Parky at the Pictures (DVD 1/11/2012)

SUPERNATURAL.

Few modern film-makers favour the restraint that made James's stories so potent. Consequently, `things' are no longer content simply to go bump in the night. Moreover, since the emergence of the `found footage' flick, the twin arts of establishing atmosphere and sustaining suspense have been ditched in favour of teasing the audience before delivering a series of visceral jolts that merely transient thrills rather than building up a gnawing sense of dread.

Also known as Emergo (after the flying skeletons gimmick devised to accompany the initial screenings of William Castle's House on Haunted Hill, 1959), Apartment 143 is a workaday variation on the Paranormal Activity brand of possession picture that has Kai Lennox move kids Gia Mantegna and Damian Roman away from the house that has been channelling bad vibes since the car crash death of his wife. However, when it becomes clear that the malevolent presence has followed the family, Lennox summons Michael O'Keefe and his assistants Rick Gonzalez and Fiona Glascott to see if they can detect anything with their state-of-the-art equipment.

Scripted by Rodrigo Cortes (who directed the claustrophobic Buried, 2010), this is a film short on surprises, in spite of the efforts of director Carles Torrens and cinematographer Oscar Duran to give the action some visual variation by using different camera formats to generate distinctive footage. And the same is true of Sevé Schelenz's Skew, which hits upon the novel idea of distorting the images recorded by Robert Scattergood when he goes on a road trip to a wedding with buddy Richard Olak and his girlfriend Amber Lewis. Things begin to go wrong when they hit a coyote in the night and Scattergood notices that its snout looks odd through the viewfinder. But, when the hotel clerk whose visage had appeared equally contorted is found dead shortly after they check in, the trio realises that something untoward is going on and that rewinding the video may not be the sole solution.

Prompting the inevitable question germane to all found footage films - why does the person wielding the camera keep recording at times when this should be the least of their concerns -  this interesting, but never compelling twist on the Cannibal Holocaust-cum-Blair Witch formula finds a companion in Richard Parry's A Night in the Woods, which accompanies American Scoot McNairy, his girlfriend Anna Skellern and her cousin Andrew Hawley on a camping expedition to Dartmoor that gets off to the worst possible start when McNairy takes an instant dislike to Hawley.

It soon transpires that he has every reason to be suspicious of the stranger. But Skellern discovers on McNairy's laptop plentiful reasons why she should be equally livid with him. Yet, instead of launching into a good old-fashioned row, the menfolk wander off into the night, leaving Skellern to go in search of them using a strong light beam conveniently fixed into a camcorder that provides a neat alternative to the night-vision style used for the rest of the climactic action. In fairness to Parry and cinematographer Simon Dennis, the visuals are often splendid, as is Udit Duseja's sound design. But, while the cast deserves credit for improvising with such gusto, the story is utterly devoid of suspense and surprise, even during the moments when it is almost impossible to discern what is supposed to be happening.

The setting is even more remote in debutant Jaime Osorio Marquez's The Squad, which joins a Colombian army unit under Juan David Restrepo as it is choppered into the jungle to ascertain whether rebels have wiped out a force billeted at a mountain outpost. No sooner have they landed, however, than one of the troopers ignores warnings and charges into the building to check on the condition of a buddy, while another is wounded by an exploding landmine that also damages the radio. But Sergeant Andrés Castañeda, medic Alejandro Aguilar and Privates Mateo Stevel and Juan Pablo Barragan realises they are in real trouble when they find Daniela Catz chained behind a false wall and uncover a command log suggesting that she is a witch. However, when she escapes, the paranoia ramps up and the soldiers begin to speculate about what actually did for their predecessors.

Bearing a creditable resemblance to John Carpenter's The Thing (1982), as well as several more recent stranded military personnel thrillers like South Korean Su-chang Kong's R-Point (2004), this is deftly paced and broodingly photographed by Alejandro Moreno in Andean locations whose mist shrouds are a throwback to the Universal and Hammer classics mentioned above. The characters might have been more finely sketched, while too many key incidents occur off screen. Nevertheless, the friendship between Aguilar and Barragan is nicely judged by Marques and co-scenarist Diego Vivanco, who keep the viewer on tenterhooks for much of the picture.

Mike Flanagan does a similarly decent job of keeping the audience guessing, as another unseen menace goes on the loose in the Glendale district of Los Angeles in Absentia. It's been seven years since Morgan Peter Brown vanished without a trace and wife Courtney Bell decides to have him declared dead in absentia before she gives birth to the baby who has been fathered by cop Dave Levine, even though she is dating psychiatrist Scott Graham. However, the minute she does so, Bell begins having nightmares and even sees Brown fulminating against his abandonment in all-too-real waking visions. However, when sister Katie Parker returns from drug rehab and encounters a bloodied man in the pedestrian tunnel leading to the park and he warns her about the existence of `the underneath', the entire neighbourhood goes on full alert.

