Tag: horror

Judy

  By

★★½
“Insane Clown Posse”

judyAt first, I wondered if this was some kind of post-apocalyptic work, with Ursula (Giorgi) the leader of a face-painted tribe, enforcing discipline with extreme brutality on her minions. But it turns out to be everyday society: she actually heads a group of “street performers” [I guess; not quite sure what they do, but it’s likely something between mime and a freak show]. who survive by extracting money from members of the public. Ursula’s next target is Mary (Babusci), who pulls over in her car to have a phone conversation (an admirably safe approach, it has to be said), only to find herself being menaced by Ursula. Panicking, Mary pulls a gun on the whey-faced loonette, and drives off. Despite making it safely back to the apartment where she lives with her dog, Judy, it becomes increasingly apparent that Ursula has not taken kindly to her rejection at gunpoint, and will have her revenge – both on Mary and Judy.

What’s particularly interesting here is, this is a horror film almost entirely without male characters. There isn’t a single speaking, on-screen male role: there is a emergency dispatcher whom Mary calls on her cellphone (before Ursula’s blocker kicks in), and one of the villains could be male, since they wear a mask and never speak. But otherwise, not just protagonist and antagonist but all the supporting roles – hell, even the dog! – are female. That’s not common in any genre; it’s likely entirely unique in the “home invasion” sub-division of horror. De Santi sets the table well, quickly establishing both the ruthless brutality of Ursula as well as her mercurial nature: Giorgi does very well at putting over the idea that her character could explode into savage violence at any second.

Significantly less effective is the middle section, which largely consists of Mary pottering around her flat. There are attempts at building menace, such as a creepy-looking robe in the bathroom, or incoming phone-calls consisting of almost dead-air. However, there’s no real sense of escalation or progression to these, and they appear little more than trivial gimmicks. Things ramp up appreciably when Judy goes missing from the locked apartment. Mary goes to look for her canine on the beach, but the answer to the mystery may be closer to home than she initially thinks, and when she discovers that… Hoo-boy. There’s also the question of what, exactly, Ursula keeps in that manacled, spike-encrusted box (and, perhaps, also the one of how the hell she got it up all those stairs).

To call the ending abrupt, on the other hand, would be the understatement of the year. Admittedly, it doesn’t seem like there’s anywhere else the story could go, at the point when the credits roll; yet there’s usually at least a momentary coda at the end of most movies. Here? Not so much. All told, it would likely have worked better as a short film, in the 15-20 minute range, which gives you an idea of how much padding is present. Still, given the low budget, it is certainly better than some I’ve endured, and is helped by a creepy central premise, especially if you suffer from coulrophobia. Look it up…

Dir: Emanuele De Santi
Star: Orietta Babusci, Marlagrazia Giorgi

Curve

  By

★★★
“A feature-length advert for NOT wearing your seat-belt.”

Mallory (Hough) is driving to Denver for her wedding, though has some qualms about the upcoming event. She opts to take the scenic route, but her car breaks down – she’s startled, but delighted, when back-packer Christian (Sears) shows up out of nowhere to fix it. She offers him a lift, only to find once they hit the road, he’s a couple of sandwiches short of a picnic. Realizing the dire straits she’s in, and that she’s wearing her seat-belt while he isn’t, she opts to crash the car into a ravine. However, the result is the exact opposite of what she wants: Christian is thrown free, and Mallory trapped by her ankle in the wreckage. Realizing he has a captive toy, Christian wanders off to terrorize the residents of a nearby cabin, but pops back occasionally to taunt his victim, who is forced to extreme measures to survive, while trying to figure out a way to escape.

curveIt’s a perfectly reasonable way to pass the time, and given its obvious limitations – there are barely a handful of speaking parts and the bulk of the running time takes place in and around the single location of Mallory’s car – works within them reasonably well. It’s a little weird to see Hough, whom we recently watched play Sandy in a televised “live” version of Grease, cooking and eating rat, and contemplating going all 127 Hours on her leg, but she pulls it off decently enough. Less effective is Sears, though he has the problem of walking in the footsteps belonging to the pinnacle of psychotic hitch-hikers, Rutger Hauer in The Hitcher; it’d be hard for anyone not to be overshadowed by that comparison. On the other hand, I like the way Mallory is thrown entirely on her own resources: there’s no knight in shining chain-mail coming to her rescue here.

