The Shattering

Director: Jason Boritz
Writer: Ward Parry
Producers: Pietro Dioni, Malee Nerenhausen, Alex Splendore
Cast: Ben Fritz, Elizabeth Weisbaum, Holly Burns
Country: USA
Year of release: 2015
Reviewed from: TubiTV

The Shattering is an attempt to make a werewolf film with no werewolves in it. Not in a 13hrs sort of way, where there is a quasi-human transforming monster though it’s not strictly a werewolf. And not in a Lycanthropy sort of way where you’re meant to think there’s werewolves but it turns out there’s not. No, this very definitely features werewolves – characters freely use the W-word – but apart from some momentary POV attack shots, the werewolves themselves are not actually present on screen.

That shouldn’t be a problem. What you don’t see can be very frightening. Implication is all. There are no ghosts on screen in The Haunting but it’s still one of the scariest ghost movies ever made.

What hamstrings The Shattering (meaningless title by the way) is not the lack of actual hairy, toothy wolf-people. Nor is there a major problem with the acting or the photography. It all looks very slick and well-made.

But the script is bobbins. Which is a shame. And the direction doesn’t help.

We know we’re off to a bad start when we have a group of friends driving along in the middle of nowhere at night and one decides to ask where they’re going and why. What, were you drunk or asleep when they bundled you into the car, and you’ve just woken/sobered up? This is just lazy, convenient exposition, and it happens again and again in this film.

There’s a particularly awful bit where one character suddenly decides, out of nowhere, that a particular bit of wall is hollow and kicks it in. She then asks for a light and reaches inside because of course there’s something in there. Another character holds up a cigarette lighter which (a) does nothing to illuminate the hole in the wall because it’s a tiny flame about two feet away and (b) wouldn’t make any difference anyway because the person reaching into the hole isn’t looking into it. From the hole is extracted a locked metal box. Shortly thereafter this same girl appears holding a key, saying it’s what she was looking for, despite not having tried it in the lock. Quelle surprise, it does fit and from the tin she extracts a battered diary – which someone immediately opens to a relevant page – and a VHS cassette.

Despite being filmed (and presumably set) in 2013, there is a TV/VHS combi in the room and the tape plays exactly what they need to see, a moment of found footage nonsense wherein someone keeps filming as they are running away from something attacking their family. Said person then presumably rewound the tape, wrote up a few more diary entries, locked the tape and book inside a metal tin, put the key somewhere else in the house where it would be easily findable, knocked a hole in a wall, put the tin inside the cavity, then plastered and painted over the hole.

As you do.

That whole sequence is a masterclass in how not to progress your story through exposition and infodumps, convenience and coincidence. It’s just awful. Did no-one actually read through this script before making it? Because this sort of stuff is so, so obvious.

The initial set-up, which I’ll grant you is original, is that one of these friends has cancer and her boyfriend is taking them to a ‘healer’ out in the woods. Although that has its own problems because it immediately marks out all these characters as idiots. Drugs can cure cancer (sometimes). Chemotherapy can cure cancer (sometimes). A good diet and exercise can reduce your risk of getting cancer in the first place. But a ‘healer’ cannot cure cancer; all they can do is take your money.

There are some hunters in the woods who put a stinger on the road that gives the car a blow-out and when the driver gets out to change the wheel, he is dragged off into the darkness by something.

Now, whatever did that could be a wolf, a bear, a mountain lion or a particularly angry and strong skunk. Whatever it is, it’s out there. And there could be a pack of them. So what would be the best course of action? Would it be (a) Holy crap, there’s a dangerous wild animal on the loose! Close the doors! Lock the doors! Wind up the windows! Whatever you do, stay inside the car! Or would it be (b) Holy crap, there’s a dangerous wild animal on the loose! Everyone out of the car and let’s all run off randomly into these woods that we don’t know at all in ones and twos!

Somehow they all make it to an empty, unlocked house where the lights are on. Which is convenient. The hunters take occasional pot shots at them while falling prey one by one to the POV werewolf. Most of the middle act is just dull soap opera stuff about one of the girls discovering that her boyfriend is cheating on her with one of the other girls. Completely irrelevant to the plot.

Eventually there are only three people left in the house, and they’ve read the diary and watched the found footage VHS tape and realised that they are being used as werewolf bait (and that one of their friends may be the kid on the tape). The hunters have chucked a walkie talkie in there so there’s some communication. This one hunter says they should all run out of the house to draw the werewolf so that he can shoot it.

There’s no instruction of which door they should run out of, or which direction they should run, which would seem fairly crucial decisions if their goal is to lead the prowling werewolf in front of the hunter’s gun (they don’t know where the hunter is). There’s some final twist which doesn’t really make sense. And then it all mercifully ends. It’s all ultimately something to do with werewolf saliva having curative properties, or something.

None of the young people in the house are very interesting and I can’t remember any of their names. But at least they’re not as sketchily drawn as the hunters. At no point does it become clear how many hunters there actually are, or whether they are all working together, or who’s in charge, or where they are in relation to the house, or indeed anything at all. Some of the hunters have names in the end credits, some are just called ‘Hunter 1’ etc. What’s the difference? Damdifino.

