Parky at the Pictures (DVD 5/1/2012)

In addition to contributing the script and the rousing score, veteran director Dick Maas also exploits his Amsterdam locations with commendable assurance in Sint, which puts a dark spin on the already disconcerting fable of Sinterklaas and his helper Zwarte Piet. Ultimately undone by a muddled denouement and some mediocre special effects, this is still an entertainingly mischievous demonisation of St Nicholas that also amusingly accuses the government of covering up five centuries of festive butchery.

On 5 December 1492, St Nicholas (Huub Stapel) and his acolytes are torched aboard their sailing ship for attempting to kidnap some village children and smuggle them back to Spain. However, the burnt bishop refuses to lie down and, on the same day in 1968, he returns to murder the family of a young country boy who grows up to be policeman Bert Luppes, who is an expert on the crimes of Sinterklaas, but cannot persuade chief Jaap Spijkers that the imminent full moon means he is about to strike again.

Across the city, teenager Egbert Jan Weeber gets dumped by girlfriend Escha Tanihatu as he opens her gift in front of their class. While walking home, she confides in friends Caro Lenssen and Madelief Blanken that she has been seeing another man. But Weeber has also been cheating on her with Lenssen, although she is wary about dating him as middle-class mother Cynthia Abma thinks Weeber and his disabled, tarot-reading mother Barbara Sarafian are rather common.

As Luppes is suspended until the holidays are over, a patrol boat is sunk in the mist near the old harbour and Tanihatu is attacked while babysitting brother Julian Maas, who had been disturbed by noises outside his bedroom window. On hearing her friend shriek down the phone, Lenssen rushes next door to see Tanihatu's lifeless corpse crash down the chimney. But as she leaves police headquarters after giving a statement, she spots Weeber being interrogated for Tanihatu's murder when, in fact, he had been fleeing for his life after coming face to face with the sinister saint and his entourage after getting lost en route to playing Nicholas at a children's party with now-mutilated Black Peter pals Jim Deddes and Joey van der Velden.

As Weeber is bundled into a patrol car, nurse Lien van de Kelder notices a singed smell on her ward and is checking the children in her charge when the power fails. Following another murderous onslaught, Nicholas gallops across the rooftops on his white steed Amerigo, which crushes the car carrying Weeber after it's winged by a marksman. Nicholas speeds away from Luppes wielding a flame thrower and he teams up with Weeber in an audacious bid to steer a motor boat packed with explosives into the charred ecclesiastic's ship.

However, they are intercepted by a police launch and Luppes is fatally wounded in the ensuing showdown with Nicholas's crew. But as troops arrive on the dock, Weeber manages to dispatch the deadly cargo and earns a reward from police enforcer Ben Ramakers for keeping quiet about what he has witnessed. Yet, as Lenssen climbs into Weeber's hospital bed, the camera peers out of his window and settles on the skeletal visage of the undaunted Nicholas on the Oude Kerk tower.

Clearly intent on setting up a sequel, Maas makes this as action-packed as it's tongue in cheek. Besides casting a bleak pall over some beloved customs and rituals, he also succeeds in lampooning the conventions of the imperilled teen format by investing the blood-letting with more gross-out hilarity than genuine horror. The cast fully enters into the spirit, but Guido van Gennep's camerawork becomes increasingly unhinged in the latter stages, while editor Bert Rijkelijkhuizen overdoes the flash cutting (perhaps sometimes in an effort to disguise the ineffectual chroma-key and CGI work).

The great outdoors is as dangerous a place as any creepy house, with dastardly deeds just as likely to occur in breathtaking sunlit landscapes as dank, cramped interiors. Julian Gilbey proves as much with A Lonely Place to Die, a visually striking and slickly suspenseful wilderness survival thriller set in the Scottish Highlands. Mixing aerial shots of mountains and forests with handheld close-ups that heighten the sense of peril, cinematographer Ali Asad not only captures the forbidding majesty of nature, but also the atmosphere of a small town during the folkloric festival that provides the backdrop for the combustible climax.

Having survived a potentially fatal fall on a sheer face while out climbing, Ed Speleers is relieved to join companions Melissa George and Alec Newman at the remote cottage being rented by married friends Kate Magowan and Garry Sweeney. The mood is strained over supper and Speelers and Sweeney fall out over a game of poker. Consequently, there's a lingering tension next morning as they set out to tackle a nearby peak. But rivalries are quickly forgotten when they stop for lunch and spot a breathing tube in the undergrowth and find terrified Eastern European girl Holly Boyd cowering in a shallow pit.

