F

Johanne Robert's F is the latest "hoodie horror" following in the footsteps of ILS and EDEN LAKE and coming at the same as Paul Williams' CHERRY TREE LANE. Roberts himself as been an active participant in the UK horror scene making a name for himself with micro-budget features most notably the Horror Channel favourite FOREST OF THE DAMNED and the made for mobile phones WHEN EVIL CALLS.

Based on real circumstances where a teacher was killed for handing out an F-grade to a pupil Johanne Roberts' F takes the story and adds an element of siege where teachers and a few lingering pupils remaining in a school at the end of the day come under attack from faceless hooded thugs who move in preternatural ways and bring death in the form of box cutters and wrenches. The film is a thread bare suspense exercise that exploits the current lingering knife culture in the UK.

Roberts latest is a significant step up from his previous productions coming at a time when it looked like the negative reviews were going to swallow his career alive. Gloriously shot on the RED One camera, though will a little over use of the out of focus trickery, F looks like a bona fide large scale production with an outstanding performance from lead David Schofield and some creepy and well executed antagonists. It is a shame the film becomes laden with a few slasher cliches such as stumbling victims or impossible deaths when it goes to such lengths to avoid being trapped in the mobile phone cliches. A little more of the violence on screen could have heightened the experience though one particular attack aftermath could be the most memorable effect of the year.

F plays out more as a slasher/horror than the expected hoodie/torture thing and manages to be topical and a bit of a 70s throwback at the same time.

I got semi-erect at this one.

Devil

DEVIL proposes to be the first in M. Night (THE SIXTH SENSE) Shylaman's Night Chronicles where the now maligned director will put his story concept in the hands of another writer and director and take more of a producing role. DEVIL brings HARD CANDY and 30 DAYS OF NIGHT scribe Brian Nelson together with QUARANTINE helmet John Erick Dowdle.

When five strangers enter a skyscraper elevator their trip soon turns to terror as the break down between floors and slowly begin to get on each others nerves. As security, an engineer and eventually police work to get them out the danger of the situation increases as one by one they are killed off. Whether this is a complicated murder plot or supernatural forces at work circumstances have conspired to bring the players in this deadly game together which will reveal the real devil inside every human being.

DEVIL fairs better for having Dowdle as director but never pushes over any boundaries making it a safe commercial horror film for those who cannot predict a jump scare or have no stomach for the red stuff. Apart from a few grisly murder aftermaths DEVIL may have found itself with a PG-13 rating, or its equivalent, and the film lacks any real suspense. Dowdle draws on his experience with the limitations of the POV remake QUARANTINE to keep the elevator scenes dynamic but lack of any real creepiness in the plot undermines this talent leaving us with a passable pot-boiler supernatural tale. All gloss and no real guts yet this first entry of The Night Chronicles is far superior to anything that M. Night has been putting his name to in the last few years.

A floppy cock for this one.

Resident Evil Afterlife 3D

The fourth film in the Capcom game influenced franchise is upon us with the series originator Paul W S Anderson returning to both script and direct his wife Milla Jovovich as the superhuman Alice in her quest take down the Umbrella corporation.

The army of clone Alice's march down into the Tokyo headquarters of Umbrella and enact slow motion, high flying, 3D captured vengeance on her creators and once that is out of the way Alice v1 can get back to tracking down the friends she parted with at the end of Extinction. This leads her back to LA and the mass zombie hordes trying to get into a maximum security prison where the last few stragglers are left scrounging out their "afterlife". The hope of rescue from a ship moored off the coast is all that keeps them going and it is not long before the evil finds it's way in and all he'l breaks loose.

Resident Evil Afterlife's 3D is spot on, further proof if needed that the James Cameron developed system is the way to go with digital 3D, bringing the good looking and permanent lip glossed ladies to life and blood splattering onto the front of your glasses. Enjoy each chest juggling gun recoil and rejoice in the pounding neo-Carpenter synth score from tomandandy. Anderson has had fun with this film mining his DVD collection to bring in scenes from The Matrix, Blade II, Alien, Doomsday, Die Hard, Escape From New York,The Book Of Eli, Silent Hill and steering the movie franchise in a totally different direction from the game series. It is mired with plot holes and series inconstancies but, and I am a little tired of justifying this, if you are paying money to see a Resident Evil movie without enjoying the first three and bringing expectations beyond your inner thirteen year olds sci-fi horror action hybrid wet dreams you've bought a ticket for the wrong show.