For obvious, ankle-related reasons, this only kicks into high gear once the heroine has extracted herself from the car, and the boot goes, at least somewhat, onto the other foot (hohoho), as she begins to hunt Christian – the still, above, is obviously from the later section. It likely does take a little too long to reach this point, and once it gets there, offers at least one element of shamelessly obvious foreshadowing, which had me rolling my eyes when it appeared, then again when it came to pass. Yet I can’t say this affected the overall respectable level of enjoyment provided here. No-one could ever describe this as ambitious, and I was surprised to discover this was by the director of Hackers, as it seems a much smaller work. That aside, there’s something to be said for aiming low and hitting your target, rather than over-estimating your resources and talents, then falling short. This definitely falls into the former categoty.

Dir: Iain Softley
Star: Julianne Hough, Teddy Sears

Hush

  By

★★★★
“What’s ASL for yippee ki-yay?”

hushThere’s one moment here, where the heroine leaves a final message, certain she’s going to die, that’s poignant to a surprising degree, not often seen in the genre. It’s the moment I really bought into this, which was made for a mere $70,000, and is a very nicely assembled machine for creating tension. Deaf author Maddie Young (Siegel) has moved to a house in the middle of nowhere to try and finish her second novel. But one night, the peace and quiet is interrupted the arrival of a masked man (Gallagher), whose intent is clear, even if his reasons remain obscure: the terrorising, and eventual murder, of Maddie. Cut off from all outside assistance, and after all efforts to escape have proved futile, she eventually realizes there is only one way to survive.

Equal parts Stephen King and Wait Until Dark, the Audrey Hepburn film in which a blind woman is similarly the target, this is an object lesson in doing the most with what you have. A cast numbering only a handful and a single location, are not necessarily a barrier to entertaining and effective cinema. The first section is very much a careful build-up: set the central character in her location, establish her strengths (imagination, self-reliance) and vulnerabilities (obvious). Then, unleash the threat, triggering an escalating series of cat-and-mouse incidents, bringing your heroine to the point of desperation mentioned above. Finally? It’s likely no spoiler to say, the tables get turned – but the less detail I provide there, the more you’ll be able to appreciate it.

If you’re wondering why this stalk ‘n’ slasher is here, consider this quote from Siegel: “We do credit Wait Until Dark for being the driving force, but we always thought this movie is more like Die Hard; we wanted to beat Maddie up, we wanted her to use the whole space. We just think Die Hard is a perfect movie, and I’ve always wanted to be that kind of action hero. One of my all-time career goals is to be Ripley in the next remake of Aliens!” Having watched the film, much of the above makes sense. It’s certainly a punishingly physical role, though since she also co-wrote the script with the director, she has no-one but herself to blame [they’re now married, so it clearly wasn’t too distressing…]

While obviously operating on a much smaller scale, much of it works almost as well, though the absence of any motive for the attacker is a little bit of a cop-out. Even something simple, as in The Strangers (“Because you were home”), might have been better. There’s also one moment where it felt like our deaf heroine reacted when her phone rang, which seemed odd. But the positives here easily outweigh any complaints, with Maddie a great heroine, who refuses to be defined by her disability – even if it puts her at a significant disadvantage in this situation. It’s also an experience thoroughly grounded in reality, where things might play out like this, given the scenario. And if you were considering moving to the country, Hush will probably make you think again.

Dir: Mike Flanagan
Star: Kate Siegel, John Gallagher Jr.

When Animals Dream

  By

★★½
“Let the right lycanthrope in.”

when_animals_dream_poster_1200_1773_81_sIf the vampire has been an equal-opportunity cinematic monster over the years, that’s less the case for the werewolf. Maybe it’s all the hair or the brutal strength, but from Underworld to Twilight, the ‘wolves have tended to be dogs rather than bitches – much though the latter might have been improved by a pack of ladies running around, like Taylor Lautner, with their tops permanently off. [I’d certainly have been on Team Jacobetta…] There are some exceptions – most notably the Ginger Snaps series, the first of which is among the best horror films of the 2000’s. This shares a similar theme, of a teenage girl who is disturbed by the changes in her body, which turn out to be more than just standard puberty. But the tone is rather more introspective, and to be honest, a good deal less successful.

The heroine here is Marie (Suhl) who has just started a job at the local fish-processing factory, when she starts to experience changes, both physical and mental. But it turns out not to be just Marie. Her mother (Richter), whose wheelchair-bound state Marie had always presumed was the result of a mundane illness, turns out to have the same affliction. After she had killed a local, her husband (Mikkelsen) had come to a pact with the local doctor, to prevent his wife from being… oh, dragged out of the house by a mob of angry villagers, wielding pitch-forks and torches, near enough. Her near-catatonic state is actually the result of a heavy regime of pharmaceuticals. And, now that Marie is beginning to exhibit the same symptoms, perhaps it’s time for her also to begin the same regimen. Or figure out an escape, with the help of her new boyfriend and co-worker, Daniel (Ottebro).