As the most experienced climbers, Newman and George agree to go for help over the hazardous Devil's Drop, while the others escort Boyd to the village of Annan Moor. However, Newman plummets to his death and George realises that his rope has been cut before falling herself into the river below. Waking from a dream of being entombed, George tries to find her bearings, unaware that only a stone's throw away Douglas Russell and Alan Steele are being murdered by Sean Harris and Stephen McCole, who are furious that Boyd's prison has been discovered and will do anything to retrieve her.

Aware she is being hunted, George reunites with her friends and takes charge of Boyd after Magowan is shot protecting her. They fall into the river and negotiate some rapids before making the bank. Speelers and Sweeney catch up with them and the former injures his leg shielding the girl from Harris and McCole, while the latter sacrifices himself by creating a diversion with a hastily made doll.

As George, Boyd and Speelers seek sanctuary in sergeant Eric Barlow's police station, Serbian gangster father, Karel Roden, arrives in Annan Moor with mercenaries Eamonn Walker and Paul Anderson intent on getting his daughter back without paying a ransom. The village streets are packed with Beltane carnival revellers as Harris and Roden meet in the pub to discuss terms. However, as night falls, the fugitives realise they can't trust Barlow and make their getaway, followed by McCole wearing a pig mask.

Ably cutting between Walker and Anderson scouring the streets, Harris and Roden playing cat and mouse and George and Boyd being stalked by McCole, Gilbey unleashes mayhem in the last reel, as gunshots are exchanged, houses are torched and villains plunge through upper-storey windows. However, he restores a semblance of calm with a sickening woodland execution that typifies the picture's sinister tone.

Complementing the fine photography with some bravura stuntwork, this is a neatly constructed tale that keeps introducing ever-more pitiless predators to imperil the feisty George and the trusting Boyd. Scripting with brother Will, Gilbey might have come up with something more inventive than a `shoot `em up' denouement. But the experienced editor sketches the characters with brisk efficiency and handles the action sequences with the same aplomb with which he exploits the terrain.

Feature debutant Susan Jacobson also makes decent use of her Staffordshire moorland environs in The Holding, which was inspired by screenwriter James Dormer's time on an isolated Peak District farm. Not since Andrew Kötting's This Filthy Earth (2001) has country mud been so evocatively depicted. But, while this misses the gleeful excesses of Billy O'Brien's Isolation (2005), it does come perilously close on occasion to a grimly melodramatic episode of Emmerdale.

Two years after neighbour David Bradley helped Kierston Wareing dispose of abusive husband Christopher Brand in the farm slurry pit, she receives an unexpected visit from Vincent Regan, a Scot who claims to have worked with Brand on a North Sea oil rig. Teenage daughter Skye Lourie is wary of the stranger, but bible-reading sister Maisie Lloyd takes a shine to him and he seems to get his feet under the table after assisting Wareing with the birth of a difficult calf.

Regan also suggests a few economies and cuts a deal with feed delivery man Mark Cooper Harris. However, he proves most useful in standing up to bullying farmer Terry Stone and his thuggish son Jake Curran, who have designs on Wareing's land. They slaughter the new-born calf and block the roads leading to her property in the hope of intimidating her. Cop Jarrod Cooke mediates and warns Regan off Wareing. But he takes the law into his own hands when he hijacks Stone in his own cottage and slits Curran after gunning down his father.

Informing locals that the pair has gone on holiday, Regan seduces Wareing and she lets him keep Brand's watch when he finds it in a desk drawer. Lourie is more suspicious, however, as is Cooper Harris, who pays with his life for trying to blackmail Regan during a family visit to the village pub. Emboldened, Regan tells Lourie that he knows all about her sordid relationship with Brand and threatens to ruin her reputation unless she obeys him. But she bites his lip when he tries to kiss her and hides out with boyfriend Gregory Oliver.

Regan is furious and assaults Oliver for defying him. On failing to find Lourie, he returns home and slaps Wareing before getting blind drunk. She drives him away at gunpoint, but is shocked to find Brand's wedding ring among Regan's belongings and is further disturbed to discover that her husband's body is no longer where she buried it. Bradley offers to protect her, but is murdered soon after Wareing discovers Stone and Curran's corpses and she is powerless to prevent Regan from resuming his tyrannical tenancy.

