It's a bit of a dash through the DVDs on offer this week, for the simple reason that the majority of them aren't much good. We start with yet another of Daniel Radcliffe's increasingly tiresome bids to prove there is more to him than Hogwarts and Quidditch. Adapted from a bestseller by Joe Hill, Horns is the kind of adolescent horror that might have been best left on the page. Director Alexandre Aja has a fine track record of producing chilling terrors, such as the 2003 torture porn outing, High Tension. But this mix of romance, revenge, chills, tears and the odd sardonic smile feels cynically packaged and lacking in conviction.

The plotline is, frankly, ridiculous. Radcliffe is accused of raping and murdering girlfriend Juno Temple and even parents James Remar and Kathleen Quinlan and musician brother Joe Anderson have their suspicions. Lawyer buddy Max Minghella believes in his innocence, however, in spite of the fact that Radcliffe blew off two of his fingers with a cherry bomb when they were kids. Kelli Garner also remains loyal. But, after waking up after a night of heavy drinking, Radcliffe discovers he has grown horns on his forehead that prompt others to confess their darkest fantasies to him before asking his permission to fulfil them.

Having failed to have them surgically removed, Radcliffe is relieved that Minghella cannot see the horns and behaves normally around him. However, vows vengeance on waitress Heather Graham when she starts fabricating evidence in a bid to become famous and beats up Anderson after touching his skin and seeing a flashback on him giving Temple a lift home on the night she died and waking up bloodied and clutching a rock. Cop Michael Adamthwaite arrests Radcliffe, who is now being pursued everywhere by venomous snakes. However, he isn't behind bars for long and makes Anderson overdose to relive the night of the murder and his reverie reveals the identity of a culprit who would have been obvious to anyone with the slightest modicum of intelligence.

This might appeal to Twilight and Harry Potter die-hards, but there seems little reason why anyone else should be detained by it, as least while sober. Radcliffe works hard, but the supporting cast lets him down as badly as Keith Bunin's plodding script, which goes out of its way to labour every point while using dialogue as exposition. Aja manages a few jolts and the effects and make-up are decent enough (although a lot of money has been thrown at them). But the basic premise is preposterous and the epistolary denouement is cringe-inducingly twee.

The acting is only marginally more inanimate in John R. Leonetti's Annabelle, although it should be pointed out that this is at least excusable in the case of the eponymous heroine, as she is a wooden doll. Hived off from James Wan's haunted house chiller, The Conjuring (2013), the action harks back to 1969 when the apple-cheeked, pigtailed toy belonged to Santa Monica expectant mother Annabelle Wallis and her medical student husband, Ward Horton. However, an attempt by their neighbour's Satan-worshipping hippie daughter to duplicate the Manson Family slayings results in Wallis returning from hospital to a very different home, in which the electrical appliances seem to have become as possessed as the suddenly ubiquitous Annabelle. But this is nothing compared to the mayhem that is unleashed when the couple move with their new baby to Pasadena and they attract the attention of priest Tony Amendola and bookshop owner Alfre Woodard.

The winged demon created by Greg Nicotero and Howard Berger stands out amongst the special effects, while Leonetti (who used to be Wan's cinematographer) and screenwriter Gary Dauberman deserve credit for trying to pack so many pilfered tropes from vastly superior horror films into their own unsettling offering. Production designer Bob Ziembicki merits mention, as do composer Joseph Bishara and editor Tom Elkins who help Leonetti sock over the shocks. But Annabelle still has a long way to go to upstage Hugo Fitch in the Ealing portmanteau Dead of Night (1945) or Chucky and Tiffany in the controversial Child's Play series (1988-2013).

