it back in 2003, and at the time it was a reaction to a lot of U.S. horror I’d seen. Basically, I felt we’d lost touch with the characters we see in movies. Most of the time you were basically watching people you wanted to see get a hatchet in the head. In the first five minutes. Because you couldn’t stand them – they didn’t evolve, and you didn’t relate to them in any way. What I wanted to do was create something that was much more character driven and make people feel for the characters in the film and the situations they found themselves in. So that was how I initially set out to write the script. At the time I was living on the ground floor of a Victorian house and that became the setting of the film. I wanted something the audience could relate to – I wanted them to see themselves in the characters, at home, and think “that could happen to me, in my house”, sort of very normal people in a very extreme situation.

At this point the co-producer does the effortlessly dangerous thing of opening the questions up to the general public…

AUDIENCE MEMBER #1: I liked it! I really liked it.

Please note – this was not someone with a question, but someone who just wanted to let everyone know he enjoyed it… immediately. Please note – that person was not me. I’m much more subtle.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #2: In terms of blocking and action, it was so loose at the top of the movie – why was that?

AC: Initially I want you to settle in. Before you got to the action of the piece, about forty minutes in, when the lights go out, I wanted to make you very familiar with the location where it would all happen. You’re plunged into near darkness on some occasions and I wanted you to have a familiarization with the location, even in the dark. What I wanted to do specifically – there were shots early on of Nick, when he’s intending to get the curry ready and we follow him and we’re left just watching a window for a short period of time. Stuff like that. What I wanted to do was suggest something’s going to happen here – get ready – that sort of stuff. Looking into certain areas, and some of those areas are recurrent in the film and do pay off later on. And some of them are mcguffins. That was definitely part of the design of the film.

ZR: One of the films Andy told us to watch was Hidden, a French film, where the camera becomes a character in the film. You start off watching the house, a long shot of the exterior.

AC: That’s an elegant point. Essentially when I wrote it – I write it in a different style to most people – if you read a copy of the script I refer to the camera as “We” sometimes, because I wanted you to feel you’re actually in there. Which is another reason for the P.O.V. stuff – there’s some P.O.V. stuff but not as much as in the other projects that I’ve done – I’d like you to feel that you’re involved. Much more than if you’ve got a static camera, just there, doing a very familiar kind of shooting.

NI: For the cast, have you done anything like this before?

GA: Yeah, I think a few of us have done that sort of thing before. The P.O.V. stuff was really interesting though – you’re in character looking at the camera – it was difficult. It wasn’t so much for me, the other guys did a lot more than me. It was difficult when I had to do it, so I imagine it was very difficult for them.

NI: Andrew and Zoe, you two have worked together before, right?

AC: Ha! Yes. Zoe was Louise Paxton in the internet series – finally the secret’s out!

ZR: I still get hate mail.

AC: Really? Sorry about that. Initially one of the ways we got interest in The Torment was a project called In The Dark, which is a project I shot with Zoe, as a real –

ZR: Well, not real. Some people thought it was real.

AC: A hoax. It was a hoax. It’s still there if you wanna have a look.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #3: Can you tell us more about the true story angle. The “based on true events”. It’s a lot like Balham generally, I guess.

That provides more laughter. Tragically it’s also true…

AC: Yeah, I wouldn’t say it was directly based on true events. But… definitely influenced by some –

ZR: It all happened.

AC: I am a nice person really.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #4: The portrayal is a descent into schizophrenia – how much did that influence you?

AC: What happens to David in the film, I wanted to present a believable descent into madness. We tend to do that rather flippantly in cinema, and that again comes back to adding reality to the film and making people feel able to involve themselves with the characters, so I did research before writing about what happened to David. When you see horror movies, the monsters, ghosts and axemen are all very frightening but not as plausible as insanity. It’s something we see in our everyday lives – not personally – you see it in the news, and very sad cases of things that happens to people, and because it is plausible that’s a very good way to bring an audience into the story, essentially.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #5: There were quite a few laughs during the film. How did you pick where to put comic timing in it – the light relief?

FF: We didn’t realize there was any humour in it!

GA: It’s a Rom-Com!

NS: It was kind of helpful for me in the earlier stuff that there was some of the lighter stuff in the relationship, that I had. It was quite good because I knew it was going to get crazy later on. As Andy said about trying to create an environment where you felt for the characters, and building up a relationship, so later you could be part of that and feel for the characters.

NI: So it wasn’t just intense?

NS: No, it was enjoyable too. I mean, we all got on really well.

NI: But it was scary. Were you scared at times?

GS: [TENTATIVELY] Yes. There were moments – definitely moments. We were in the house, and the house is massive, and they built a set inside it and blocked off some of the walls so we could block off something or put up a door. Because of that there was so much space in that house, where we could go and be on our own for a bit before a scene. There was quite a few moments where we’d all go find a corner on our own and try and scare ourselves silly, but then when you go back into a room and it’s full of crew… then it’s a lot less scary.

ZR: The kids’ room are quite scary. It had been a family house, and I don’t know how many kids lived there – certainly a few – because there’s about three children’s bedrooms in the house that are still decorated with children’s stuff, and mobiles –

AC: They left in a hurry.

ZR: That was weird.

AC: Some kind of horrific event.