He explains how he had been scarred by witnessing his drunken father kill his mother with a broken vodka bottle and how he had decided to punish Brand for mistreating the family he didn't deserve. Determined to protect Lourie and Lloyd, Wareing sleeps with Regan and urges her daughters to escape. But they are terrified after stumbling across Bradley's body and rush back to defend their mother, as the rampaging Regan returns to the farm after gunning down PC Cooke.

The inclusion of alternative endings suggests that Jacobson and Dormer weren't entirely sure how to conclude this increasingly bloody saga. Ultimately settling for electrocutions and explosions, they stray somewhat from the rugged realism that had characterised the earlier action. But this is a solid variation on the deranged interloper scenario, with Regan shifting chillingly from gauche civility to unhinged ferocity during a disconcerting supper scene. Wareing and Lourie prove worthy adversaries, but it's Nic Lawson's views of the deceptively picturesque verdancy that makes this so unsettling.

Borrowing liberally from Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) and Rob Reiner's 1990 take on Stephen King's hostage saga Misery, Steven Nesbit's feature bow Curio shows promise and clearly had sufficient merit to coax Blur's Graham Coxon into writing the score. However, Nesbit will have to devote more time to polishing the dialogue and keeping expository chatter to a minimum if he gets to a second chance behind the camera. Moreover, he also needs to find a more competent star than Jennifer Bryer, whose debut performance leaves a lot to be desired.

Arriving in the Yorkshire countryside to spend a few days with six year-old daughter Sydney Wade, Bryer hopes to make up for the time she lost after hitting the bottle following the death of her husband. However, she has misgivings almost as soon as she sets foot in the ramshackle cottage she has inherited and matters scarcely improve when neighbour Christine Howe collapses and dies at the end of an impromptu bit of fortune telling. Local bobby Richard Wood (who is essentially the village idiot) accuses Bryer of murder and she takes off across the moors having assaulted him.

She wakes with a gunshot wound in her shoulder and the earnestly eccentric Wayne Russell reassuring her that Wade is safe and everything will be okay. In fact, he is a mother-fixated psychotic who has chained Wade in an outhouse (where she is befriended by the spectral figure of Joel Jackson) and has no intention of letting a real live woman escape from his clutches - no matter what the voices in his head say.

Bromwyn Jennison plays Mother with a suitably rasping menace and Nesbit's autumnal vistas are admirably atmospheric. But there's little else to recommend this unconvincing chiller, with the macabre humour being far outweighed by the unintentional laughs emanating from the unwanted comparisons with the caricature residents of Royston Vasey in The League of Gentlemen.

Despite its competence, Jourdan McClure's Rogue River is equally predictable and undemanding. Menacing performances from off-screen partners Bill Moseley and Lucinda Jenney help sustain the suspense. But Michelle Page never feels plausibly vulnerable during her enforced stay and not even a left-field climactic contrivance can recover the trust forfeited by the exposure of the opening sequence's cynical duplicity.

Bidding brother Chris Coy goodbye, Page heads from California to Oregon to scatter the ashes of their father at his favourite camping spot. At the water's edge, she is warned against violating local by-laws by the genial Moseley, who mentions a daughter in sympathising with her loss and offers her a lift when she returns to find her car has been towed. Overcoming her misgivings, Page agrees to stay to supper with Moseley and Jenney, whom he introduces as his wife. However, it becomes clear that she is his sister, who wears a wig to disguise the fact she is losing her hair as the result of a ravaging illness.

The table talk is cosy, if awkward. But the mood sours when Page drops a plate while helping Janney wash up and she has the gash in her hand sewn up while Moseley holds her down. Coercing her into accepting a bed for the night, Page comes round to see an ominous figure at the window and she is shocked when Moseley charges into the darkness with his gun and returns with reassurances after firing a couple of shots.

Waking in the night, Page sees Moseley standing over her in his underpants and is bemused when he says he has been communing with her father's urn. She creeps downstairs and catches sight of him self-flagellating in his room and is surprised to bump into Jenney in the kitchen. They grapple and Moseley throws Page out for her ingratitude. But she doesn't get far before she is knocked out by a rifle butt and wakes to find her ankles strapped into leather manacles.

