Cert 15 Stars 1

Family secrets are brought into focus in this lumbering and laboured British supernatural horror which takes his inspiration from the Soviet inventor, Semyon Kirlian, who claimed to be able to photograph a person’s ‘aura’.

Written and directed by Steve Lawson, it sees expecting couple Diane and Mitch Walker move into his late uncle’s spooky country house, where they unwittingly release an ancient evil.

Released as ‘Aura’ in the US where this is unconvincingly set, Spanish actress Denise Moreno plays Karen, and Rula Lenska enjoys herself as a local psychic far more than I did watching this.

Cert 18 Stars 3

Scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis returns as Laurie Strode to the horror slasher franchise which kick-started her career, as forty years after she survived the killing spree of masked knife-wielding psychopath, Michael Myers, he returns once more to torment her.

And her star presence helped to scare up nearly £200m world wide on a terrifyingly tiny £8m budget, making this the biggest grossing episode of the eleven strong series.

It’s success was also helped by being a direct sequel to the 1978 original, and by basically pretending all the other films don’t exist, it’s easy to catch up.

Cert 15 127mins Stars 4

There’s a demonic creepiness to this slow burning supernatural horror which doubles as a tormented exploration of a very dysfunctional family.

Aussie actress Toni Collette gives an Oscar-worthy performance as a woman being torn apart by fear, grief and the pressures of parenting.

Her daughter has some very disturbing habits, her son has some serious issues and her mother is recently deceased but remains a malign influence. 

With echoes of 1968 classic, Rosemary’s Baby, this is an extraordinarily stylish and self-assured debut by director, Ari Aster, who seems to want to punish more than entertain us.

Intense, anxious, bleak and deeply unsettling rather than scary, Aster deliberately avoids the crowd pleasing thrills of the recent and more easily enjoyable horror, A Quiet Place, and he seems intent on shocking us into submission.

Hereditary has proved hugely divisive in the US, due in part to its controversial ending, but you’d best see it to make up your own mind. If you dare.

 

 

Cert 18 85mins Stars 1

This deathly dull and derivative slasher bravely ignores the tremendous creative resurgence horror films are enjoying.

Movies such as the Oscar nominated Get Out, and apocalypse creature feature, A Quiet Place, have generated big bucks from big thrills.

Instead this is relentlessly unimaginative,mindlessly mirthless and defiantly non-scary.

Plus it’s a great example of the cinematic rule of thumb, which advises avoiding films which are less than 90 minutes, as apart from early Disney cartoons, they’re rubbish.

This belated sequel to the barely remembered 2008 original, laughably claims to be based on true events. It sees an unsympathetic family terrorised by mask-wearing psychopaths in an out-of-season trailer park resort.

Christina Hendricks of TV’s Madmen fame, has had far better luck in tiny arthouse films than in mainstream movies. Her presence is wasted as the mother of two high school kids who I was happy to see tormented.

I’ll pray tonight and ask forgiveness for wasting my time watching this.

 

Cert 18 Stars 3

It’s been 14 years since the first Saw horror film first hacked its brutal way into popular culture.

Scoring for nearly billion dollars at the box office for a fraction of the cost, the torture porn franchise has been a huge success and returned with this eight instalment.

Proving there’s no stopping a psychopathic killer, and despite Jigsaw dying in the previous film, he’s back to punish a group of strangers who wake up chained in a steel shed.

This is a typically nasty and violent, and longtime fans will lap up its bloody inventiveness.