THE REVEREND’S REVIEW

FT’s resident man of the cloth REVEREND PETER LAWS dons his dog collar and faces the flicks that Church forgot! (www.peterlaws.co.uk)

I Trapped the Devil

Dir Josh Lobo, US 2019 Available on digital platforms from 21 Oct

Here Comes Hell

Jack McHenry, UK 2019 Available on digital platforms from 11 Nov

Come to Daddy

Dir Ant Timpson, New Zealand/Canada/US 2019 DVD and digital release date TBC

Genre films frustrate some filmgoers because they are, well… generic. I must have seen 100 films which start with a car breaking down outside a spooky, storm-battered house, for example. Yet film makers occasionally get a chance to inject something new into the mix. Left-field stuff can leave some audiences cold or might, ironically, set off a new endlessly repeatable storytrend. So, we’re looking at three new chillers this month that at least have the balls to do things a little differently. Each was recently screened at the annual Frightfest, and will receive wider releases later this year.

First up we get the high-concept horror of I Trapped The Devil, where a Christmas family reunion turns proper awkward when sketchy brother Steve insists he’s trapped Satan in the basement. Is the whispering man down there an innocent kidnap victim or the Devil himself? I’m hardly the first critic to spot the similarity to ‘The Howling Man’ episode of the original Twilight Zone, and it’s true that this feels like a stretched-out 30 minute story at times; it’s a super slow burn, and you’ll lose count of the slow-zoom shots on the red lit-basement door, flanked with bolts and a hefty wooden crucifix. Yet there’s

Sketchy brother Steve insists he’s trapped Satan in the basement

an undeniable chill to the voice behind the door, and the film maintains a nice level of tension throughout its running time. The final image gave me a satisfying shiver, too.

Another way of doing something new with horror is to take two previous properties and mash them together. Here Comes Hell does precisely that by blending Downton Abbey with The Evil Dead. The efforts to evoke a 1930s feel are capital, darling, from the opening ‘Ladies and Gentleman’ monologue, to the hokey ‘fake’ model and car effects; little things like this gives the film a pleasing nightmare edge. Once the demons finally break out (it takes a while) there’s gory fun to be had, even in black and white. My wife walked in midwatch and guffawed at some of the acting: “This looks like a sixth form drama project!” she said. Harsh, but I know what she means. Yet there’s an earnest spirit here, plus an excellent string quartet soundtrack that elevates the film. Oh, and the ‘worms-inthe-eye-sockets’ bit almost made me puke, so bravo for that.

Finally, we have the most accomplished of the three, with Come To Daddy. Elijah Wood (below) is achingly sympathetic as a troubled young man visiting his estranged dad after decades of abandonment. The reunion, at the father’s bizarre seaside home, doesn’t go quite as planned. The film subverts genre labels by simply evading them; it’s way too slippery to pin down. Is it a family drama, a thriller, a supernatural horror or a laugh-out-loud comedy? Actually, it’s all of these things at the same time. Just watch the father and son discussion about Elton John for proof. It’s simultaneously funny, tense, depressing and scary. And if there were ever an Oscar for the best Michael Heseltine joke in a motion picture, this one would be a shoo-in.

For me, there will always be a place for generic, predictable story patterns in movies. Millions of us derive a strange sense of comfort from the recognisable rhythms of truly ‘generic’ films. It’s why they’re so popular. It just makes it all the more fun when something comes along that has the courage to take a different, and often far quirkier, turn. are trapped on ski lifts or in saunas. The people in this case are a gaggle of (remarkably healthylooking) kids who have just been liberated from a Nazi death camp in Poland in the dying days of the war. The peril they’re in is that the remote country house they have been liberated to is surrounded by ravenously hungry dogs roaming free now their Nazi masters have fled. To compound the problem, there’s no food, water or electricity, so the poor kids are equally ravenous.

The two eldest are Hanys (Nicolas Przygoda) and Hanka (Sonia Mietielica) who as well as being the strongest also share a mutual attraction. This upsets the awkward Wladek (Kamil Polnisiak) who covets her for himself, and he finds himself torn between helping his friends and trying to engineer a fatal accident for his love rival.

Plenty going on, then, and one could not fairly describe Werewolf as dull, but somehow it never truly engages. Firstly, just like those aforementioned films where people are stuck in an ATM vestibule with a serial killer over a Bank Holiday weekend, the premise is over-engineered to the point of absurdity. Second, as a result, it is wholly unconvincing: not only are there a couple of plot twists that defy belief but the kids look as if they have wandered in from the set of Outnumbered, so sparky and energetic are they; these kids are supposed to have come direct from a death camp. Which brings me to my third and deepest objection.

Werewolf is at heart an exploitation movie. Nothing wrong with that: so is Jaws; but I had hoped the days of exploiting the Holocaust to provide the backdrop for run-of-the-mill thrillers were over. Trivialising the demonisation and systematic persecution of a vulnerable minority group merely to provide fodder for entertainment is surely no longer welcome or acceptable; even the notoriously tasteless Italian B-movie industry stopped making Nazi flicks in the 1980s. Granted, there are still plenty of horror films that use Nazis as evil incarnate, but that’s not the case here: the dogs are the main threat, the biggest genocide in human history merely window dressing.

There is, it has to be said, much

to admire about Werewolf. The locations are stunning and they are beautifully captured in some elegant photography. Director Adrian Panek has wrung two or three decent performances from his young cast in what must have been rather testing circumstances. It’s gruesome enough without being over the top, and it has the good sense to last less than 90 minutes. But it has serious flaws too and a yawning chasm where its heart should be.

Daniel King

★★★★★