Moseley and Jenney are too busy congratulating themselves to notice Page shuffle past them into the basement to find some tools. But they hear her drop a crowbar on the concrete floor and she listens in horror as Moseley taunts a man stuffed into a trunk. She goes to investigate, only to be apprehended once again and have her potty mouth cleansed by Jenney with a kettleful of boiling water. Consequently, she is unable to call out when sheriff Michael Cudlitz comes calling and is shot by Moseley, along with his passenger.

He is spared when Jenney realises the man in the trunk has died and Page surmises that they use their prisoners in a perverse bid to keep the ailing woman alive. However, the siblings also have plans for her and she is made to wear a wedding dress and straddle their viagra-doped victim in a room full of candles. But she recognises the crucifix he is wearing and is punished for lying to the couple that she was alone in the world.

Returned to her room, Page manages to head butt Jenney and suffocate her with her father's ashes. But, in shooting the lock off the trunk in the basement, she alerts Moseley who rushes back from a fishing expedition for the forest showdown that reveals the opening chicanery and sets up a closing shot of a pregnant Page emptying the contents of two urns into the river.

Beside the highly specious incestuous twist, this is a pretty routine affair with a surfeit of plotline imponderables. Moreover, it's not particularly scary. Page is accorded far too much freedom of movement for a captive and her tormentors lack the ruthless cruelty of the worst screen psychotics. The debuting McClure directs steadily and wisely opts to let the audience speculate rather than spectate during the more gruesome interludes. But this has little to distinguish it from the growing number of incarceration chillers and it pales beside Sonny Laguna's Blood Runs Cold, a good old-fashioned slasher with a terrifyingly innovative villain. This is quite an achievement, considering it was shot by a three-person crew without electricity for some $5000 in just 35 days in temperatures that were always between 15-20° below zero. However, some of the Swedish cast struggle with the English dialogue and it's not always easy to follow the layout of the house that singer Hanna Oldenburg has rented to recharge her batteries and write some new songs.

Ignoring the advice of manager Ralf Beck and her SatNav, Oldenburg finally reaches her cabin in the snowy woods near her home town as dusk descends. The facilities are somewhat basic, but she unpacks and tunes up her guitar. However, she hears a banging noise upstairs and is relieved to discover it's simply an open window, although she curses when a picture falls off the wall when she slams it shut and the glass in the frame shatters.

Needing a drink to calm her nerves, Oldenburg drives to the local bar and recognises old flame Patrick Saxe chatting with motormouth buddy Andreas Rylander and his girlfriend Elin Hugoson. She invites them back to the house to party and they wind up staying the night. Saxe spots a shape at an upstairs window when he goes outside to pee, but thinks nothing of it and even fails to notice an axe-wielding figure bearing down on him as he prepares to sleep on the couch. However, he reconsiders Oldenburg's invitation to share her bed and creeps upstairs.

Waking in the small hours, Rylander wanders outside and finds that Oldenburg's car has been tampered with. Returning indoors, he hears music playing from an old radio and is lured into a side room where the sound of his dispatch wakes Hugoson, who wanders into the same room to be slaughtered by a man dressed in polar exploration gear (David Liljeblad).

Next morning, Saxe leaves his phone number in lipstick on Oldenburg's mirror as he tiptoes away. However, he is disturbed to find blood stains on the snow and follows the sinister Liljeblad lurking in the trees to a shed where he begins feasting on Rylander's entrails. Saxe buries an ice pick in the stranger's neck and flees, only to slip on the step and hurt his leg. Braving the pain, he manages to crawl into a wood store. But the moment he ventures outside, he is decapitated.

Surprised to find herself alone, Oldenburg cleans up the mess in the front room and, oblivious to the havoc that's been wreaked, spends the day working on her music. But, as darkness falls, she begins hearing eerie noises and she is forced to defend herself from the marauding interloper with a corkscrew and an improvised deodorant and lighter flame-thrower.

Having thus far followed a standard stalk`n'slash template, the climactic action becomes increasingly convoluted and difficult to follow. Oldenburg enters a passage leading from her room and then happens upon a boarded-up panel that gives on to a tunnel that takes her into an icy cave filled with expeditionary paraphernalia. She finds Saxe's corpse with its innards exposed and grabs an ice hammer before recklessly returning to the house to confront her foe. However, their confrontation is complicated by the arrival of Beck, who had come to bring Oldenburg some groceries and leaves the safety of his car on hearing her screams.

