MOVIE DUNGEON

Kim on the weird and wacky world of DTV

“You might want to tell that to Mike, but you can’t — you know why? Because a shark ate his head!” The latest remake-of-a-20-year-old-hitpassed-off-as-a-sequel, Darin Scott’s DEEP BLUE SEA 2 shuttles through an approximation of Renny Harlin’s smart shark effort — but feeds no-name no-hopers to the CGI fish rather than chumming the likes of LL Cool J, Saffron Burrows and Samuel L. Jackson. No worse than the average ’nado or ’topus sharksploitationer — but no better either. I saw Deep Blue Sea in a crowded, raucous cinema and had a great time, and this, sir, is no Deep Blue Sea.

Marcin Wrona’s DEMON is at once a layered exploration of Polish national guilts and an upscale horror picture. A lavish traditional wedding in the woods is disrupted when an uninvited guest, the spirit of a murdered Jewish girl, possesses the groom and forces the hypocritical celebrants to remember their own buried sins. It segues from observational farce, not a million miles from Robert Altman’s A Wedding, to supernatural creepiness.

A three-part BBC serial, THE MAD DEATH (1983) — directed by Robert Young (Vampire Circus) — is an entertainingly alarmist tract about what happens when rabies is imported to Scotland by an irresponsible French woman smuggling a cat zipped into her fur coat. It manages weird, horrific moments, involving cosily familiar faces you assume won’t get as badly treated as they are here. There’s the erotic hallucinations of first-bitten Ed Bishop as he dies in hospital, health official Richard Heffer menaced by eerily silent ferret-fondlers in a pub, and mad doggie lover Brenda Bruce letting loose a pack of slavering pooches with demented fervour before trapping doctor Barbara Kellerman and training her not to be a bad sort.