Less an outright horror than a dissertation on love, loss and learning how to cope with each, this is an intriguing saga that exploits its novel premise to discuss a range of social issues relating to class, alienation and the twin myths of the suburban idyll and the American Dream. Evocatively photographed by Rustin Cerveny to blur the distinction between fact and fantasy, the action unravels in a measured manner that makes the revelations all the more plausible and disconcerting. Flanagan might have afforded us more of a glimpse of the otherworld and its overlords, but he more than atones with the scenarios imagined for their lost loved ones by those left behind.

Moving across the City of Angels to the South Bay area, it's back indoors for The Pact, a feature-length version of the 11-minute short that first got writer-director Nicholas McCarthy noticed at Sundance in 2011. However, given the hoary nature of the screenplay, the primary reasons for checking out this overstretched debut are Walter Barnett's production design (complete with some of the most terrifying wallpaper in screen history) and Bridger Nielsen's nimble camerawork.

When her mother dies, Agnes Bruckner takes up residence in her seemingly cosy home while attending to her affairs. However, biker sister Caity Lotz wants nothing to do with the place and is aghast that Bruckner sees nothing sinister in the flickering lights and power cuts, let alone the shadowy backdrops to their Skype conversations. But, when her sibling mysteriously disappears, Lotz ventures into the property and is so spooked by the creepy occurrences that ensue that she ask cop Casper Van Dien to investigate. He locates a room that nobody previously knew existed, while oddball relative Mark Steger shows up to add another plot strand that doesn't really go anywhere. Thus, while McCarthy may well eventually prove capable of breathing new life into these tired haunted house clichés, he has clearly been rushed into releasing this calling card and might have been better advised to have taken his time and devised a worthwhile third act.

Another debutant showing promise, but ultimately failing to deliver is Eoin Macken, who sets The Inside in an abandoned Dublin warehouse that serves as a chilling symbol for the boom times that disappeared with the demise of the Celtic Tiger. Macken also stars as a homeless person who tries to sell the camcorder he has found on the street and ends up watching in horror as he sees Siobhan Cullen, Vanessa Matias Fahy, Natalie Kostrzewa, Kellie Blaise and Tereza Srbova detour from a night on the town into the backstreet premises where they are attacked by wild boys Emmett J. Scanlan, Karl Argue and Brian Fortune. However, this maladjusted trio is nothing compared to the sinister presence that prowls the cavernous cellars.

Surely someone is eventually going to come up with an alternative to the horror staple of the stalking and slashing of young women? Macken leaves it late to offer his variation by having his voyeuristic anti-hero slip through the boarded-up door to see if he can rescue any survivors. But many will already have been put off by the chauvinist undercurrent and the fact that David Laird's shakicam imagery makes it almost impossible readily to identify with the poorly defined characters. Yet the intrusion by the rapacious hooligans is truly unsettling, while Gavin O'Reilly's lighting, Greg French's sound design and the score by Kevin Whyms of Whymsonics make the screams, shouts, pants, whimpers and sobs of the subterranean pursuit seem all the more viscerally perturbing.

SCI-FI HYBRIDS.

Science fiction and horror have been cinematic bedfellows since the pioneers of the 1890s began producing pictures about x-rays, skeletons and ghosts that loomed and dematerialised as if by magic. Sadly, many of today's dabblers in the dark movie arts have only a fraction of the imagination of these fin-de-siècle showmen, who were forever seeking the next showstopping illusion rather than hoping to bamboozle their audiences with a few tricks borrowed from another practitioner's act.

Sadly, despite being released by Universal, Johannes Roberts's Storage 24 is not up to the studio's usual genre standards. Opening with the crash landing of a military aircraft in the yard of a London storage facility, the action quickly comes to focus on those trapped inside its electronically powered doors with a bloodthirsty alien. Owing debts to both JJ Abrams's Super 8 and Joe Cornish's Attack the Block (both 2011), this makes effective use of its redoubtable corridors and confined spaces, as well as such unlikely weapons as a battery powered yappy dog. But it never feels anything more than a lacklustre episode of Doctor Who.

Noel Clarke (who also wrote and produced the picture) has come with buddy Colin O'Donoghue to collect the belongings stashed in a room he shares with ex-girlfriend Antonia Campbell-Hughes, who is accompanied by loyal friend Laura Haddock and her smarmy beau, Jamie Thomas King. A trip to a vending machine, however, causes the latter to find terrified receptionist Alex Price cowering in a cupboard after witnessing the slaughter of electrician Geoff Bell. But King is powerless to prevent Price from being snatched by the ravenous monster and is soon dispatched himself having entrusted his party to the care of eccentric Ned Dennehy, who has been reduced to living in his lock-up following a disastrous divorce.