Perishing in a failed bid to shoot her assailant, Beck is dragged to his lair, where he is soon joined by Oldenburg, who is captured while trying to retrieve Beck's car keys. Once again, she manages to escape with perplexing ease and triumphs in a frantic machine-gun showdown.

In truth, the final third of this brisk chiller is a touch chaotic, with Oldenburg making too many foolish decisions and Laguna becoming frustratingly dependent upon shakicam. But the zombified relict of a forgotten polar mission is an inspired monster and it's only a shame that Laguna and fellow scenarists David Liljeblad and Tommy Wiklund didn't delve more deeply into his past. However, they do leave one loose end tantalising untied - who attacked the stranded motorist in the opening scene?

Having married Romanian producer Rey Muraru, British director Faye Jackson began reading into the local folklore and decided to set the follow-up to her little-seen debut, Resurrecting Bill (2000), in a remote Transylvannian village and use the gothic storyline to examine the resentments that continue to fester from the Ceausescu era. Unfortunately, Strigoi (2009) fails to recreate the bleak comedic touch achieved in Georgian Tengiz Abuladze's Repentance (1984), which similarly links a corpse to the corruption and decay that afflict a hapless peasant community.

Returning from Italy after realising he is too squeamish to become a doctor like his parents, Catalin Paraschiv moves in with grandfather Rudi Rosenfeld and finds himself at the funeral of an elderly neighbour. He is perplexed to discover that someone has forged his signature on the death certificate and can't understand why mayor Constantin Barbulescu refuses to investigate the strange marks on the deceased's corpse. But these are just the start of the surprises, as Paraschiv learns that Barbulescu and wife Roxana Guffmann have risen from the dead and that their bid to infect everyone by drinking their blood is connected to the ownership of land that was confiscated by the Communists and misappropriated by the champions of the new democracy.

Notwithstanding Kathinka Minthe's evocative photography and the simmering mood of malevolence, the indigenous cast struggles to cope with the English dialogue and this distracts from the acuity of the political analysis. Moreover, the symbolism is often as heavy handed as the efforts to subvert generic staples. Yet this is a laudably ambitious and sometimes amusing bid to produce a horror satire and Jackson commendably holds back the gore until she has established the mythology of the strigoi vampire and the customs, tensions and prejudices that underpin rural Romanian society.

Narciso Ibáñez Serrador will always be best known for his 1969 chiller The House That Screamed, but Who Can Kill a Child? (1976) is a welcome addition to the cult shelf. Previously released in abridged form under such titles as Island of the Damned and Death Is Child's Play, this owes as much to Alfred Hitchcock's Daphne Du Maurier adaptation The Birds (1963) as Village of the Damned, Wolf Rilla's 1960 take on John Wyndham's classic tale of juvenile malevolence, The Midwich Cuckoos. Yet what makes this such a striking and contentious piece of work is the prologue, in which Serrador uses footage of crimes committed against children in times of war and famine to explain the aberrant behaviour occurring on the Andalucian island of Almanzora.

Biologist Lewis Fiander and his pregnant wife Prunella Ransome are desperate for a bit of solitude away from the other tourists staying in the crowded resort of Benavis. So, they make a four-hour motorboat trip to an island Fiander remembers from an expedition a decade earlier. However, on landing, the couple quickly come to realise that all is not well. Concerned by the fact that the shops are open even though there are no grown-ups anywhere around, Fiander finds a group of children beating an old man like a piñata, while they learn from a terrified local hiding in the hotel that the kids started their reign of terror the previous evening and seem intent on slaughtering every adult in sight. Keen to protect their unborn baby, the pair decide to flee. But this proves easier said than done, even when armed with a machine gun.

Opinions of this disturbing picture tend to depend upon the reaction to the opening images of the concentration camps, Vietnam and Biafra. There's no question that Serrador fails in his bid to use these atrocities to justify the vengeance of the malign niños prowling the island for victims. But he builds a genuinely unnerving atmosphere and has the courage both to depict the killings in the cold light of day and refuse to speculate about what turned contented kids into pitiless killing machines. Many have complained about the folly of Ransome and Fiander's actions, particularly their reluctance to harm youngsters when they are about to become parents themselves. But they acquit themselves admirably alongside a superb supporting cast of sullenly sinister youths.