NI:Zoe, you actually stayed there, am I right?

ZR: Yeah, yeah. But I wasn’t scared, normally. Apart from the kids’ rooms – I didn’t go in there. [TO ANDREW] Were you scared?

AC: I’m never scared.

ZR: [LAUGHS] Like a true horror writer.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #6: What inspired you?

AC: I love thrillers, I love horror films. I didn’t want to do something that was all “bang bang, in your face” – when I watch a horror film it’s the building sounds, the structural sounds you can hear… When I was writing it I lived in Wandsworth Common, with a really big garden, and in the middle of the night you hear foxes screaming out. Those are the sounds of real life and they’re terrifying at three o’clock in the morning when you’re hammering away at a horror script. I think for me, the sounds of the pipes and the building itself, they slowly move towards gearing the film up – the sound designer is very very important, whenever I’m creating.

NI: How about the fight scenes. How hard was that?

ZR: It hurt.

NI: How long did it take to do?

GS: I donno, a couple of days. The fight coordinator who did the fights with us –

ZR: Is she here tonight?

They pause, looking into the audience for a response. There isn’t one.

GS: Okay, good.

Everyone bursts into laughter.

GS: She really hurt me.

ZR: She really hurt.

GS: She practiced Zoe’s moves on me and she’d hold me down and say “Zoe, this is what you do”, then she’d say to me “Does this hurt?” and I’m “Yes it bloody does! Get off!”. She was fantastic, she really was.

ZR: She was a James Bond stuntwoman, and you’d think they’re going to teach you how to fall over without hurting yourself… in actual fact they actually just say “Now you fall”. And I’d ask “Do I do it with the left foot first or…” and she’s just “No. Just fall. Here’s lots of padding, just fall.” I was bruised.

NI: What are you all doing now?

GS: I’m working on a sci-fi film called Transmission.

NS: I’m off to Liverpool to do a play. It’s called Tis a Pity She’s a Whore. Full of laughs.

FF: I’ve just done a short film called Frequency, which was funded by the old UK Film Council. We’re looking to get funding for the feature film.

ZR: I’m actually recording the voice of the central character in an animation, which my boyfriend is doing the music for, and I have to get up for nine thirty tomorrow morning. And I do the voice… of a little girl…

AC: I’m currently writing a new character-driven horror film.

ZR: Can I be in it?

Andrew Cull sadly doesn’t answer that question… I guess we’ll find out whenever the future arrives.

The Torment is available on DVD 9/8/10

David O’Reilly (Giles Alderson) needs somewhere to stay. His girlfriend Sarah is cheating on him and he’s in desperate need of a friend. Alex (Nicholas Shaw), his mate of over ten years, invites David to stay with him and his girlfriend, Kate (Zoe Richards). David appears unsurprisingly distraught, but Alex and Kate quickly realize his distress is less to do with his relationship troubles and more to do with something that’s following him. More than one something, in fact, and something David claims is desperate to get inside the house and do horrific things to the inhabitants. As David’s mental state rapidly deteriorates, Alex and Kate quickly realize they’re in an incredibly dangerous situation, either from David himself or from something altogether less human…

The Torment is not startlingly original, but it’s not trying to be. It’s a character-driven horror piece that claws its way towards an inevitable conclusion, but with such intensity and enough ambiguity to keep you interested throughout. Are the creatures real? Is it all in David’s head? What the hell is that in the garden?! The Torment can be very scary at times, and this is thanks to the smart direction from Andrew Cull and Steve Isles and the excellent sound design from Vanesa Lorena Tate – turn off the lights, crank up the volume and prepare to be scared.

Giles Alderson’s portrayal of David O’Reilly is a brave one, showing a man on the cusp of exhaustion, despair and potential lunacy. It’s rare to see a male lead having to break himself emotionally as much as Alderson does, and David is almost comical in his mania at times, but Alderson gives a realistically haunted performance throughout that is both gutting and terrifying. All four actors do a sterling job of creating believable and likeable characters, which is incredibly rare in a horror movie.

The beautiful Francesca Fowler gives an excellent performance as pregnant neighbour Anna, and despite having a very small role she provides a loveable, haunting and utterly believable performance. It is Zoe Richards and Nicholas Shaw, however, that sew the film together as the beleaguered Kate and Alex, acting as the skeptical characters the audience can relate to. Zoe Richards is especially likeable and doesn’t irritate or amuse as the disbeliever, but instead gives an understated, smart performance – again a rarity in any horror film.

Although a lot is right with The Torment, there are also a few problems. Occasionally a scene can drag, is too dark and can be confusing. There’s also another “less is more” lesson to be learned here, and a tragic one. The demons David believes are coming to kill him are shadows, noises, figures in the dark – and this works fantastically well – but they’re also ripped-flesh Thing-esque monstrosities full of teeth and malice. These creations are fantastically imagined and brilliantly made, but their presence is tragically unnecessary, and seeing them so clearly detracts rather than captivates.

The Torment is a solid, scary, well created horror film. It doesn’t ooze with originality and would’ve benefited from being more subtle, but these are minor quibbles. It is well acted, directed and scripted, with a sound design that excels. This is a quality little British horror film and well worth a watch. In the dark. With the sound cranked up to eleven.

