CULT HERO OF THE MONTH
CAN YOU WATCH too many films about dolts who lark about the ocean like complete prawns, get into trouble out of sight of land, and are chomped to bits? In James Nunn’s Shark Bait , pretty youths (UK soap actors pretending to be dudebros and Kansas gals) annoy a great white after crashing ‘borrowed’ jetskis. Nunn (One Shot, Tower Block) stages one terrific non-shark-related stunt, but the script seems to be random pages of 47 Meters Down, The Shallows and Open Water stapled together. Whining personal subplots fill the clinging-tothe-wreckage patches between big-fish attacks.
Taneli Mustonen’s The Twin is another mixand-match, scrambling The Other (or, for those with shorter memories, Goodnight Mommy), Rosemary’s Baby and Midsommar. After the death of a child, Rachel (Teresa Palmer) and Anthony (Steven Cree) flee the US for his ancestral home in Finland — along with Elliot (Tristan Ruggeri), their surviving kid. Elliot insists on having a bed in his room for his dead twin Nathan, and then that he is Nathan, who was the evil one of the twin-set. A neighbour (Barbara Marten, best thing here) warns Rachel that pagan locals are using her in an arcane ritual to resurrect the Devil. The last act does compound predictable twists with fresh material, Ruggeri has good creepy-kid vibes and the Finnish locations are as eerie as in Mustonen’s solid slasher Lake Bodom.
Benjamin Louis’ Stoker Hills is either an intricate, ambitious exercise in storytelling or a bit of a jumble that’s hard to get into. Student filmmakers (David Gridley, Vince Hill-bedford) attempt a night-time guerilla shoot on a zombie sex-worker movie (‘Streetwalkers’) and try to rescue their star (Steffani Brass) from a monk-hooded, pig-hearted (not a misprint), blood-siphoning maniac (Jason Sweat). When they lose the camera (and go missing themselves), the cops (Eric Etebari in a hat, William Lee Scott with a rosary) examine the found footage for clues. After a Saw-style finish in an underground torture-porn lair comes another turn — featuring guest star Tony Todd — you’ll either find clever or annoying.
Uniquely among imitations of Wait Until Dark, Randall Okita’s See For Me casts a legally blind performer (Skyler Davenport) as lead character Sophie. Former Olympic skiing hopeful Sophie cat-sits in isolated luxury homes and steals small items on the grounds no-one would prosecute a blind semi-celebrity. When more serious criminals invade the house she’s looking after, she needs sighted remote assistance from phoneline volunteer Kelly (Jessica Parker Kennedy). The home is kitted out with pricey obstacles to trip over or use as weapons (not really compatible with having a curious cat), and Davenport’s interestingly unsympathetic lead works up a rapport with Kennedy’s Kelly.
Made under the cleverer title ‘CURS>R’, Toby Meakin’s Choose Or Die is another warning against playing games designed by Satan. Kayla (Iola Evans) fires up a vintage text-based computer game (voiced by Robert Englund, playing himself ) which forces her to make tough choices that resonate gruesomely in the real world. The film’s act comes together in a ‘boss level’ which pits Kayla against the previous highest-scorer (Eddie Marsan). It has barbed footnotes about ’80s nostalgia and impressive one-off challenges — the cleverest keeps the horror (Kayla’s mom versus a giant rat) off screen while rendering the scene in retro green-screen graphics.