All sorts of claims have been made for Dan Turner's low-budget chiller, Stormhouse. The distributors compare it to The Ring (2002), Saw (2004) and Paranormal Activity (2007), while one critic has noticed a resemblance to the early work of John Carpenter. Yet, while Turner, production designer Jamie Bishop, cinematographer Richard Swingle and Martin Calder's special effects team do well to suggest the presence of a malevolent entity, this lacks either the suspense or the shock value to merit such comparisons.

Eight months before the invasion of Iraq, the British military succeed in capturing and imprisoning a supernatural entity. Ghost whisperer Hayley Sands (Katherine Flynn) is dispatched to the Stormhouse facility by government minister Duncan McGill (Andrew Hall) to investigate. But, while she receives a cordial welcome over a game of table tennis from civilian Justin Rourke (Patrick Flynn), Major Anthony Lester (Grant Masters) and his cohorts are hostile in the extreme as they query her qualifications for assessing their trophy and its significance.

On the second day of her sojourn, Hayley is allowed to visit the area where the entity is being kept and is unnerved by the eerie sound of Lester singing `Frère Jacques' in the murky light. The same song is intoned by Karl Matthews (James Capel( the following day, as he walks along the gangway to the cage. But worse is to follow, as Hayley watches terrorist Salim Hassan (Munir Khairdin) being manhandled into the cage and then treated almost like a puppet as the spirit seizes him.

Horrified by the treatment meted out to a prisoner, Hayley visits Hassan in his cell to find out what he experienced. But she is arrested the next morning for collaborating with the enemy and Lester has her tossed into the enclosure as punishment. However, the power cuts and the entity escapes during the confusion, leaving Hayley locked in the vault and unsure whether she is alone or not. McGill arrives from London to relieve Lester of his command. But he resists violently and strides off to regain control of the unit, unaware that menacing Lieutenant Groves (Grahame Fox) has been possessed and a killing spree ensues with `Frère Jacques' being passed like a grotesque roundelay as the entity selects and slays host after host.

Meanwhile, Hayley and the wounded Justin have forged an unholy alliance with Hassan and are using a severed thumb to pass through the security network to make their escape. But, while Hayley makes it to the perimeter fence, she gets no further.

Packing plenty of twists and turns into the last day, Turner manages to stay one step ahead of the audience and the denouement is splendidly unexpected. However, things become a bit convoluted as the focus falls on minor characters like Martin Delaney's computer bod and squadies Anthony Mark Streeter, Frankie Fitzgerald, Jordan Pitt and Marlon Williams, who seemingly exist solely to up the body count. Katherine Flynn (who is the daughter of Jane Seymour) acquits herself admirably as the feisty heroine and Masters makes a suitably power-crazed villain. But quite what the allegorical points about the War on Terror are supposed to be (if there even are any) is anybody's guess.

Michael McKiddy and Ross Kidder seem to find it impossible to stop yakking in Brett and Drew Pierce's DeadHeads, a zombie comedy of considerable wit and invention that merits mention alongside such macabre romps as Michele Soavi's Dellamorte Dellamore (1994) and Edgar Wright's over-praised Shaun of the Dead (2004). Smartly scripted and played with knowing brio, this has cult favourite written all over it.

Waking in a laboratory with a bullet hole in his skull, McKiddy staggers into the surrounding woods to find he is not the only member of the living dead community on the loose. In the commotion, he is bundled into a tavern by Kidder, who revels in his reanimated state orders food and beer to stop the other punters from getting suspicious. Indeed, when a band of fugitives seek sanctuary inside, he suggests they play along to avoid being slain.

However, McKiddy has got it into his head that he should use his second chance of life to take a road trip to Michigan to see Natalie Victoria, the girl he was about to propose to when he was murdered by her father (Leonard Kelly-Young). Always one for a challenge, Kidder agrees and they are soon joined by Markus Taylor, a more typical and less garrulous zombie who rides in the back of the pick-up when they hitch a ride from oldster Harry Burkey, who is mourning the death of the ex-hooker wife he brought back from Vietnam.

All would be fine if Kelly-Young hadn't hired bounty hunters Benjamin Webster and Greg Dow to dispose of McKiddy and their trigger-happy tactics - in combination with those of vigilante Thomas Galasso - keep the trio on their crumbling toes. Eventually, however, they reach McKiddy's home town and he decides to gatecrash the school reunion in the hope of seeing Victoria one last time and perhaps popping the question.

