TRIGGERED **** South Africa 2020 Dir: Alastair Orr. 90 mins South African filmmaker Alastair Orr, whose earlier genre films – notably FROM A HOUSE ON WILLOW STREET (2016) – never quite hung together, nails it with TRIGGERED, a sharp-witted, intense riff on THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME retooled with an ensemble of entitled, apathetic, desensitised millennials. The set up is so familiar that characters name check the SAW series and LORD OF THE FLIES onscreen. The most obvious modern precursor is BATTLE ROYALE though the backstory and twist are from the slasher movie book of antagonist motivation. Nine reunited high school…
Author: Steven West
GILTRUDE’S DWELLING **** Canada 2019 Dir: Jeremy Lutter. 15 mins Teenage orphan Giltrude (the excellent Kennedi Clements) lives in a house on a mountain from which she has never left. Her parents (Jesse Hutch, Priscilla Faia) go out at night on mysterious missions while reminding her that the house itself also goes “somewhere” to sleep and reiterating the dangers of the outside world, especially at night. Years later, the grown up Giltrude (Kacey Rohl) seems to be completely alone, her parents having not returned home for a long time. She comes to the aid of wounded orphan Liam Hughes, whose…
MONSTROUS ** USA 2020 Dir: Bruce Wemple. 86 mins Despite the impressive, looming Sasquatch of this film’s poster – and a 2017-set prologue featuring an unambiguous assault on two female motorists – the “monstrous” in Bruce Wemple’s indie drama turns out to be something quite different. Written by its star, Anna Shields, if follows her character’s mission to locate her missing best friend in the Adirondack Mountains, NY. Sylvia (Shields) is stuck in a dull relationship with an underwritten sub-Fox Mulder character played by Grant Schumacher (complete with “I Want to Believe” poster) but together they fix up a road…
THEY REACH *** USA 2020 Dir: Sylas Dall. 87 mins A nostalgia-infused feature debut for writer-director Sylas Dall, whose childhood obsession with VHS horror is apparent from the get-go. In a 1969 prologue, a father and son team come to the aid of a seemingly possessed boy for a “scientific study”, recording the unfolding horror on tape. It doesn’t end well. Ten years later, in the small town of Clarkston, 13-year-old gadget / robot obsessed tomboy Jessica (Mary Madaline Roe) picks up the old tape recorder within a box of junk from an antique shop. Her intention to use it…
ALONE **** USA 2020 Dir: John Hyams. 98 mins An American remake of the Swedish thriller GONE from the same screenwriter, Mattias Olsson, this stripped-down cat-and-mouse thriller treads on highly familiar ground but does so in a fashion that feels unusually authentic while sustaining the suspense from start to finish. Split into chapters (‘The Road’, ‘The River’, ‘The Rain’), it opens with an appropriately unsettling journey through autumnal mountains. Our protagonist is Jessica (Jules Willcox), a young woman taking refuge in the wilderness following the suicide of her husband. As she tows a U-Haul trailer across the country, she is…