Romantic duplicity plays a surprisingly large role in what is supposed to be a creature feature, but the subplots seem to exist more to give Clarke's hero a sense of moral superiority to go with his strength, ingenuity and survival instinct. Indeed, the script is almost risibly loaded in Clarke's favour and only the estimable Haddock manages to filch the odd scene from him. But this imbalance is very much to the film's detriment, as we never particularly care what happens to the imperilled quintet and this lack of empathy is reinforced by their rather muted response to the danger they face as they clamber through air ducts or scuttle along echoing corridors.

Roberts accommodates plenty of wry humour, but Colin Theys strikes a better tone in Alien Infiltration, which has been scripted by John Doolan with a greater emphasis on yuks of the guffawing than the gruesome kind. If anything, the storyline loses momentum and the ending is something of a letdown. But the performances are bullish and the blending of physical and computer-generated effects is commendably done considering the limitations imposed by the budget.

When junkyard owner Kevin Shea catches younger wife Ashley Bates canoodling in the barn with employee Cuyle Carvin, he starts meting out a thrashing that is ended only by mother-in-law Hilma Falkowski burying a hammer in his skull. However, before mother and daughter can start plotting how to get their hands on the insurance money, a spacecraft crashes into the barn and they are faced with the problem of retrieving the body they need to prove that Shea perished at the hands of extraterrestrial forces. They offer a $300,000 dollar reward and attract such hopefuls as exotic dancer Adrienne LaValley, no-nonsense priest Roddy Piper, sleazy crook Jeremy London and supposedly helpless schemer Sari Gagnon. But, even though it is preoccupied with finding scrap to repair its craft, the alien is still prepared to put up a fearsome fight.

There is no stopping Theys and Doolan as they pack the madcap action with robotic sharks, flesh-eating slugs and a crowd perched on a nearby hill to watch the would-be corpse seekers bite the dust. But not all of the gags pay off and the same is true of Jim Mallon's Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie (1996), which was spun off from a short-lived HBO series that became a cult hit for its fond lampooning of the 1950s B movies that enabled science fiction to make the transition from occasional screen curio to Hollywood's keystone genre of the blockbuster era.

The premise of the show was that Dr Clayton Forrester (Trace Beaulieu) is planning to take over the world by using Z-level exploitation movies to dumb down the populace into meek submission. However, when he tries to test his technique on Michael J. Nelson in the Satellite of Love, his subject uses his wit to debunk the pictures and offset their brain-frying awfulness. He is aided in his endeavours by robot sidekicks Crow T. Robot (voiced by Beaulieu) and Tom Servo (Kevin Murphy) and they return for the feature edition, which breaks from the tradition of selecting bona fide turkeys by opting for Joseph M. Newman's reasonably respected 1955 adaptation of the Raymond F. Jones novel, This Island Earth.

The wisecracks still come thick and fast, however, as Nelson and his mechanical pals talk over an edited version of the Newman storyline that sees scientist Rex Reason assemble a machine called an interlocutor that puts him in contact with the mysterious Jeff Morrow, who congratulates him on passing the audition to participate in his top secret project. Next day, Reason is taken in a remote controlled plane to a facility in Georgia, where he meets up with old flame Faith Domergue and boffin Russell Johnson, who is killed during a thwarted escape bid. But, even though Morrow succeeds in taking Reason and Domergue to his home planet of Metaluna, he cannot convince them to help his people win a war against the neighbouring Zagons.

Essentially transferring the Beavis and Butthead concept from MTV videos to sci-fi movies, this has its moments. But, even though there is an undeniable intelligence behind the commentary and the skits that see Nelson crash into the Hubble Telescope while trying to make a quick getaway and then make contact with a Metalunan with his own interlocutor , as many viewers will be keener to see how the interstellar showdown turns out than how Forrester reacts to being teleported to a Metalunan shower after having his cunning plan resisted once more.

It's probably best not to take Joe Knee's Dragon Wasps too seriously, either. When father David Stasko goes missing in the jungles of Belize while working for the Transgentec corporation, his scientist daughter Dominka Juillet flies to South America with her intrepid assistant Nikolette Noel. With only a discarded rucksack and a GPS tracker to go by, the duo strike out into the unknown. However, this is dangerous country and soldier Corin Nemec insists on escorting Juillet to protect her from drug smuggler Gildon Roland. But, as the movie title suggests, there is something much more dangerous hovering above the rainforest canopy just waiting for their moment to strike.