Combining wisecracks with knockabout gross-out, this is highly enjoyable throughout. McKiddy oozes nerdish decency (as well as some unsightly bodily fluids), while Kidder quips and cackles like someone doing an impression of Christian Slater doing his Jack Nicholson schtick. Taylor also excels as the gentle giant who has to be reminded occasionally not to gnaw on the nice folks helping him. Also worth noting are Webster's hilarious turn as the bigoted palooka and Eden Malyn, whose cameo as Kelly-Young's skittishly inept secretary is an absolute delight.

Escaped prisoner AJ Bowen undertakes a more serious quest in Adam Wingard's A Horrible Way to Die. With cinematographers Chris Hilleke and Mark Shelhorse contrasting dingy interiors with threatening expanses, this is a darkly deceptive drama that is infinitely more restrained and considered than the gleefully delirious Pop Skull (2008). But the sense of menace is insufficient to give the twist the shocking severity that Wingard envisages.

The action opens with Bowen waking in his car and murdering the young woman he finds locked in the boot. As he commits what is clearly the latest in a series of vicious crimes, his ex-girlfriend, Amy Seimetz, attends her first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting since moving to Columbia, Missouri in the witness protection programme. As she introduces herself, she attracts the attention of quietly spoken Joe Swanberg, who asks her on a date and she hesitantly agrees.

Bowen, meanwhile, appears to have bumped off another woman in a motel room prior to shaving off his beard in a service station restroom. As he drives, Wingard flashes back to when Bowen used to sneak out when he was sure Seimetz was asleep and add to his tally of victims. However, one night, she decided to follow him to a lock-up on the edge of town.

Despite an awkward start and a dreadful first night in bed, Seimetz and Swanberg become an item and she confides her feelings to fellow dental nurse Holly Voges. She is unaware, however, that Bowen is on her trail and has just killed the female motorist he used to get him through a police roadblock. But the strain is clearly getting to him and he slumps beside the car with a mix of guilt and lassitude.

Seimetz has finally started to trust Swanberg and notices he is uncomfortable around former drinking buddies Brandon Carroll and Lane Hughes when they bump into them in a backstreet café. However, she thinks nothing more of it when news breaks of Bowen's flight and, when Voges is found dead, she becomes convinced he is out to avenge her ratting on him to the cops. But, as Seimetz recollects the awful discovery of Bowen's victims in his storage unit, she makes the fatal mistake of revealing her true identity to Swanberg, who offers to hide her away in a remote cabin belonging to his parents.

Most viewers will have heard of lonely women accepting marriage proposals from cons on Death Row. But the idea of fanboys offering their hero the chance to get even with his betrayer is pretty novel and screenwriter Simon Barrett enhances its ingenuity by imparting one last spin. Yet the fussiness of the structuring enervates the power of the conceit, which is further undermined by the failure to establish the depth of Seimetz's relationship with Swanberg. That said, the performances are solid, with Seimetz ably conveying the vulnerability exacerbated by both her trauma and her drinking and Bowen giving off a regretful malevolence that turns to real ferocity when he shows Swanberg and his pals what he thinks of their plan.

In 1969, minor Hollywood director Ron Ormond survived a plane crash and ceased making cheap exploitation pictures like as The Girl from Tobacco Row (1966) and The Monster and the Stripper (1968) to produce what became known as Christian scare movies. Working in conjunction with Baptist minister Estus Pirkle and Ed Martin of Hope Aglow Ministries, Ormond used shockers like If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? (1971), The Burning Hell (1974), The Grim Reaper (1976) and Believer's Heaven (1977) to terrorise impressionable viewers into disavowing the dark side and being born again.

Producer Larry Fessenden is one of the stalwarts of the new indie horror boom in the United States and it's no surprise to see him lampooning the God Goes Boo genre in Satan Hates You, in which he also takes a supporting role alongside Bradford Scobie as a diabolical demon. Unfortunately, writer-director James Felix McKenney is even more prone to playing to the gallery and, consequently, an amusing idea is sabotaged by some grossout schlock and a distinct shortage of genuine wit and inspiration.