As the intro to this review hints, Arnby appears to be trying for a similar atmosphere to another Scandinavian monster mash, Let the Right One In. But too much of this comes over as flat and uninteresting, without enough development of the plot or characters. The performances are mostly good, Suhl underplaying things to the point of emotional deadness that’s actually entirely appropriate to the dead-end life into which she would otherwise be headed. It’s part of the point: her disease is also the cure for the disease of achingly tedious normality. Unfortunately, the movie spends too much grounded in that normality, and delivers on the aching tedium in full measure, mostly of slow and plodding. Arnsby eventually gets to the meaty stuff, with an impressive climax on board a ship at sea – nowhere to run, nowhere to hide – and if you’re in the right mood, looking for something more contemplative, this would perhaps hit the spot better. Unfortunately for the film’s grade, I was wanting something more traditionally horrific, and consequently found this to be no full-moon; probably a half-moon, at best.

Dir: Jonas Alexander Arnby
Star: Sonia Suhl, Lars Mikkelsen, Jakob Oftebro, Sonja Richter

Byzantium

  By

★★★½
“Pride and Prejudice and Vampires”

byzantiumOk, that’s probably not strictly accurate, but there is more than a hint of it, in the way this manages to combine period drama with Gothic horror trappings – while also depicting the same characters in the present day. This slipping back and forth in time is somewhat distracting, and there are points where you wish they had just picked an era and stuck with it. The heroines here are a pair of mother and daughter vampires (Arterton and Ronan), who have been more or less on the run for about two centuries. For the mother, Clara, was a terminally-ill prostitute who stole the secret of vampirism from her client, Captain Ruthven (Jonny Lee Miller) in the early 19th century. She not only became immortal herself, she turned her daughter, Eleanor – an act strictly against the tenets of The Brethren, who are kinda like the vampire union, who put out a death-warrant on the pair. In the present day, this means Clara – still turning tricks to provide for Eleanor – has occasionally to decapitate people with a garrotte, should they turn out to be hunters sent by The Brethren.

The pair end up wintering in a boarding-house on the sea-front of a largely deserted seaside town (I got a strong whiff of Harry Kümel’s Daughters of Darkness, which had Ostend instead of Hastings for its “experienced” female vampire and her acolyte). Eleanor is increasingly dissatisfied – and who wouldn’t be after two centuries stuck in perpetual adolescence – and seems almost to half a self-destructive streak, including writing essays at school about her vampiric life, which naturally cause concern to her teacher! She also builds a relationship with young, ill waiter Frank, something of which Clara also disapproves. There’s a good, dynamic contrast between the two leads. At the time, Ronan was fresh off both Hanna and than Violet + Daisy, though she is the cerebral of the pair here, careful only to drain the blood of those who are ready and willing to accept death. In comparison, Arterton is far more animalistic and instinctual, making this an interesting warm-up for her subsequent role in Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters.

This isn’t Jordan’s first entry in the vampire genre, having previously directed Interview With the Vampire, and the two aren’t dissimilar, both being as much about the relationships as actual blood-sucking. I wish I’d learned more about the back-story of Clara and Eleanor; there would seem to be a rich history there, that’s almost entirely unexplored, with virtually nothing about the 190 years between the latter’s turning and the present day. Has Eleanor been a sullen teenager all that time? Dear God, I thought I was a saint, handling the resulting sulkiness for less than a decade, as our kids went through it. Decapitation by garrotte sometimes seemed a good approach to parenting. However, at least Eleanor doesn’t sparkle, although there’s an amusing nod to other vampire lore, as she watches one of the classic Hammer movies from the genre. If not developed fully enough to be a classic itself, there’s still enough new and/or well done here, to make this better than your average random Netflix selection.

Dir: Neil Jordan
Star: Saoirse Ronan, Gemma Arterton, Daniel Mays, Sam Reilly

Sweet Home

  By

★★★½
“Hogar, dulce hogar…”

sweethomeA straightforward yet effective cross between a slasher film and Die Hard, sees Alicia (Garcia-Jonsson) plan a birthday dinner for her boyfriend, Simon (Sevilla) in an almost deserted apartment building. However, she stumbles into a plot to evict the last remaining tenant… in a body-bag. Trapped inside the locked tenement, the young couple become the target, first for the evictors, and then their boss, the Liquidator (Tarrida), as they seek to cover the tracks of their murderous work.

