MOVIE DUNGEON

Kim on the latest DTV must-sees

It’s psycho/superhuman/cryptid woman’s month in the Dungeon, with four unusual female leads in oddball art-horror hybrids. Assaf Bernstein’s wintry Canadian psycho-drama LOOK AWAY has teenage wallflower India Eisley unwisely kiss her own bathroom mirror after a chat with her Tyler Durden/mr Hyde doppelgänger, being replaced by a psycho who gets revenge on folk who’ve picked on her. Jason Isaacs is superbly creepy as her plastic surgeon father, whose idea of a birthday gift is facial remodelling.

Park Hoon-jung’s THE WITCH: PART 1 — THE SUBVERSION is just the thing for those who’ve given up on Fox ever releasing The New Mutants.

A spin on the psychokinetic superkid genre, its heroine (Kim Da-mi) unwisely uses her powers to beef up her weedy singing on a ‘South Korea’s Got Talent’-type show and finds herself in conflict with the evil government agency who genetically enhanced her and a gang of stylish, evil mutants. It starts as a normal teen movie, but segues into astonishing action — more follow-ups are promised.

Erik Blomberg’s THE WHITE REINDEER (1952), a Finnish rarity getting luxury Blu-ray special edition treatment, and Perry Blackshear’s THE SIREN (aka The Rusalka) both feature regular guys falling for folkloric females — a vampire weredeer and a mermaid — who try to fit into the human world, but have a regrettable tendency to kill men for food. Both movies are haunted love stories set in attractive backwoods.

Colin Minihan’s WHAT KEEPS YOU ALIVE is a straight-up psycho movie in which Brittany Allen and Hannah Emily Anderson (both terrific) celebrate their anniversary in the proverbial cabin in the woods... Things go suspensefully awry and the lovers are pitted against each other in a tense survival scenario.