The plot is preposterous, the acting often awful and the CGI effects invariably look as though they have been attached to the matte screen with sellotape. Yet Nemec's full-throttle performance gives Mark Atkins and Rafael Jordan's screenplay a conviction it scarcely deserves and Knee plays with generic convention with his tongue so firmly in his cheek that it is difficult not to enjoy the entire farrago. Indeed, one is even left wishing by the end that there had been a few more of the flame-throwing super-insects to keep Nemec and his companions on their toes.

If Dragon Wasps is undemanding fun, Bradley Parker's Chernobyl Diaries is much more problematic, if only for the fact that it is set in the abandoned city of Prypiat that bore the brunt of one of the world's worst nuclear reactor disasters in 1986. Condemned by several connected charities and support groups, the film has been produced and co-scripted (from his story `The Diary of Lawson Oxford'), by Oren Peli, the Israeli-American director who made his name with his debut feature, Paranormal Activity (2009), and who ardently insists that he has been thanked by the Chabad's Children of Chernobyl group for his sensitive discussion of such contentious issues.

While travelling across Europe, friends Jessie McCartney, Olivia Taylor Dudley and Devin Kelley detour to Kiev to visit McCartney's brother, Jonathan Sadowski. He suggests they take an `extreme tourist' trip to Prypiat and Norwegian backpackers Ingrid Bolsø Berdal and Nathan Philips join them in guide Dimitri Diatchenko's van. However, after wandering around the deserted residential area and being scared by a prying bear, the visitors realise they are stranded when Diatchenko discovers that his engine wires have been chewed through. Unable to raise help, the septet huddles in the vehicle and starts apportioning blame until they are interrupted by the sound of hounds baying in the darkness. But this is only the start of their troubles, as they have yet to encounter the mutant humans still roaming the streets.

In 1999, the Austrian director Nikolaus Geyrhalter visited the Ukraine and captured the full horror of the eponymous ghost town in the profoundly moving and indelibly disturbing documentary, Pripyat. By contrast, this rehash of radioactive contamination clichés shot on location in Serbia and Hungary is shamelessly exploitative. When required to run around screaming in torchlit terror, the cast performs admirably. But it is easily defeated by the near-impossible challenge of making us care about such shallow ciphers and few will have been persuaded by the time that the inevitable `final girl' awakens in a nearby hospital that this is anything other than shameless exploitation.

CREATURE FEATURES.

Early cinema was chock full of ghosts, ghouls and skeletons. But vampires didn't put in an appearance until the 1920s and it was 1932 before the first recognisable zombie showed up. But, since the Japanese took a liking to monsters in the 1950, the creature feature has become an integral part of the horror scene. Luckily, the credibility of the creature has never really been an issue, with audiences being as willing to recoil from a man in a rubber suit as they were from meticulously constructed models or mere amalgamations of pixels. Indeed, in many cases, the enjoyment increased in direct proportion to the preposterousness of the peril and this point is adequately made by the gallery of grotesques on offer this Halloween.

From its title alone, it's clear what to expect from Stuart Simpson's Monstro! after Nelli Scarlet, Karli Madden and Kate Watts flee a scene of gore-spattered carnage to lay low in a small Australian coastal town. Unfortunately, they are such bad girls that they find it impossible not to land themselves in fresh trouble and, instead of remaining in their shack and chugging and snorting themselves into oblivion, they opt to ignore the warnings of wheelchair-bound veteran Norman Yemm and go for a dip in the sea.

Something about their evil aura awakens a slumbering, multi-tentacled menace and fishermen are soon being washed up on the beach minus such customary accoutrements as arms, legs and faces. Undaunted, even by the diminution of their own number, Scarlet and Madden recruit Yemm's seemingly innocent granddaughter Kyrie Capri, who lost her own parents during an attack some 15 years earlier, and she proves just as capable of wielding an angry blade as her new best friends.

Opening with a striking monochrome sequence that erupts into colour with the first spurt of blood, this is a confident piece of Ozploitation from Simpson, who announced himself back in 2006 with the Troma pick-up, Demonsamongus. However, he is unable to sustain this level of slick style and time hangs heavy as the girls bicker and party during what is essentially a pastiche of the kind of quip-trading flesh flick that used to be the speciality of Russ Meyer and Radley Metzger. Things pick up again once the focus returns to the Cormanesque critter beneath the waves. But, while the cast give it a good go and Nick Kocsis's special effects are suitably cheesy, Simpson is always too conscious of emulating the retro grindhouse antics of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez to pay due homage to the real thing.

