CROC! (aka Crocodile Vengeance) * UK 2022 Dir: Paul W. Franklin. 84 mins The 2007 movie CROC (minus the THEM!-style exclamation mark adorning this one) was an entirely forgettable waste of Michael Madsen’s under-used screen talents…but at least it was vaguely watchable. Its namesake (a rare British foray into the realm of crap CG monster movies) offers a feature length expansion of that genuinely amusing wedding party sequence from Lewis Teague’s rightly well regarded ALLIGATOR. It showcases what might be cinema’s worst ever digitally-created monster crocodile (complete with giant, distracting, flapping tongue) and the most unlikeable ensemble cast in recent…
Author: Steven West
THE PRICE WE PAY *** USA 2022 Dir: Ryûhei Kitamura. 85 mins Japanese director Ryûhei Kitamura has been in the genre business since the late 90s, scoring a cult hit with the inventive low budgeter VERSUS (2000) and crossing over into visceral American genre fare via the suitably crunchy Clive Barker adaptation THE MIDNIGHT MEAT TRAIN, alongside vigorous latter-day B-movies like NO ONE LIVES and DOWNRANGE – enlivened by his sense of style and propensity for impressively executed explosions of extreme violence. From British screenwriter Christopher Jolley (SCARE ATTRACTION, REMEMBER ME), THE PRICE WE PAY is characteristically brisk, brutal and unpretentious.…
THE HARBINGER **** USA 2022 Dir: Andy Mitton. 87 mins Screenwriter / director Andy Mitton’s follow-up to the quite wonderful YELLOWBRICKROAD and THE WITCH IN THE WINDOW continues an impressive run of smart, character-driven independent horror films – this one melding a dose of 1980s style rubber reality horror against the backdrop of a major city during the pandemic. It unfolds in a suitably wintry New York City apartment building enslaved by the restrictions and paranoia of Covid. In the opening sequence, a young woman (Emily Davis) is comforted by the building manager while she falls apart from the extended isolation. Mitton…
STALKER *** UK 2022 Dir: Steve Johnson. 93 mins Elevators became ostensible no-go areas, cable-controlled coffins during the Covid pandemic and have, logically enough, long been a potent backdrop for horrific individual set pieces (DEEP RED / FINAL DESTINATION 2 / DAMIEN: OMEN II) and entire films (Dick Maas’ THE LIFT, DEVIL). This effective one (tiny) room, two-handed chiller – an ideal format for a picture shot in said pandemic – opens with stats reminding us that, while one in two women will be stalked in their lifetime, one in nineteen men face the same ordeal. It’s a good scene-setter…
CONTROL ** Canada 2022 Dir: James Mark. 90 mins Another in the growing army of perfect-Covid era movies: a stripped down, one-room (save for beach-based flashbacks), mostly two-character containment piece. Sadly, it’s also yet another entry in the over-crowded cycle of “Sadistic KRYPTON FACTOR” movies spun off from Canada’s CUBE series, in which a small group of characters are at the mercy of a seen-but-not-heard puppet master for reasons that only become clear during the climactic exposition-o-rama plot twist. The SAW franchise has always owed as much to that series as it does to SE7EN, and since then, we’ve seen a…