Three sentences, and that’s basically the entirety of the plot covered, since most of the film is an extended stalk ‘n’ slash, with Alicia, in particular, seeking a way out. It’s absolutely her story, because Simon is wounded relatively early in proceedings, and ends up close to a non-factor in proceedings – for one reason or another. Even though there’s a sense of Garcia-Jonsson acting mostly in her third language (she was born in Sweden, most of her career has been in Spain, yet her dialogue here is mainly English), it doesn’t harm the film, because Martinez is a firm believer in showing, rather than telling. That’s just what something like this needs, with gratifyingly few pauses for exposition after things kick-off. In particular, things are ramped up with the arrival of the Liquidator, who disposes of bodies with the aid of liquid nitrogen and a hammer. This is about as wince-inducing as it sounds.

As well as a fairly monstrous villain, who is quite prepared to dispatch his supposed allies if they prove more trouble than they are worth, the main appeal is seeing Alicia use her wits to survive, clambering in, around and through the maze of corridors and service passages in the building, as she tries to stay one step ahead of those hunting her down. The claustrophobic setting, enhanced by a thunderous deluge coming down outside, which has cleared the streets of everyone else, generally work for the movie too. Reading other reviews, seems I’m not the only person to detect notes of John Carpenter, with this in particular evoking feelings of Assault on Precinct 13 crossed with Halloween. Though it has been a very long while since Carpenter has directed anything as shallowly entertaining as Sweet Home.

On the other hand. the floor-plan of the house, an important factor in proceedings, seems more than a little inconsistent. This may be less an apartment building, and more a Klein bottle, for there were times when I was thought Alicia was on an upper level, only for her to open a door and suddenly be back at ground level. However, if you’re prepared to let that aspect slide, along with the occasional moments of less-than-sensible behaviour (almost inevitable, given the genre), this is an energetic and enthusiastic romp, which will likely have you quoting various John McClane-isms over the course of proceedings. But it’s safe to say that Die Hard did not end in a climax which had Bruce Willis in the basement, unconscious, dotted lines drawn on his limbs, in preparation for easy separation by Alan Rickman and his hacksaw. More’s the pity, perhaps.

Dir: Rafa Martínez
Star: Ingrid Garcia-Jonsson, Bruno Sevilla, Oriol Tarrida, Jose Maria Blanco

Ballet of Blood

  By

★½
“Bitchy ballerinas, being bitches.”

balletbloodWell, I will say this. If you start your film with a ballet class being interrupted by a former student, who rushes in – topless, for no readily apparent reason – and sprays the class with fire from her Uzi: you have my attention. Unfortunately, this early goodwill is utterly wasted, frittered away in a number of ways over the next 90 minutes that would be spectacularly impressive, if that were the aim of the film-makers. However, it appears their true intention was along the lines of, “Let’s do a micro-budget version of Black Swan, but one based on our obsessive watching of Suspiria, starring a cast of interchangeable Barbies rounded up from the strip-club nearest to the local community college.” Actually, that sounds rather more entertaining than this.

There are two intertwined threads here. One, is the aftermath of the shooting, carried out by mad dancer Nisa (Raye), which injured the school’s prima ballerina, Sylvie (Robinson). Nisa escapes, leaving the school on edge, and breaks her pal Ria (Knopf) out of the asylum where she’s being held – as, apparently, you are – in order to assist with an even more deadly assault. Meanwhile, the atmosphere at the school is becoming increasingly abusive and strained. Student Maren (Martinez) is disturbed to find that the novel she is writing is turning eerily predictive. Is her old typewriter somehow causing events to take place? Or is it all in her psyche?

There may be a bit of Showgirls, or perhaps cable series Flesh and Bone, to be found in here, Masters clearly having a fine appreciation of the trash aesthetic, which shines through in dialogue, particularly Sylvie’s, that is occasionally so dumb, it’s positive genius. The use of classical music for the soundtrack is not bad either. However, these don’t even start to balance the negatives: these begin with audio which often appears to have been recorded from the bottom of a nearby well, and continues into a slew of characters who look, sound and (fail to) act alike. This lends itself to viewer confusion, not helped by the fact your attention will likely be wandering to more interesting things – specifically, in my case, our cat playing in a cardboard box. There’s just too many scenes of the cast sitting about jawing tediously at each other, before Nisa and Ria kick things off.