Don Wood and Christine Spencer have been led astray. He is a bibulous bisexual with a habit of bumping off his one-night stands, while she is an addict who can't resist breakfast invitations from sleazy men in bars. Goaded on by Fessenden and Scobie, the pair dump dead bodies out of windows and submit to backstreet abortions. But tele-evangelist Angus Scrimm is not prepared to let these lost souls go and bartender Reggie Bannister, judgemental hotel desk clerk Michael Berryman and reformed party girl Debbie Rochon have a part to play in their gruesome salvation.

Stuffing the action with blood-letting, vomiting, casual promiscuity and even more insouciant slaughter, McKenney isn't afraid of shocking the audience. But the termination sequence (complete with its tiny waving hand) and the cut`n'paste rape montage lack finesse and no amount of grandstanding on the part of a willing cast can make amends.

It's hardly the greatest recommendation that Dario Argento regards Cat o' Nine Tails (1971) as his least accomplished picture. However, the central segment of a loose trilogy that also includes The Bird With the Crystal Plumage (1970) and Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971) is an atmospheric giallo that contains one of the best car chases in Italian cinema.

Walking home at night with niece Cinzia De Carolis, blind ex-journalist Karl Malden overhears a furtive conversation about blackmail and feels compelled to investigate when scientist Carlo Alighiero is pushed in front of a train the day after a break-in at a biological institute researching into criminous chromosomes in which nothing seems to have been stolen. Malden is assisted in his labours by cub reporter James Franciscus, who is distracted from such suspects as gay scientist Horst Frank and Alighiero's shifty fiancée Rada Rassimov by institute chief Aldo Reggiani's daughter, Catherine Spaak.

Using Erico Menczer's roving camera and editor Franco Fraticelli's disconcerting shifts between close-up and montage to consider the nature of sight and the inability to see, Argento comes close to parodying Michelangelo Antonioni's Blowup (1966), while also castigating the paparazzi and cinema audiences for their passive, yet implicatory mode of spectating. The station and rooftop sequences are splendidly staged to the accompaniment of Ennio Morricone's score, while the breakneck chase through the streets of Rome ranks alongside anything produced by in Hollywood at the time by Peter Yates or William Friedkin. The performances aren't quite so animated and the solution to the case is a touch underwhelming. But, while this is never as baroque as later Argento movies, its blend of science, espionage and suspense is admirable.

Finally, opening in an airport lounge as the winners of a social network competition arrive for a once in a lifetime flight to New York, Chris Crow's Panic Button confines much of its action to the plush cabin of a private plane. But Crow makes neat use of computer graphics and CCTV footage to reinforce the sense of dread and impotence experienced by the snared quartet as they discover the chilling truth about their prize.

The audience is one step ahead, however, as it sees Scarlett Alice Johnson's daughter being kidnapped and her mother being murdered as she steps into the car taking her to the terminal, where she meets fellow victors Jack Gordon, Michael Jibson and Elen Rhys. They all seem nice enough as they sip champagne in the lounge. But appearances soon prove deceptive, as the foursome are forced to hand over their mobile phones and embark upon a truth game based on their profiles on the All2Gethr website.

Conducted by an animated alligator on the cabin consoles, the test reveals Jibson to be a serial philanderer with a pierced scrotum and a violent temper and Johnson to be a recovering alcoholic, while Gordon is exposed as an internet stalker with a tendency to lie and Rhys as a reformed bully and bulimic, who is now an online counsellor. Although embarrassed, the strangers shrug off the disclosures. But a kiss and tell round cuts closer to the bone, with Johnson being forced to admit that she circulated snuff footage of a gang killing, while Rhys owns up to being a virgin and Jibson concedes he has a thing for underage porn sites.

His anger at having his privacy invaded results in him paying a forfeit of having to watch a friend being executed with a rifle. He dismisses this as a reality TV-style stunt. But Gordon has to endure a pal being beaten and tossed down a stairwell when he refuses to take his turn and he retaliates by breaking into the plane's data log, where he discovers that the plane is not crossing the Atlantic but heading towards All2Gethr headquarters in Oslo.

Complete with a diabolical coda, this is a cleverly topical thriller whose discussion of internet morality will discomfit anyone with guilty cyberspace secrets. The performances are effective, if patchy. But the scripting and the characterisation are slick, while Crow springs his surprises with evident relish. Working in Cardiff with a budget of just £300,000, he also makes adept use of the claustrophobic setting and knows when to send Simon Poulter's skittish camera in for the telling close-up. The animation for the Alligator is a touch tame, but Joshua Richards's hectoring voiceover more than compensates.