THE CULT OF KIM NEWMAN
The critic and novelist on this month’s weirdest straight-to-video picks
LOW-BUDGET BRITISH genre cinema is currently thriving. There are even tribute acts to tentpoles of the form — Savvas D. Michael’s Righteous Villains is a riff on Ben Wheatley circa The Kill List and Steven M. Smith’s Dead Again is a mash-up of all three Edgar Wright Cornetto films. In Righteous Villains, wideboy con man Jamie Crew and gun-toting widow Lois Brabin-platt undertake a heavily symbolic journey to an island where the Devil (Adam Deacon) presides over orgiastic decadence. Dead Again has Frost-and-pegg knock-off village coppers Tony Fadil and Elliot Cable cope with a zombie apocalypse that’s also an alien attack while bantering about pop culture.
Simon Kay’s Shadowland also covers familiar ground, but has nice, widescreen Scots landscapes, and solid work from Amelia Eve as an action heroine who steps up when a bungled bunch of mercs and VIPS are trapped in a disused barracks where a superweapon experiment has produced a murderous, vaguely defined monster. It has too much shouting in lieu of characterisation, but it runs to an air of general creepiness and springs a couple of okay shocks.
Darren Berry’s West Country-shot Paintball Massacre has a school reunion/paintball session turn nasty as a bunch of thirtyish types are killed off one by one as they traipse through the countryside, stalked by a masked murderer whose identity they try and work out between the impalements and landmines. It’s one of those movies where people who act as if they never want to see each other again voluntarily assemble to whine, bitch, moan and reminisce so much that the killings might come as a blessed relief. Its saving grace is that the cast are enthusiastic, committed and funny — with especially strong work from Natasha Killip as a thoroughly horrible Instagram star and Aoife Smyth as a stoner who takes all her life lessons from the Fast & Furious series.
Perhaps the first horror movie to come out of Ipswich, The Haunted Hotel is a multi-director omnibus with a range of styles and approaches but a single setting — the Great White Horse Hotel. Said hotel is the setting for supernatural events encountered by various folk over the years, including a young Charles Dickens (Reece Ritchie) getting inspiration for The Pickwick Papers in the hotel’s early days, and an ageing hard man (Paul Moriarty) holing up after a heist when the place is near derelict in the present. The anecdotes range from sentimental or comical (with more than a hint of Inside No. 9) to more openly horrific. All are solid, and a couple are standouts: a 1970s tale about a horror writer (Geir Madland) cracking up, and a 1990s sketch about a maid (Rocio Rodriguez-inniss) struggling with a room that refuses to stay cleaned.
Chris Bell’s The Heiress fits in with a recent strain of horror that’s dealt with intergenerational troubles in female-dominated families (Hereditary, Relic). After the death of her devoted but sinister grandmother, fragile Clare (Candis Nergaard) starts ‘seeing things’ in the house she shares with her less otherworldly sister Anna (Jayne Wisener). Gradually, it emerges that whatever’s going on in Clare’s head is spilling into the waking world. The plot is filled in with flashbacks
— it’s seldom a good thing in folk-horror films if your family matriarch is called Lilith — but the story is overshadowed by Nergaard’s outstanding performance.