A good hard on.

Dark House (Fangoria Frightfest)

Sometimes horror just needs to be good cheesy fun and DARK HOUSE does this in spades. It is a riot of contrived plot devices, a bit of a rip off of THE HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL and is helped along by Jeffrey Combs stellar hammy performance and some other good turns despite the cliched character types. The set design and art direction is brilliant capturing the cartoonish over the top feel of a Halloween haunted house. It's a film that's easy to be forgiving of but equally easy to forget.

DARK HOUSE makes Happy Horror Hard On semi-erect.

The Haunting (Fangoria Frightfest)

Spanish language film NO-DO here repackaged as THE HAUNTING wants to be in the same league as the Del Toro produced The Orphanage and other Spanish spookshows but where we are used to a slow haunting build and rounded characters to carry those sort of films NO-DO is ham fisted and clunky jamming as many jarring juxtapositions as it can and over using CGI ghost effects rendering the whole thing a dull and obvious affair. When the film gets to breathe it starts to find its feet but no sooner are we settled in than we find ourselves cutting to, or here more appropriately dissolving to, another scene or morphing into poorly recreated "stock footage"

A sad Spanish haunting that leaves me floppy.

Don't Look Up

When an American horror director starts to receive visions of an unfinished 1920s Romanian film makers work he sets out to re-create the lost masterpiece and hopefully resurrect his stalled career.

Channeling the spirit of Bela Ort, who is played by Eli Roth in the briefest of cameos, and convincing a small crew to re-open a long abandoned film studio when a series of bizarre consequences begin to fall on the movie set as the spirit of a gypsy curse is reawakened. Which is just as well as no one films anything beyond one take, the crew take to running around smashing cars or knifing each other and there is a lot of howling and flies buzzing about and a bizarre Romanian location scout with the worst accent since Cate Blanchett tried to be Ukranian in the fourth Indiana Jones movie. And there's some stuff about and old guy hanging around with a baby growing in his neck tumour.

When a horror movie carries the name of respected Asian horror directors like Fruit Chan and Hideo Nakata you would be expected to be treated to something unexpected and probably actually scary. Instead DON'T LOOK UP is such a disaster it adds competence to any Uwe Boll film you may have seen. Horrendous acting turns, a disjointed "plot" and a couple of set pieces cribbed from Nakata's original RING and even a few from the TOMIE movie discredit any horror movie honour these two may have gained.

DON'T LOOK UP should be renamed Don't Look At All and is hilariously bad in the level of the equally inept GIALLO.

Flaccid, floppy and inert.

Shelter

Julianne Moore plays a hardened psychiatrist and profiler who does no believe in multiple personality disorder. Her father likes to challenge her opinions and introduces her to a patient who not only displays multiple personalities but can also manifest physical aspects of the people sharing his head. The pursuit to discredit the patients condition descends into a struggle with belief and faith.

Writer Michael Cooney (Identity, The I Inside and eh... Jack Frost) is on familiar territory as his story slowly unveils a psychological conundrum that unfortunately veers sharply into a crackpot, mystical hodge-podge where one of the major plot conceits relies on that unobtainable Hollywood power to have a computer do impossible tasks very, very quickly. This reeks of rewriting burying the original script under layers of Hollywood BS. It's like way him a Dark Castle film without the fore warning of the logo to let you know your about to watch a piece of crap.

It goes to show that it's not just remakes that are bereft of ideas but original productions also. Does the fault lie at the hands of the writers, the directors or the money men? Certainly not the audience who stayed away from Shelter in droves. This is a confused, uninspired film that feels more like a business deal and a bunch of paychecks than an actual attempt to rouse any scared or chills.

I'm left flaccid and floppy