This week, we have two cracking horror films, both available to rent in the usual places…
‘We Summon the Darkness’ is set in Indiana in the summer of 1988. Three young women, Alexis (Alexandra Daddario), Val (Maddie Hasson) and Bev (Amy Forsyth) attend a heavy metal concert. They meet three guys, Mark (Keann Johnson), Kovacs (Logan Miller) and Ivan (Austin Swift). Despite the news being full of stories of a spate of satanic killings, Alexis invites the three virtual strangers to her house….
This is a lot of fun for anyone who likes trashy horror movies. The period setting is crucial to the plot but the director Marc Myers doesn’t burden the film with heavy handed cultural references. It us really well paced, building up to an effective climax, and providing plenty of gore along the way.
Daddario is great and Forsyth makes an appealing heroine.
Rating: 8 out of 10
The low budget ‘Sea Fever’ is a real treat. Siobhan, a withdrawn marine biology student is persuaded by her teacher to join a trawler crew on a fishing trip to enable her to study anomalies in the marine life they catch. When they enter an exclusion zone, they encounter a mysterious creature…
Whilst the influences are pretty obvious, especially ‘Alien’ and ‘The Thing’, ‘Sea Fever’ still feels fresh and original. The trawler crew are well drawn, and the interaction between them felt really convincing. Director Neasa Hardiman – who wrote the screenplay – slowly builds up the tension really well. She avoids having her characters behaving irrationally in order to put themselves into danger, and as they begin to be killed off, the order of their deaths was unexpected.
Hermione Corfield who plays Siobhan, shows herself to be a star in the making as her character transforms from timid student to the one person who might be able to save the crew members. This is amongst the most impressive in recent years.
Rating: 8.5 out of 10
Despite those two films’ high body counts they are not as gruelling to watch as another new rental option, ‘Swallow’. Hunter (Haley Bennett) is a housewife who is in a suffocating marriage to Richie (Austin Stowell). When she becomes pregnant she starts to eat increasing strange small objects, including pins, marbles, and batteries.
This is a sincerely made film about an unusual mental illness. The cast is fine, with Bennett giving a career best performance and Nathan Halpern contributes a great score. However, there is a certain coldness to the movie that prevented me from emotionally engaging with it.
Rating: 6.5 out of 10