Rating: 7 out of 10 stars

Genetic scientists Clive (Adrien Brody) and Elsa (Sarah Polley) are splicing experts, respected in their field to such an extent they’ve become mini celebrities, even outside the scientific community. They’ve created new life by splicing animal genes together, and a valuable new protein with it. Despite working for a corporation, they remain sassy, smart, cool and incredibly eager to move to the next level. They’re horrified, however, when their boss demands they cease their research in favour of marketing what they’ve already created.

Angered by the corporation’s greed, the two previously free-reigning scientists continue their splicing techniques in secret. Breaking international law and the boundaries of ethics, they drop human DNA into the splicing process, hoping to create a creature capable of providing cures for hundreds of diseases. What they create, however, is something more human than animal. Deciding to keep their ground-breaking mistake, this unfortunate decision leads them down a dark path filled with danger, deceit, betrayal and death.

Vincenzo Natali does a competent job of directing Splice, making it feel like a compact and personal film until the final, utterly derivative twenty minutes. The only quibble is how Splice could have been incredibly disturbing and haunting, creepy and genuinely scary, especially with the creation and discovery of a new life. Yet it’s all done matter-of-factly, with little innovation or attempts to surprise. The shots you expect happen, and although not soaked in clichés, Splice ambles down a well-worn path to its inevitable conclusion.

Weird Science films are a tough nut to crack – they either go trashy, slightly comedic horror (Freaked, Return of the Killer Tomatoes) or dramatic and horribly disturbing (The Fly, Human Centipede) and Splice falls firmly into the second category. Yet without the horror. The creators, however, wanted to play with a number of genres, and the result is a Marmite, ham and chocolate milkshake. The individual ingredients may be enjoyed by some people, but combining them creates something altogether questionable and uncomfortable.

Despite the plotting and uninspired direction, there are some excellent elements that make up Splice. Brody and Polley are superb throughout, and they take the tired dialogue and make it believable, shaping the characters into a realistic couple teetering on the cusp of a scientific miracle. They’re not hugely loveable, both displaying horrendously demented character flaws, but they’re likeable enough for you to care what happens to them.

The star of the show, however, is the “creation” herself – the bizarre and captivating Dren. She is played fantastically by Abigail Chui (young Dren) and Delphine Chaneac, with more touches of honest humanity than any of the humans on screen. The CGI, make up and effects are excellent, and the creators of Dren can be satisfied that they’ve done an immense job. Brilliant work.

Essentially the fault lies with the scripting – the story and screenplay – again penned by Natali, with co-writer Antoinette Terry Bryant. It is incredibly unsubtle on a metaphorical and allegorical scale, and panders to a stupider audience than is expected. It works on an obvious level, but is not as smart as it pretends to be.

Splice, rather ironically, is a combination of a number of genres that do not work when spliced together. It’s not a horror, it’s not a drama, it’s not a thriller, it’s not an overly intelligent brain-scratching weird science film. It’s an enjoyable, intriguing movie that starts off well and cascades senselessly towards a frustratingly dense finale. Brilliant acting and effects save Splice from mediocrity, but only just. Good fun, but sadly lacking the brilliance it was begging to have.

Rating: 6 out of 10 stars

The 28-minute film is getting raving international reviews and attention in the industry. It has been nominated for official selections at 13 festivals thus far, which include Film North Huntsville International Film Festival (CAN), the prestigious Swansea Bay Film Festival (UK), run by Michael Sheen (The Queen) and patroned by Catherine Zeta Jones; Atlanta Horror Film Festival (USA), one of the top 5 horror festivals in the USA; Barebones International Film Festival (USA), Indy Horror Film Festival (USA), Heart of England Film Festival (UK), International Film Festival Ireland (Ireland), International Film Festival South Africa (South Africa), Twin Rivers Media Film Fest (USA), Fright Night Film Fest (USA), Atlanta Shortsfest (USA), Atlanta Underground Film Festival (USA) & Killer Film Fest (USA).

Daniel Reininghaus is a truly innovative director with a deep understanding of mental psychology. Even while wearing his director’s hat, Reininghaus manages to pull off an incredible versatile and mesmerizing performance, showing a wide range of emotions and maturity that is rare for a young actor. This film is dynamic for it engages you to look within yourself about exploring inner turmoil people face and the social dilemma that surrounds mental illnesses. This gory, jaw-dropping film will bring shivers down your spine as you grind your teeth, cover your eyes and squirm in your seat. See what the Rogers’ family experienced after being invited over for dinner…”

Gorepress has been lucky enough to view the film online and can happily report that the attention surrounding it and its 12 nominations and selections are certainly deserved. Keep your eyes peeled for an opportunity to watch Eyes Beyond and in the meantime, watch the trailer here :

For more information, visit the official website – www.eyesbeyondmovie.com

For twenty-five years, civilization has survived in meager enclaves, guarded against a plague of the dead. Fifteen year-old Temple wanders this devastated landscape, keeping to herself and keeping her demons inside her heart. Temple is pursued by a deathless horde, by a man who seeks revenge on her for the death of his brother, and by the horrors of her own past. Moving back and forth between the insulated remnants of society and the brutal frontier beyond, she must ultimately decide where to make her home and where to find the redemption she seeks.