Another couple of strangers cause plentiful mayhem of their own in Frank Henenlotter's Basket Case (1982), as Kevin Van Hentenryck checks into a seedy New York hotel whose clientele seems to have come from Lowlife Central Casting. However, it soon becomes clear that the gauche hayseed clinging to a large basket is every bit as creepy as the other occupants of Robert Vogel's 42nd Street flophouse and a flashback shows how the young Van Hentenryck was separated from his malformed Siamese twin by a couple of doctors and a veterinarian on the orders of their father, Richard Pierce.

Sharing a telepathic link with Belial, the doting sibling kills Pierce and the pair are sheltered by kindly aunt Ruth Neuman until they are ready to exact their revenge on the sawbones who parted them. Having slaughtered Bill Freeman back in Glens Falls, Van Hentenryck heads to the city, where he is befriended by hooker Beverly Bonner and develops a crush on surgery receptionist Terri Susan Smith, while stalking medics Diana Browne and Lloyd Pace. But, as the gaps between fast food scarfing sessions increases, Belial comes to resent Van Hentenryck's independent tendencies and their bond becomes ever-more strained as the pull of normality grows stronger.

Readily acknowledging its debt to the gorefests of Herschell Gordon Lewis and David Lynch's Eraserhead (1977), this is an unnerving blend of body horror and love triangle melodrama. The human cast is spirited enough, with Van Hentenryck making an affable anti-hero. But the fascination lies with Belial, who was created from a mix of puppetry and stop-motion animation by effects designer Kevin Haney, although the sequences depicting the swollen claw-like hand seizing upon its victims were actually achieved by Henenlotter wearing a prosthetic glove.

A sequel was somewhat inevitable, although eight years eventually elapsed (during which time Brain Damage, 1988, and Frankenhooker, 1990, were completed) before Henenlotter felt compelled to continue the story in Basket Case 2 (1990). Having crashed through a Times Square window in order to escape their pursuers, Van Hentenryck and Belial are taken to a hospital, from which they are rescued by Annie Ross, an old friend of Ruth Neuman, who champions the cause of the physically different. Indeed, her suburban home is filled with individuals learning to cope with such afflictions as rodentine features, facial tendrils, elongated teeth and condensed foreheads. But, while Belial is content to rub along with his new acquaintances (even finding romance with a soulmate named Eve), Van Hentenryck is eager to make a fresh start with Ross's granddaughter, Heather Rattray, and it is only when reporter Judy Grafe and private eye Ted Sorel start snooping around that he regains his sense of family loyalty.

If Henenlotter and SFX guru Gabe Bartolos stray too close to the contentious territory covered in Tod Browning's Freaks (1933) and Jack Cardiff's The Mutations (1974), they take a more circuitous route in Basket Case 3: The Progency (1992), which sees Van Hentenryck and Ross strike out for the Deep South after they learn that Belial and Eve are expecting. However, while Ross is entrusting her charges to doctor Dan Biggers and catching up with Jim O'Doherty, the uniquely gifted son she abandoned long ago, Van Hentenryck (who is no longer being straitjacketed after accidentally killing Rattray and trying to re-attach Belial to his side) falls under the spell of sheriff Gil Roper's daughter, Tina Louise Hilbert, who turns out to be a tattooed, whip-cracking dominatrix beneath her prissy exterior.

However, while everyone is distracted by the birth of a dozen slimy infants, deputies Jackson Faw and Jim Grimshaw discover there is a sizeable reward on offer for capturing the murderous siblings. But, when they dispatch Eve in kidnapping the babies, Belial sets out to rescue them wearing a metal suit that has been specially designed for him by handyman O'Doherty. The consequences are somewhat inevitable, but Henenlotter stages the pandemonium with a typical mix of abominable decimation and bleak humour. Apparently, a third sequel is on the cards, but it will have to go some way to top the rendition of the Lloyd Price hit `Personality' delivered by Ross and her fellow passengers during the minibus trip south.

The predators come thicker and faster in Ultimate Zombie Feast, a two-disc portmanteau collection that bundles a 15 shorts around Paul Cranefield, Scott Kragelund and Erik Van Sant's featurette The Book of Zombie, which centres on the use of caffeinated drinks to reclaim Utah from the Mormon undead  The pick of the rest are David M. Reynolds's 'Zomblies', which accompanies six rangers on a mission to collect samples of the virus that has necessitated the sealing off of Cornwall; Dane Tor Fruergaard's Sergio Leone-inspired oater, 'It Came from the West'; and Grégory Morinhas's 'Paris By Night of the Living Dead'; which numbers Amélie and Zinadine Zidane among the casualties as bride Karina Testa and groom David Saracino.refuse to let brain-munchers ruin their big day.