Even though the grand finale is rather less than grand, the budget restrictions here being what they are, it does represent an improvement over the rest of the film, purely because something is happening. Quite what that something is, it’s harder to say, since this is where the giallo influence of Dario Argento really kicks in, meaning copious dollops of style, in lieu of substance. Except, Masters is not exactly Argento, and apparently forgets there’s more to creating cinematic style, than throwing a couple of filters on your lights. Much as I’m loathe to criticize micro-budget indie film, there just isn’t enough here to merit more than a clear warning.

Dir: Jared Masters
Star: Sydney Raye, Mindy Robinson, Marla Martinez, Jessica Knopf

Chastity Bites

  By

★★★
“Not-so real housewives.”

chastitybitesA somewhat successful modernization of the vampire legend, it sees feminist wannabe journo Leah (Scagliotti) clashing with the popular clique at her high-school, under their queen bee Ashley (Okuda). Just as Leah is preparing a devastating expose on how the cool girls are planning a mass virginity loss, the ground gets pulled out from under her by the arrival of Liz Batho (Louise Griffiths), a counselor who begins a devastatingly successful abstinence program, the Virginity Action Group, into which Ashley and her cronies buy in, for their own ends. Liz also lures in the local moms, with her devastatingly impressive line of skin-care products. Leah digs into the past of Ms. Batho and thanks to a helpful tip from her Internet search engine (which is, at least, a first in cinematic plotting!), realizes Liz is – gasp! – Countess Elizabeth Bathory, who escaped being walled up in her chamber, and has roamed the world ever since, using the blood of virgins to sustain her youth. But since Leah’s relationship with local police soured following an article calling them racist, she’s going to have to stop the Countess using her own resources.

The results are sporadically funny. It’s a nice reversal on the usual horror trope of “have sex and die,” [albeit not the first: Cherry Falls already got there], and some of the characters are a hoot. Griffiths hits the spot just right as Bathory, combining elegance and threat with just a hint of Katie Holmes, and Okuda makes the Alpha Bitch far more rounded than most depictions [it took Chris to realize where we’d seen her before; she plays Tinkerballa in popular web-series The Guild] But she and Scagliotti are both clearly past high-school, well into their twenties, and so aren’t convincing teenagers. The heroine also appears to have eaten a dictionary, leading to dialogue that is both forced and not as witty as it thinks it is. Worst of all, I could have done entirely without Leah’s lesbian sidekick (Raisa), since her main purpose in the film appears to be to allow for embarrassingly-bad banter with her gal-pal.

It does make some nice stabs (hohoho) at social satire, in particularly the hypocrisy of high-school and American vs. European values, but it’s a bit too monotone in its approach. I did appreciate its almost entirely gynocentric nature. The only male character of note, is in the film mostly to ensure Leah is no use to the Countess, and when the chips are down, rather than rescuing anyone, is disposed of with ease, leaving Leah to face her immortal enemy alone. However, there remains too much of a problem with the heroine, who comes over for much of the movie as smugly PC, rather than someone with whom I’m interested in spending time. It’s this which restricts the film’s eventual success, leaving it as more of a respectable time-passer than an outstanding triumph.

Dir: John V. Knowles
Star: Allison Scagliotti, Louise Griffiths, Amy Okuda, Francia Raisa

Pride + Prejudice + Zombies

  By

★★★½
“Not the zombie apocalypse I expected.”

ppz09I’d imagine the market who would most appreciate this – those who like early 19th-century literature, but feel it would be improved by the addition of the walking dead – is rather small, which may explain its lackluster performance at the box-office. Personally, I’m more a fan of Victorian and later work, and have never actually read Pride and Prejudice, so suspect all those aspects here, flew entirely over my head. I have, however, seen more than my fair share of zombie flicks, so that’s the angle from which I will be reviewing this. Several angles surprised me. Firstly, it’s not a comedy. While we laughed, the film takes its theme seriously. Secondly, there’s surprising invention here. It’s not just dropping zombies into a costume drama; there’s thought gone into details of the setting, and also ideas such as the undead initially retaining their humanity.