Taking place solely in Southern states from Florida to Texas, this stirring tale is deeply rooted in the tradition of Southern Gothic literature. (Bell’s primary influences for this book include William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston and Cormac McCarthy.) Bell also abandons zombie convention (narratives that tend to use zombies as background rather than as plot devices or characters) and gives the generic monsters a gravity, elegance and majesty that, as offal-consuming corpses, they don’t generally possess.”

The Reapers Are The Angels is out now via Henry Holt & Co. Publishers and they have generously given us 5 copies for our competition. Simply send your answer to the question below to mail@gorepress.com with the title ‘Win A Book’. The closing date is 13/8/10 at which point we’ll pick the winners at random and notify you immediately if you’ve won! Good luck!

Which of the following is not a Southern US state?

• a) Delaware
• b) Tennessee
• c) Idaho

Click here to enjoy an excerpt from the book!

Christian’s daughter is dead. Choking on her own vomit in an alleyway, her fragile body is discovered full of heroin, alcohol and semen. If this wasn’t bad enough, Christian is anonymously sent a videotape… of her having sex with three men. It’s a commercially available adult entertainment title, and shot on the evening she died. Haunted and horrified, Christian decides to track down those responsible for creating the movie; looking for answers, looking for reasons, looking for revenge.

The trouble with all “serious” revenge films is the lack of empathy we tend to feel towards our protagonist. It’s perhaps a cathartic thrill ride, but The Horseman doesn’t greatly have much sympathy for anyone and therefore we’re simply left watching it for an almost Saw-like sadistic love of sadism and the torturing of the morally corrupt. Only Dead Man’s Shoes had the amazing mix of seriousness and twisted humour without making it whimsical or ridiculous. The Horseman is mostly humourless, and only his relationship with runaway Alice really gives us more insight into his loving, more likeable side. We are never allowed to see him interacting with anyone before his daughter’s tragic death, and so all we know of Christian is this broken, barbaric shell of father.

He is a complex, harrowed man – at one point he pours his daughter’s ashes in a bin – and although Peter Marshall does a stunning job of making the character utterly believable, he is exceedingly hard to relate to. Christian is demented. Torturing information out of people has never been so horribly bizarre. The bicycle pump inserted into a penis is truly sick and wrong. What happened to pulling fingernails off with some rusty pliers? The Horseman’s all about the penis torture.

Like violence begets violence, in The Horseman horrible torture begets horrible torture. Christian tortures information out of people, which leads him closer and closer to the morally demented porn-makers responsible for killing his daughter, but this also leads him to the torture chair himself, where all manners of cyclical revenge begins to occur – nipple-rippage, face-crowbarring, blow-torching horribleness – it’s not “Payback” style gloriously sadistic, but real-world “use whatever’s lying around” style murderous torture. It is nauseating and eye-wateringly horrific.

Acting wise it is excellent throughout – all the performances feeling grittily real, which makes all of the violence so much more harrowing. Brad McMurray is especially stand-out as the utterly repugnant Derek, a character you genuinely despise – it is a stunning performance. It is these kind of characters that Christian must remove from his world. The sinners. He is the fourth Horseman and he rides a white van. His name is Christian, and he is Death – a one man judgment day.

Steven Kastrissios’ direction is also very good. The Horseman is grimily shot, necessarily dark and depressing throughout, almost like seeing the world through the eyes of Christian – a world suddenly devoid of colour and joy. Tragically Kastrissios has nothing else in the pipeline, but hopefully we’ll see a lot more from him in the future.

Shot non-linearly, it’s an interesting watch, and smartly done. For all it’s brutally and lack of likeability, it is a compelling and well crafted piece of work. The ending is excellent, and throws in a genuine sense of panic and terror, and this is the only real moment when you really, truly want Christian to succeed.

The Horseman is solidly acted and directed, and as a piece of quality film-making it gets top marks, but it is simply too horrible to be thoroughly enjoyed. Perhaps it isn’t supposed to be enjoyed, but endured, like Christian himself as he battles through the mourning process in the grimmest of ways. It is an excellent film, but it is incredibly dark. Those who like their horrors drowning in nihilism, violence and torture will adore The Horseman. For everyone else, it might be too horrific to endure.

Rating: 7 out of 10 stars

When the SS Lane Victory, reactivated and deployed in the Persian Gulf for black-op interrogations, falls radio silent, an elite Marine task force are sent to apprehend the terrorists. Led by Col. John Willets (Lance Henriksen), the team find one survivor, John’s son Colin (Gary Stretch).

But as the soldiers search for the men responsible for the bloody butchery of the ship’s crew, they soon discover a more devious enemy than any of them had ever imagined and all hell breaks loose as they become locked in brutal battle to the death…

Visit the official site here – www.nazidawn.com

And watch the trailer here –

Tom Noonan’s career spans 30 years of horror from Wolfen to House of the Devil, but he is still perhaps best known for his amazing performance as demented serial killer Francis “Tooth Fairy” Dolarhyde in Manhunter. He has clocked up notable performances in Heat, Last Action Hero, The X Files and Seraphim Falls. Tom Noonan also writes, directs, produces and even composes for film – he is a man of many, many talents.

The Scullion had the pleasure of catching up with him at the London Film and Comic Con 2010, chatting about writing, Eminem, acting, the stupidity of the film industry and how no one messes with Tom Noonan. No one.