Drawn from places as disparate as Britain, the States, Canada, Holland, Spain and India, the remainder represent a typically mixed anthology bunch: Barend de Voogd and Rob van der Velden's 'Zombeer'; Inaki San Román and Rafael Mertinez's 'Zombies and Cigarettes'; Joseph Avery and Matt Simpson's 'Plague'; Duncan Laing 'Bitten'; Jay Reiter's 'Arise'; Monica Winter Vigil's 'Not Even Death'; Randy Smith and Craig Peach's 'Fear of the Living Dead'; Bren Lynne's 'Kidz', Sat Johal, Tony Jopia and John Payne's 'Zombie Harvest'; Dan Gingold's 'The Skin of Your Teeth'; Tarunabh Dutta's 'Savages'; and William Bridges's 'Dead Hungry'.

The Dutch duo of Martjin Smits and Erwin Ven Den Eshof are given longer to warm to their themes in Kill Zombie!, after a crashed Russian satellite infects the population of Amesterdam with a livid green ooze. Some fortunate souls managed to survive the calamity, however, if only because office stiff Yahya Gaier and his doltish brother Mimoun Ouled Radi found themselves in jail after a punch-up at a party with Surinamese tearaways Uriah Arnhem and Sergio Hasselbaink. But Gaier isn't one to let a plague of flesh-eaters prevent him from a rendezvous with the girl he has drooled over from afar for many months. So, he enlists the assistance of intrepid cop Gigi Ravelli to escort him across the city to keep his date with destiny.

Shamelessly ripping off Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead (2004) and Scott Pilgrim vs the World (2010), this is a knowing, but unremarkable variation on the slaying misfits zomedy formula. But, while Tijs van Marle's script lacks novelty, Nederhorror is never anything less than technically proficient and Joost van Herwijnen's saturated imagery and Joost van de Wetering's brisk editing give this a visual panache to match the willingness of the cast.

Operating under the pseudonym The Butcher Brothers, Mitchell Altieri and Phil Flores demonstrate considerably more control in The Thompsons, which develops the story of their 2006 cult success The Hamiltons, which focused on the efforts of some siblings suffering from a blood-craving disorder to integrate into ordinary society and which ended with an explosive gas station showdown. Having survived the attempted cull of his clan, Cory Knauf escapes to Britain and changes his surname to maintain a low profile while he searches for the vampire elder who can advise him on how to cope in an unforgiving world. But, while publican Daniel O'Meara and his wife Selina Giles appear welcoming and Knauf strikes up a rapport with their human-born daughter Elizabeth Henstridge, twins Sean Browne and Tom Holloway have an altogether more sinister agenda and Knauf has misgivings about contacting his own twin brothers, Samuel Child and Mackenzie Firgens, to bring injured sibling Ryan Hartwig to the safe house.

Making evocative use of the rural settings to generate a moiling sense of unease, Altieri and Flores concentrate less on blood-letting than on the concepts of belonging, loyalty, kinship and dynastic ambition, with the clash between the Thompsons and the Stuarts ultimately feeling like something out of tome on medieval history. The performances match the deft characterisation, but what most intrigues here is the disavowal of vampiric folklore so that the allegorical allusions seem more immediate and discomfiting.

Even though it takes place in a world in which all 100 of the remaining vampires are female, Dennis Gansel's We Are the Night (2010) evidently finds the conventions of the nosferatu genre more to its liking. Setting its slaughter against the chicest Berlin backdrops, it owes more to Torsten Breuer's cinematography, Matthias Musse's production design and Anke Leinke's costumes than it does to a screenplay that the then 37 year-old director insisted he wrote when he was 23. Yet, even though style triumphs over content in almost every frame, the tensions between the protagonists are played with irresistible verve by a fine cast led by Nina Hoss, as the 250 year-old nightclub-owning vampire who has added decadent DJ Anna Fischer and tragic former silent movie star Jennifer Ulrich to her coterie. Yet, despite just having polished off the passengers and crew of an airliner, Hoss still has a hankering for some fresh meat.

However, she bites into more than she can consume when she seduces Karoline Herfurth, as not only is the athletic pickpocket seriously averse to authority, but she also has no inclination to abandon the fierce heterosexuality that keeps bringing her back to cop Max Reimelt, who is determined to get his woman after being kicked in the groin at the end of a breakneck pursuit through a crowded shopping street. Gansel stages such action sequences and a gun battle with some Russian mafiosi with rip-roaring aplomb. But he lingers overlong on the picture's lifestyle aspects, with the result that this winds up being closer to Hex in the City than The Lost Girls.

STALK & SLASH.