Completing this decidedly lacklustre terror triptych is Scott Michell's Scar Tissue, which starts promisingly when Danny Horn flees his flat on finding a female friend slaughtered in the bathtub. He joins forces with suspended cop Charity Wakefield, who is appalled to discover that DNA found at the scene matches that of Pete Lee-Wilson, the long-dead murderer of her older sister. DI Mark Cameron and pathologist Imogen Bain are also puzzled by the discovery and the mystery deepens when DNA traces found on a severed hand at a lap-dancing club flag up another killer who has been in stir for two decades. However, uncertain whether he is making a police procedural, a gory thriller or a supernatural sci-fi, Michell allows things to fall apart during a misconceived finale involving abduction, video links, an old hospital and a pile of people who have played almost no prior part in the proceedings.

Sisters are also crucial to the action in Jeremy Berg's The Device, as Angela DiMarco and Kate Alden meet up for the first time in years to scatter their mother's ashes into a lake near the cabin from which the latter was once kidnapped by her boyfriend. Despite the place holding bad memories, the pair stray into the woods and find a black orb in a crater. On discovering its gravity-defying powers, this intrigues DiMarco's fiancé, David S. Hogan, who senses fame and fortune and smuggles the object back to the city and refuses to surrender it, even though the siblings start to experience nightmares involving bright white lights. But it's only after DiMarco discovers she's pregnant that Alden's abduction, the warnings to stay away from the cabin and the family's history of close encounters start to make sense.

Unfortunately, while the premise is intriguing enough, Berg (who acts as his own cinematographer) and screenwriter John Portanova take forever teasing out their revelations. Accompanied by Joseph Molner's moody score, some of the scenes of DiMarco experiencing an unexplained presence in her new home are nicely judged, as is her growing suspicion that she may not be carrying Hogan's child. But, while the effects created by Kate Dixson and her team are fitfully eerie, the chill factor is missing, as is a motive for the extraterrestrial invasion and their peculiarly stealthy tactics.

Jérôme Salle seeks to bring viewers back to reality with a resounding bump in Zulu, an adaptation of a Caryl Ferey novel that strives to expose the fissures that exist in post-apartheid South Africa, but which lacks the trenchancy, restraint or depth of characterisation either to engross or convince. At the heart of the story is Cape Town homicide chief Forrest Whitaker, who witnessed his father being burned alive during the political disturbances in KwaZulu-Natal in the late 1970s. However, not even those horrific scenes can prepare him for the fallout from the death of a 20 year-old white girl, who is found beaten to death in a botanical garden.

Investigating alongside Whitaker are Conrad Kemp, who has just returned to duty after nursing his wife through cancer, and Orlando Bloom, who is so ashamed that his father was a prosecuting judge that he uses his mother's maiden name and drinks to forget his past and the failure of his marriage. However, when Kemp is killed by a machete-wielding drug dealer, his colleagues realise that the violence they are witnessing is rooted in the poverty, injustice and corruption in the townships, which is exploited by white paymasters who set black gangs against one another in a sickening display of racial arrogance. Moreover, Whitaker and Bloom underestimate the extent to which the thugs can infiltrate their private lives and put their loved ones in danger.

Renowned for Largo Winch (2008) and The Burma Conspiracy (2011), Salle has always had a flair for propulsive action. But the violence here often feels cartoonish, with the black meth dealers being lazy caricatures who shoot with a wild inaccuracy that makes them sitting ducks for the dynamic duo, who seem to be able to survive every beating and gunshot wound as if they were figures in a video game. This bullish approach also means that any serious political points that Salle and co-scenarist Julien Rappaneau hope to make are made to look trivial and melodramatic, especially when the source of the killer drug turns out to be white supremacist scientists (in cahoots with a sinister Swiss pharmaceutical firm) out to cull the black population in revenge for the peaceful transition to ANC rule.

It doesn't help much, either, that Bloom takes every opportunity to show off his ripped tattooed torso, even when sneaking downstairs with a cocked pistol when he thinks he has an intruder (who turns out to be his disaffected son). But Whitaker is let down by the screenplay that fails to make the most of the aching sadness that informs his handling of the case , his dealings with his mother and his faith in Nelson Mandela's plans for peace and reconciliation.