Sporting a nifty straw hat, Noonan comes across as a very serious man – stern, confident, curt, a little world-weary and utterly firm in his opinions. Tom Noonan clearly doesn’t suffer fools gladly…

GOREPRESS: Is this your first time in England?

TOM NOONAN: No, I’ve worked here a few times as a screenwriter.

GP : You’ve been involved in a lot of aspects of the film creation process – you’ve acted, written, directed, even composed – what do you prefer doing. Is it the acting side?

TN : Acting is easiest to do, and the rest of it all feels pretty much the same. Directing and acting feel the same. Writing is harder because it takes a skill, and acting has no skill involved -

GP : There’s no skill involved in acting?

TN : There’s a little bit – there’s a little bit when you gain experience, but acting is something you’ve got a knack for or not. Simple as that.

GP : What kind of genre do you like to write for – are you more drama, comedy, thriller, horror?

TN : Most recently drama, but I’ve written comedies and scary movies and thrillers, all kinds of stuff.

GP : Are you a fan of collaborating with others, or is it more about your own work?

TN : No collaborating.

GP : No collaborating at all?

TN : No.

GP : Why not?

TN : It’s just not as much fun.

GP : Do you prefer to act in your own work, that you’ve written, or do you prefer passing it on to someone else?

TN : The four features I’ve made I’ve acted in all of them. It makes it easier in a lot of ways, to act in something you’re directing.

GP : Have you had any trouble with directors or producers, in regards to passing over your writing?

TN : Usually by the time the movie gets made you’re not on it any more.

GP : Really? Why?

TN : When they sell your script they option it, and they give you a part of the money and then the rest of the money when you finish the re-write. So if you sell a script for five hundred thousand dollars, they give you a hundred, and then another hundred when you do the first re-write, another one-fifty for the second… except what usually happens is they give you a hundred thousand for the first re-write and then they fire you.

GP : And that’s happened to you?

TN : Yeah, all movies are done that way.

GP : Do you think that’s a good approach to making films? A sensible one?

TN : Look at movies. Most of them are terrible. So what they do is – there is a [script] budget for the movie, which is five hundred thousand, and you get a part of it, but you’re not going to get the whole five hundred unless you’re on it the whole time, which is very unusual. So by the time they begin directing, either they hate you or you hate them, and it’s a drag.

GP : Is it because you spend too much time with the director or producer?

TN : No, it’s because they tell you one thing and then a month later they tell you at totally different way to re-write it. And then a third way, and then their wife reads it and then their maid reads it and the maid has her own opinions on it.

GP : So the writing side of things is pretty harsh. What’s your favourite experience on a film? Acting wise.

TN : Besides my own movies, I do a show called Damages, which I really enjoy doing.

GP : With Meryl Streep.

TN : Exactly. I have a lot of fun acting, it’s very easy. People tend not to tell me what to do very much.

GP : Really?

TN : It’s sort of because of who I am.

GP : Are they scared of you?

TN : Hopefully, yeah.

GP : So it’s deliberate? Do people find it difficult to approach you about your acting?

TN : Usually on a movie, if there’s a problem with a scene, the director will go to the actor they think is easiest to talk to. So the more you make it easier to be directed, the more you’re going to be directed. Even if you’re not the problem. So I tend to avoid discussions about the scene, although I’m available if someone wants to say something, but they almost never do.

GP : Do you think this is because, during your thirty-year career, your most recognisable characters have been unapproachable, sinister, slightly twisted and ultimately a little terrifying? Is this a perception people bring to the set?

TN : Well, I’ve not done as many of those sinister roles as you’d imagine. I’ve done seventy movies, probably twenty or twenty-five have been strange. I think it’s just my attitude, and people also admire me because I’ve made movies that they’ve seen. Once you’ve worked a lot and they like what you do, they don’t really want to mess around with it.

GP : So they know what they’ve got and they’re happy with it?

TN : You know, making a movie is so fucking hard, and most people have no idea what they’re doing. So the last thing you wanna do is start messing around with an actor you like. So it makes sense that they don’t want to bother you, because if they fuck you up then they’re really fucked.

GP : Have you had any appalling times on set then, when people have messed with you?

TN : No, no, not really. I know my words and I’m pretty good, so no.

GP : You’ve worked with Michael Mann twice, on Manhunter and Heat. What’s he like as a director?

TN : I love working with him, but he’s not an easy guy to work with. He can be very tough with people… but not with me.

GP : With House of the Devil, did you have much influence over Ti West in regards to the writing or directing?

TN : I tend not to get involved with the directing element at all. I don’t tell them how to direct, they don’t tell me how to act.

GP : You’ve also composed music for some films (occasionally under pseudonym Ludovico Sorret) – what kind of music are you a huge fan of?

TN : I love Beethoven, Bach, Vivaldi, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, you know – the standard shit.

GP : Nothing hugely modern like Lady Gaga or Britney Spears then?

TN : Yeah, well pop music loses it’s sheen as you get older, and it doesn’t have much interest for me. Once in a while though, someone like Eminem comes along, who I like a lot. Rarely do I like something new – I’ve never liked pop music that much. It took me a while to even like the Beatles, which I now love.