Although rabid killers had cropped up in the odd movie during the 1940s and 50s, the slasher cycle that continues to exert such a grip over cinema audiences only really started with Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho in 1960. Yet it wasn't until the early 1970s that serial menaces like Jason Voorhees, Freddie Krueger and Michael Myers became the stuff of nightmares. The five terrors on the loose in the titles on offer this Halloween may not be in the same league. But with the lights dimmed for a midnight start, there's no knowing how scared you'll be feeling by the first flash of cold steel.

Although released under the Troma banner, Father's Day is the work of the Winnipeg-based Astron-6 collective that comprises Adam Brooks, Jeremy Gillespie, Matt Kennedy, Conor Sweeney and Steven Kostanski. It started life as a mock trailer for online consumption, but Troma threw $10,000 at the quintet and this in-joke-stuffed pastiche of 1970s drive-in and grindhouse fodder is the gleeful result. Riffing on everything from Moby Dick to The Wizard of Oz, the storyline is a bit of a mess, while as many gags sail wide of the target as prove direct hits. But they come thick and fast and there can be no faulting the enthusiasm of a cast willing to strip, slip, slash and slurp their way through any number of revolting sex and slaughter sequences.

Gay psycopath Mackenzie Murdock has a thing for dads. In particular, having abducted and defiled them, he enjoys feasting upon them and consigning their souls to Hell. However, monocular vigilante Adam Brooks has decided enough is enough and he joins forces with long-lost sister Amy Groening, rent boy Conor Seeney and priest Matthew Kennedy to end Murdock's reign of terror, even if it means pursuing him all the way to the Underworld to prevent him from acquiring ghastly new powers linked to his demonic past. But if Good is to conquer evil, God is just going to have to forget about the accidental zapping of an angel and let his avengers get on with their task in hand.

Hurling caution and taste to the four winds, the Astron boys take a stab at offending just about everyone here, as the instances of blasphemy, incest, torture and cannibalism threaten to overtake the body count. But, while there is no excuse for humour that occasionally strays too close to being chauvinist and homophobic, some of the more restrained deadpan cracks are very funny. Moreover, the contrived continuity errors and incongruous soundtrack selections go some way to atoning for misfiring sequences of hallucination and intestinal slapstick, while the best place for the amusing, but intrusive cod trailer for a Star Wars knock-off entitled Star Raiders was surely among the DVD extras

Debuting director Michael Biehn plays it dead straight in The Victim, which he also wrote and produced with his wife and co-star Jennifer Blanc. Once a regular member of James Cameron's stock company in pictures like The Terminator (1984), Aliens (1986) and The Abyss (1989), Biehn plays an ex-cop who has turned his back on the world and moved into a cabin in the woods in order to find solitude and solace. No sooner has he started to meditate, however, than he is disturbed by stripper Jennifer Blanc, who insists she is being chased by rogue cops Ryan Honey and Denny Kirkwood, who have already murdered her best friend, Danielle Harris. Yet, while Biehn accepts her story, his doubts begin to mount after the lawmen knock on his door with a photograph of a woman they claim is a danger to law-abiding citizens like himself.

Creepy for all the wrong reasons, this is an eminently resistible slice of macho tosh. The performances are polished enough, while cinematographer Eric Curtis establishes a decent sense of place. But the dialogue is dire and the action over-cluttered with flashbacks. Given he only had 12 days in which to shoot, Biehn can be forgiven for the picture being a bit rough and ready. But his sense of pacing is as dubious as his fixation with flesh, while the shifts in tone between exploitation and soap opera are clumsy in the extreme. One anticipates with some trepidation, therefore, his remake of Chilean Patricio Valladares's Hidden in the Woods, a tale of incestuous abuse that has dismayed many on the festival circuit with its graphic brutality and contemptible misogyny.

A very different kind of abode comes under siege, as banker Sean Faris's attempt to give vet wife Briana Evigan the surprise of her life backfires spectacularly in Eduardo Rodriguez's Stash House. Recently relocated from Ohio, Faris had no idea when he purchased the foreclosed Californian property that it contained a large consignment of heroin. But it doesn't take long for fake security guards Jon Huertas and Dolph Lundgren to come looking for the merchandise and, as Faris and Evigan barricade themselves behind their surprisingly well-fortifed walls, the house starts to give up some of its other closely kept secrets, too.

Gary Spinelli laces his screenplay with a couple of twists, while Matthew Irving keeps his camera moving stealthily through Michelle Jones's archly designed interior. But it is never satisfactorily explained why someone who could afford so much state-of-the-art surveillance equipment couldn't keep up with their mortgage payments. Moreover, Rodriguez and Spinelli never quite get past the fact that Faris has to pull a fast one to land the deal and, let's face it, bankers don't exactly make the most empathetic movies heroes right now. So, while it generate fitful amounts of suspense, this is little more than Home Alone for Adults and there wouldn't be a story at all if Huertas had been able to exercise some self-control and simply wait for the occupants to go to work.