On the other hand, it’s not the action extravaganza I expected from the trailer, and never achieves the all-out heights of excess I was hoping to see. There are some decent sequences, but a number of missed opportunities, for example, in eye-patch wearing aristocrat, Lady Catherine de Bourgh (Lena Headey), who is described as the ultimate bad-ass, yet barely lifts a finger. I expected a massive battle at the end, and didn’t get one; instead, the film almost rubs our face in this, inserting a mid-credits epilogue that’s the biggest tease since the end of My Wife is Gangster 2. Not that you’ll mistake this for anything other than a zombie film, of course, even if it is closer to Pride and Prejudice (and Zombies) – which would make sense since I believe the book was about 85% Austen’s original text. There are still plenty of positives, led by James, as Elizabeth, the feistiest of the five Bennet sisters, whose father (Charles Dance) has brought them up as zombie-killers, much to the concern of their mother (Sally Phillips), who’d rather they married rich.

The story revolves around a love-triangle between Elizabeth, Mr. Darcy (Riley) and Lieutenant Wickham (Huston), unfolding against an the backdrop of an escalating zombie threat, which lurks in almost every hedgerow, whist party and back bedroom. Previously, the walking dead have largely been confined to London, but appear to be developing organization, and given their increasing numbers, this could be disastrous for humanity. Meanwhile, Elizabeth also has to fend off the perhaps even more threatening predations of Parson Collins (Matt Smith), who has been brought in to marry one of the sisters, providing a male heir that will secure the family’s future, since the daughters are unable to inherit property. Her skills are unquestioned, and nicely understated; when Darcy suspects one of Elizabeth’s sisters of being bitten, and releases carrion flies to see if he’s right, she plucks them out of the air, one at a time, and hands them back to him.

Their relationship is another well-handled aspect. This Darcy is not exactly swoonworthy, and hardly the life of the party (no-one who totes carrion flies everywhere they go, ever will be), yet he’s prepared to let Elizabeth be the person she wants to be – a sharp contrast to Collins. It’s her free-spirited nature and stubborn refusal to be ground down by the conventions of society – even the severely-skewed ones of this scenario – which make her an engaging heroine. Other pleasures are the work of Smith and Phillips, adding a great deal of background charm, largely due to their total indifference to the zombie apocalypse – achieving marital bliss is clearly far more important. It probably works better as satire on class, rigid social norms and the British stiff upper-lip, than as real horror; its PG-13 rating obviously limits the latter aspect. As long as you are not going in expecting a Georgian-era version of World War Z, this should be well-made and enjoyable enough.

Dir: Burr Steers
Star: Lily James, Sam Riley, Jack Huston, Bella Heathcote

ppz01

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

Last Shift

  By

★★½
“Bit of a cop-out.”

last shiftA strong start fails to be sustained, as it becomes increasingly apparent that the director here has a very limited selection of weapons in his cinematic arsenal. Jessica Loren (Harkavy) is a rookie cop, following in the footsteps of her late father. Her first assignment is the last (wo)man standing, on the final night before all duties at a police station are transferred to a new building. She’s supposed to be little more than a caretaker, waiting for the final clean-up crew to arrive, but virtually as soon as she is left alone, weirdness starts happening. She gets increasingly frantic calls from a woman who says she has been abducted, then a vagrant appears, first outside and then inside the facility. Furniture moves. Ghostly singing is heard. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, before a conveniently-passing bystander informs Jessica that tonight marks the year to the day that a notorious cult of serial killers were caught and brought to the station, where they all committed suicide.

Despite moments that are unquestionably effective, DiBiasi uses the jump scare far too often, beyond where it becomes not just ineffective, and instead a joke. I lost count of the number of times that the heroine saw something, heard a noise that made her look in another direction, and when she turned back, whatever had been there was gone. I did like the way you were never quite sure whether what you were seeing had any objective reality – perhaps a prank by her fellow officers on a new recruit – or if it was entirely in Jessica’s head. And while she stays around well past the point at which any rational person would have legged it out of there, the backstory gives a plausible explanation, in terms of her desire to make a good first impression, and live up to her father’s legacy. However, given that, her apparent complete ignorance of (or amnesia about) previous events doesn’t make sense, especially since her father died apprehending the cult in question.

Things ramp up in the final reel, with the station under siege by other members of the cult, but I have to confess, my attention had not been adequately sustained through the middle portion. Harkavy gives her best shot, and is decent, but this performance isn’t so much acting as reacting, and given she is alone for much more of the film than you’d expect, it needs a good deal more. I couldn’t help comparing this with another take with a not dissimilar theme and location, Let Us Prey. That succeeds a great deal better, not least because it provided a solid antagonist against whom the heroine must battle, rather than an apparently endless line of ghosts and cheap (if, it must be admitted, sometimes successful) shocks, as provided here.

Dir: Anthony DiBlasi
Star: Juliana Harkavy, Joshua Mikel, Hank Stone, Mary Lankford