GP : So – the Beatles or the Rolling Stones. Who do you prefer?

TN : The Rolling Stones are great, but I like the Beatles because I think they’re better – their songs are amazing. Amazing words, and no one seems to really appreciate their lyrics. They’re great.

GP : So you’re more about the words, what they’re saying? Which is why you like Eminem presumably.

TN : I like what he’s got to say. It’s good.

GP : Finally, what’s your favourite horror movie?

TN : I think it’s probably Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The original one. And The Exorcist. And I like Vertigo, although that’s not really a horror movie…

GP : Thanks for speaking with Gorepress, Tom.

TN : Thanks.

Vision is currently doing the festival circuit and garnering much acclaim. Gorepress had the pleasure of viewing it this week and we can report that it’s a stylish little shocker that deserves the attention it’s receiving. Watch the trailer here :

Join the group on Facebook for updates and news! – ‘Vision’ Short Horror Film

Eight candidates, one job. They’re led into a concrete bunker, sit down at their desks and prepare themselves for the toughest exam of their lives. There are very few rules, and disturbingly The Invigilator tells them “There is no law in this room but our law”. The candidates accept this, and flip over the question sheet. But it’s blank. They’re all blank. There is no question. Or is there? During the next eighty minutes the eight potentials must fight it out, metaphorically and literally, to discover the ultimate answer to an unknown question.

Presumably filmed in real time, the eighty minutes flash by as you watch the candidates slowly crack under the pressure. If they don’t find the question soon enough, they might not have time to write the answer. If the answer needs to be written, of course.

At first they work as a group, thinking smartly and eliminating possibilities, but the closer the timer ticks towards the dreaded number zero the more desperate they become. Back-stabbing, cheating, lying and violence explode within the small windowless room, and it quickly becomes apparent that some people will do anything to get the ultimate job. Anything.

The film really rests upon the performances of the main core players – the candidates – and they all pass the test with flying colours. Luke Mably and Chudwudi Iwuji especially shine as aggressive narcissist “White” and team-playing Catholic “Black”. Named by White to ensure no one knows anyone’s names, Black and White are joined by Brown, Dark, Blonde, Brunette, Deaf and Chinese. Each actor has their own character to play with, and they come across as individual and deep. It feels more like a play than a film, mainly because of its one-room setting and dialogue-heavy scenes, but this is far from a complaint as it works brilliantly.

Exam treats its audience with a surprising amount of intelligence, providing an idea of the outside world without ever truly spelling it out. Set “Soon” in our future, an epidemic has swept the world, and only expensive suppressants can save those unfortunate enough to be struck down with the virus. The candidates are all hoping to attain a much-coveted job in the powerful corporation that makes these drugs, whose C.E.O. people haven’t seen for years. It’s an interesting and believable set-up, and avoids a number of cliché pitfalls it could’ve easily fallen down if the characters hadn’t witnessed the destructive force of a world-wide viral outbreak. This is more than a twisted version of The Apprentice – the question and even the job specification is genuinely unknown.

Direction wise it’s sharp and stylish throughout, with focus on attention to detail that forces you to notice the important things without unsubtly smacking them in your face.

Yet, despite everything about this piece being well crafted, at its heart it’s incredibly flawed. The C.E.O.’s hiring method is extremely questionable, and you feel there are perhaps a thousand better ways of assessing potential staff members. It makes the corporation appear sinister, cynical and slightly demented. There is no law, so the characters can do whatever they like to succeed. Is a mass murderer really the kind of person you’d want as an assistant? The film has a flawed concept, but it is still very good if you accept it wholesale. The moment you begin questioning it, it’ll fall apart and you’ll quickly lose interest.

Exam is compelling, intelligent and well-crafted. The concept is mildly ridiculous, yet if you can ignore this then you’ll have a thoroughly enjoyable time. We might not know the question, but the answer is always “Yes” – watch this film.

Rating: 7 out of 10 stars

Shot in high contrast black and white with splashes of colour, Jack Falls is reminiscent of Sin City, but with a more gritty, realistic edge. The film stars Tamer Hassan (The Business, Layer Cake), Simon Phillips (Jack Said, Jack Says), Alan Ford (Snatch), Olivia Hallinan (Lark Rise to Candleford, Sugar Rush), Dexter Fletcher (Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Stardust), Adam Deacon (Adulthood, Kidulthood), Doug Bradley (Hellraiser), Zach Galligan (Gremlins), Jason Flemying (Lock Stock, Kick Ass) and Martin Kemp (The Krays).

Brought to the screen by Press On Features, the company behind the previous Jack films and post-apocalyptic thriller The Last Seven (out at the end of August), the film has gone back to the roots of the original graphic novels written by Paul Tanter, who as well as scripting the film also directs this installment with co-director Alexander Williams. Jack Falls is due an Autumn release.

Hellraiser star Doug Bradley features in Jack Falls as a sarcastic but talented Doctor who has a hand in saving Jack.

Check out the teaser featuring the horror legend here :

Very stupid from the start, Sexy Killer kicks off with breasts, blood and bad language in a confused knife attack in a college shower room. What leads on from here is one piece of mind-smacking insanity after another.