The McCallister brand of self-defence resurfaces in Steven C. Miller's The Aggression Scale, which has been scripted by Ben Powell to eschew knockabout farce and focus instead on the pitiless violence required to defend a homestead from implacable intruders. Proficiently shot by Jeff Dolen on cannily designed sets by Mary Steeves and tautly edited by Miller himself, this may not be the most original of scenarios, but it is innovatively presented.

Furious at being out of pocket $500,000 syndicate boss Ray Wise sends hitman Dana Ashbrook to liquidate those who dared to steal from him. But, while he picks off a woman jogger in front of her children with consummate ease, Ashbrook has a tougher task on his hands in dispatching Boyd Kestner, who has fled into the country with new wife Lisa Rotondi and taken his son Ryan Hartwig and her daughter Fabianne Therese with him. In fact, once Ashbrook and associates Derek Mears, Jacob Reynolds and Joseph McKelheer have located the family, it doesn't take long to bump off the parents. But Therese and her younger stepbrother are made of sterner stuff and the taciturn Hartwig is soon proving what a resourceful little psychopath he is.

Genre aficionados will be amused to see Mears (who played Jason in Marcus Nispel's Friday the 13th remake) being set upon so viciously, but this is a film awash with knowing nods and adroit plants that pay off much letter in the action. Twin Peaks alumni Wise and Ashbrook are splendid, but they are upstaged by Hartwig, who never utters a word throughout the entire picture, but conveys more menace than just about any other character in this ridiculously overlong survey.

Fortunately for all concerned, it is about to reach its conclusion. But anyone who thinks Rosewood Lane sounds an idyllic final destination has clearly not been reading carefully enough. The good news is that Ray Wise is on fine form as a hard-nosed cop, while Upstairs, Downstairs fans will be delighted to see Lesley-Anne Down essaying a shrink. But this is hardly a step in the right direction for Victor Salva, the writer-director who made such a strong impression with Jeepers Creepers back in 2001.

Now, he is reduced to peddling a sub-par variation on Clint Eastwood's Play Misty for Me (1971), which sees radio therapist Rose McGowan creaking under the strain when somebody breaks in and rearranges her figurines and keeps calling her show to recite nursery rhymes in a threatening voice. She tells ex-boyfriend Sonny Marinelli and gal pal Lauren Vélez about the fact paperboy Daniel Ross Owens used to terrorise her late alcoholic father. She even tells detectives Wise and Tom Tarantini that he has been  intimidating her while trying to sell her a subscription. But because the neighbours are too afraid to back her story and McGowan has a history of mental fragility, nobody is willing to believe she is being targeted by a cunning sociopath.

Despite a decent premise about the sinister side of suburbia, this never catches light. Salva struggles to convey McGowan's discomfort at returning to the childhood home where her once-violent father had been found dead at the foot of the basement stairs  Similarly, he fails to develop the latent menace posed by Owens to McGowan and her neighbours. But what is most dismaying is the complete lack of nuance, as characters keep stating what is blatantly obvious and persist in behaving in the most foolish possible manner. Even a closing bid to slip in some ambiguity smacks of desperation. The cast tries hard, but this commits the cardinal sin of any horror film - it's downright dull.

Admit it. You thought it was over, didn't you? But, this being a horror special, there has to be a second, twist ending and it comes in the form of Gabe Torres's Brake. As with Rodrigo Cortés's Buried (2010), the action is set in a confined space and keeps coming up with ingenious ways of sustaining the suspense. However, as Secret Service agent Stephen Dorff is encased in a perpex box in the boot of a moving vehicle, with a ticking clock, an information chute and a view of the driver and his passenger, Torres and screenwriter Timothy Mannion have plenty of options when it comes to introducing the next deus ex machina.

The less you know about this picture in advance, the better. Suffice to say, Dorff is quickly disabused of the notion he has been kidnapped because of a gambling debt and becomes convinced he is being held and tortured by terrorists bent on discovering the location of the President's secret bunker. Dorff endures bullets, burns and bees in the course of his ordeal. But a radio receiver allows him to communicate with JR Bourne, who appears to be in the same predicament, while an even more conveniently accessible mobile phone enables him to reach estranged wife Chyler Leigh and urge her to inform colleague Tom Berenger to secure the President at all costs.

Contorting himself within the confines of John Mott's set, Dorff does an admirable job in conveying the pluck and resourcefulness of a man coping with the unknown and his own growing terrors. Moreover, Torres and cinematographer James Mathers manage to find a surprising variety of angles from which to capture his travails. But, for all the intricacy and ingenuity of the scenario, the denouement is underwhelming, in spite of the fake finale.