Our protagonist Barbara is a kinky, deranged serial killer who is aware of the camera and regularly speaks to it. She kills people who slightly annoy her, and as she’s female she’s completely unstoppable because literally no one suspects her. Her murdering rampage is going fine until some students at her college invent a machine that reanimates the dead… by accident… when originally they were inventing a cure for migraines. Yep. Having made this amazing scientific find, they boldly decide to resurrect Barbara’s murder victims so the corpses can tell the police who murdered them. Naturally, bringing the dead to life never runs smoothly, and soon our sexy killer gets involved as the zombie apocalypse threatens to engulf the college. So much more happens, all of it utterly random, but this is the general crux of Sexy Killer.

For anyone who likes a tight storyline and clever plotting, avoid this film forever. It’s a saggy, shoddy mess in relation to its structure, whacking in flashbacks in an almost random manner and taking an eternity to drag the undead into the picture. The majority of the film focuses on Barbara’s demented views on life and her continually unsympathetic murdering of people who slight her, or simply exist in some cases.

Sexy Killer is exceptionally self-aware. It knows what it is, and doesn’t particularly care if you don’t like it. It plays a lounge version of Aqua’s Barbie Girl while a severed head is stuffed into her handbag, she reads a copy of Cosmokiller and she has some witty dialogue despite the film’s utter stupidity – “Did you kill all those people?” her aghast boyfriend asks. “Yes, in theory,” she replies. “But now I have to kill them all again”.

There is little to be said for meaning or depth beyond the hammeringly obvious “it’s her nature” message, and this is essentially what makes our protagonist a likeable if horrifically amoral character. Luckily all the supporting characters are either stupid, sadistic or generally unlikeable, so we don’t care if they die. And the violence isn’t offensive. In fact, you enjoy it because it is completely untaxing – it is neither impressively done or horrifically nasty. It’s just very silly.

Although enjoyable as a whole, Sexy Killer might leave you a little cold. It feels very long, it tries too hard to be kooky and it is embarrassingly unoriginal in places despite being ingenious at other points. Some audiences will adore this film, some will completely loathe it.

Sexy Killer will become a cult classic, but it’s Spanish creators knew it would when it was being made. There were no pretensions here – it was created for an audience to love its audacity and the attempted middle-finger uppage it flicks at Hollywood horror – yet it smacks of desperation at times and might just be too silly and lacking in actual gore for modern horror audiences to adore it.

Mad, twisting, idiotic and baffling, Sexy Killer is perfect entertainment if you like your horror more bonkers than scary. If not, this could be an annoying, tiresome stomp towards aggravation. Great fun, if you like that sort of thing…

Rating: 5 out of 10 stars

It is 2173 and the Earth has died. Corporal Bower (Ben Foster) awakes inside a stasis chamber onboard the Elysium, a deep space vessel on a mission to populate a newly-discovered life-bearing planet, the human race’s last hope. Bower is supposed to replace the current crew, but finds the door to the bridge locked and the power intermittent. One of his flight team is missing and his freshly-awake Lieutenant (Dennis Quaid) remembers nothing. Suspicious of foul play, Bower ventures into the air ducts to investigate, and discovers something inhuman is on the Elysium with them. They’re incredibly fast, very powerful and are hell-bent on killing and eating every human left onboard. The reactor needs resetting before shutting down forever, and Bower is the only one who knows how to reboot it. It quickly becomes a fight against a hoard of mindless monsters and their own sanity, and the clock is ticking.

Although Pandorum has an interesting premise, it is poorly executed. From the director of the diabolical Case 39, it is no surprise Christian Alvert does nothing impressive with Pandorum. It had a lot of potential, with the possibility of mixing the creeping terror of Alien with the vivid madness of Event Horizon, but instead he shoves all semblance of subtlety into an escape pod and jettisons it into space.

Within ten minutes we’ve seen our first monster in full detail, a humanoid creature dressed in spiked armour and sporting facial features similar to The Descent’s Crawlers and basically a complete rip-off of Firefly / Serenity’s Reavers. The Pandorum advertisements boast “from the producers of the Resident Evil series” so prepare for excessive carnage, wildly over-the-top fighting and very little character work – which is exactly what it provides.

From the moment the film begins it doesn’t slow down. It’s a furious, confusing, constantly-moving adventure through a bizarrely constructed spaceship. The Elysium appears like every other depressing space vessel ever created – dark, crawling with wires and pipes, adorned with guttering and trapdoors and completely without a single coffee machine. For a ship containing 60,000 people in stasis, it’s a horribly bleak place to wake up, even when there aren’t monstrous people-eaters jumping about.

The main flaw of Pandorum is that the creators give the audience no time to understand characters, and not a spark of humour to counter the grim, depressing otherness of the darkened ship. Ben Foster is distinctly uncompelling as our hero, and Quaid struggles to eek any character out of his limited role. The post hyper-extended-stasis amnesia is useful to the plot but infuriatingly convenient otherwise, much like the very idea of “Pandorum”.

Pandorum, we discover, is a colloquial term for going space-mental after an extended period of stasis. In one of history’s worst space disasters an officer went completely insane and jettisoned 5,000 people into space, all because of Pandorum. The symptoms are shaking hands, nosebleeds, hallucinations… which all of our core protagonists begin to show signs of. Are they suffering Pandorum? Are these creatures actually there? Do we care?

It is a hyperactive film, wildly stupid, too fast and without any sense of reason. Pandorum is greatly watchable, but the tone is confused – it feels like a Zach Snyder zombie flick stuck inside the bowels of the Nostromo populated by cardboard characters. It is a violent, furious, popcorn-chomping film that is instantly forgettable.

Rating: 4 out of 10 stars

Shrooms begins well. The setup is simple – a group of friends take a trip to Ireland for two reasons: “See Ireland, do shrooms”. At least they have their priorities straight. Sadly, however, the part of Ireland they see is an airport, a camper van and some woods. But the shrooms they certainly win on. Venturing into a special section of forest, led by local-lad Jake (Jack Huston), they’re told about the amazing hallucinogenic qualities of the mushrooms that grow there.

The group of six set about picking mushrooms for their big “shroom out” the next day, and Jack tells a tale about a now derelict school of correction for young boys. Apparently, one night a child in a sackcloth-hood killed everyone whilst they slept. His body was never found, and neither was that of a feral dog-boy and the maniac ruler of the school. Do their ghosts still haunt the woods? Probably.

The group are also warned about the Death Head mushroom, which only grows every few seasons. Eating one could lead to a number of reactions – it could internally destroy you, nuclear-reactioning your organs. Or alternatively, according to the ancient druids, it could cause shape-shifting, extreme ferocity and premonitions. Tara (Lindsey Haun) foolishly takes one before anyone could warn her… leading to violent fits and a convenient precognitive ability!

Settling into their little camp, the six begin to have the best shrooming experience of their lives, but something goes horrible wrong. Moronic Bluto goes missing with the car keys and mobile phones, and they soon realise something is lurking in the woods around them. Something evil. Or is it? Could they be hallucinating?! Who cares!

Despite some effective moments, Shrooms fails to produce many genuine scares. This is perhaps because you understand it “could” all be hallucinations and that Tara’s fortuitous shroom-induced future-sight might stop it happening anyway. It’s tiresome stuff and you simply fail to care.

Shrooms is a bit too bonkers in places, with some needlessly long build-up scenes, and it sags incredibly after Bluto’s disappearance. It feels like the scriptwriter died halfway through and someone else took over – someone who loves a cliché and a ferocious lack of subtlety.

In the first thirty minutes we’re given some interesting and believable characters, with some excellent dialogue and genuinely amusing moments… but then this all vanishes the moment the tension crank is nudged. Characters you originally cared for become frustrating and annoying, their decisions wildly idiotic and their ability to effectively communicate seemingly dissolved. For some reason “meet at the house because there’s a road nearby” is interpreted as “walk into a massive abandoned school and get lost”. It’s an idiotic and frustrating miscommunication, although it does provide some of the more genuine scares of the movie.

The dumb decisions aside, Shrooms also has too much happening – there are Irish rednecks, a sack-headed child, a feral dog-boy, a mad monk and a lot of insane hallucinations – it’s too much to handle at times, and you feel anything could occur. And it does. But despite all that, the ending is so face-slappingly obvious you wonder why you bothered traipsing there.

Shrooms: never a great idea. It might seem fun or risky or thrilling, but it’s not. If drugs are bad, then Shrooms is heart-explodingly, arse-rapingly, brain-meltingly terrible. This reviewer of course means the film. Don’t take Shrooms, boys and girls. At least not out of the DVD box…

Shrooms is not trippy, it’s not fun, it’s just disappointing and feels like you’ve eaten a Death Cap mushroom instead of a magic one. [That’s enough mushroom puns now] Basically, this film is shiitake. [Stop it!]

Rating: 4.5 out of 10 stars

On the 7th of August 2010, the lovely folks at Cigarette Burns will be hosting an evening of horror shorts. Night Of The Long Shorts features a stellar line-up of films that includes Can Evrenol’s My Grandmother, Life After Beth and Wishing Well. Comprising of 9 films in total, each will be shown twice for the benefit of latecomers and those that have to get away early; no-one need miss out. Night Of The Long Shorts will be the UK premiere for almost all of the 9 films. Can Evrenol will be in attendance as a precursor to his latest movie’s unveiling at this years FrightFest, as will some cast members from a few of the other shorts.

The event is due to take place at Rosemary Branch, 2 Shepperton Road, London, N1, the price on the door will be a measly £2 and the showings are scheduled for 8-10pm and again at 10pm-12am. The full list of shorts is as follows;

• Wishing Well
• Queen Of Spades
• Halloween Before Christmas
• Life After Beth
• Séance
• Ay Up Me Duck Of The Dead
• Donna
• My Grandmother
• Night Of The Milk Beast

You can visit the Cigarette Burns website and find out even more about the event at www.cigaretteburnscinema.com

Thanks to the very nice people at Revolver Entertainment, we have a couple of copies of Salvage to give away on DVD this week! Simply answer the question below to be in with a chance of winning. Please send your answers to mail@gorepress.com with the title ‘Win a DVD’. We will accept entries up to and including July 24th 2010.

Salvage shares its set with which now defunct soap opera?

• a) Eldorado
• b) Crossroads
• c) Brookside

Salvage is out on UK DVD and as of this month is also available on Region 1 US DVD! Available at all good retailers!