I would have liked to have enjoyed The Shattering. I’m a sucker for a good low-budget werewolf movie, me. The cast are all competent and the production has been made within its limits. But the script and direction are so poor that, despite my best efforts to like this, I couldn’t. It’s just terrible. It's such a shame.

This is the only narrative feature from director Jason Boritz, whose other films are all documentaries, including bio-docs of Paul McCartney, Amy Winehouse, Taylor Swift and Steve Jobs. The surprisingly Brit-heavy cast includes Yorkshire-born Jaz Martin (who has managed to be in both NCIS: LA and Emmerdale!), Northern Irishman Liam McMahon (’71) and Dorset-born Chris Jarvis (The Bill’s PC Casper, also in BHR entry Dark Rage).

For werewolf completists only, I fear.

MJS rating: C

The Rite of Rosemary

Director: Daniel Webb
Writer: Daniel Webb
Producers: Daniel Webb, Sara Jimenez Criado
Cast: Bill Thomas, Guy Barnes, Tanya Page
Country: UK
Year of release: 2015
Website: www.facebook.com/RiteOfRosemary
Reviewed from: Online screener

In the context of this impressive and enjoyable short, Rosemary means the herb, not the girl’s name. Dan Webb’s half-hour film is principally a two-hander between Bill Thomas as Thomas, an old guy who has moved from his large house into an adjacent lodge, and Guy Barnes as Jack, the son who returns after years away.

These two fine actors create a solid and believable relationship between the characters, a familial antagonism based on the secrets that each keeps from the other (and they both initially keep from us). Through their tense conversations – and a flashback featuring Jack Stevenson as young Jack – we find out something of their history. Initially Jack seems more of a threat, but Thomas is also a dangerous man. His reduced home has religious icons and he chides his son for taking the Lord’s name in vain. A painting of the Virgin Mary is essentially the Chekhov’s Gun of religious obsession, so we know that Thomas’ dogmatic faith will come into play later on.

Webb’s screenplay - based on a short story by Sarah Scanlan - is cleverly structured and flows well, so that the film seems to fly by. I’ve watched shorts of eight or nine minutes that seemed to drag compared to this one. To go into too much detail would be to risk spoilers; suffice to say there is a little violence, a little prosthetic gruesomeness and a good slice of obsessive wacko determination.

Bill Thomas is a veteran character actor of more than 40 years’ standing with TV credits that include Minder, Poirot, Boon, Lovejoy, Bergerac and many other classics shows. He was in The Tenth Kingdom, episodes of Merlin and Atlantis, and one episode of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. Guy Barnes has a much shorter IMDB list but it includes Rock Band vs Vampires and an Aliens fan film, plus he sings the end credits song for this film. The cast also includes Tanya Page as a police officer and Charlotte Mount in a role that it would be a spoiler to identify.

Among the crew, one notable name with multiple British horror credits is costume designer Sallyann Short whose other gigs include Nightmare Box, FirstBorn, Let’s Be Evil, Shed of the Dead and The Devil Went Down to Islington.

Dan Webb has directed a few shorts in recent years and and has been editor on a bunch of other people’s movies. You won’t find it on the IMDB but way back in 2007, when he was but a slip of a lad, he shot a zero-budget feature called The Zombie Survival Guide.

The Rite of Rosemary is an accomplished work, with echoes of classic British folk horror. Webb uses his cast and his location well to tell an intriguing, disturbing story. If I'm being picky, some of the cinematography is a bit dark and the initial concept of a killer on the loose is not fully developed and consequently seems something of an unnecessary red herring. But neither of these factors impinged on my enjoyment and appreciation of the film.

Currently playing festivals, The Rite of Rosemary was shot in June 2014. It screened for cast and crew in September of that year and was briefly available online in summer 2015 as part of the Top Shorts Online Film Festival.

MJS rating: B+

Banjo

Director: Liam Regan
Writer: Liam Regan
Producers: Candice Redford, Mark Adams
Cast: James Hamer-Morton, Dani Thompson, Damian Morter
Country: UK
Year of release: 2015
Reviewed from: online screener
Website: www.facebook.com/banjofilm

Banjo is Liam Regan’s love letter to Troma. The main character wears a Stuck on You T-shirt; there’s a clip from Tromeo and Juliet on TV; and Uncle Lloydy himself has a cameo as a doctor. It also features more penis damage than probably any film since John Wayne Bobbit Uncut. In particular there’s a scene at about 27 minutes which made me cover my eyes and yell “Dear God no!” loud enough for my son to hear me right at the other end of Simpson Manor. What is more, just when you think it’s all over, Regan edits in a brief flashback to this later in the movie.

James Hamer-Morton (Dead Love) delivers a fine lead performance as Peltzer Arbuckle, saddled with an inferiority complex and a shit job in the accounts department of a paper manufacturing company. Fan fave Dani Thompson (Monitor, Three’s a Shroud, Serial Kaller) is Deetz Montgomery, his hot but horrid girlfriend who is PA to Peltzer’s sadistic bully of a boss, Sawyer (Vito Trigo). Peltzer has the desk next to his cute ex Melissa Lee Ray (Serena Chloe Gardner – the corpse in She’s Dead) who is now dating swaggering American knob Stiles Rembrandt (Clay von Carlowitz). Continuing the Troma connections, Carlowitz and Trigo were both in Return to Nuke ‘Em High 1 and 2, on which Regan worked as a production assistant.

When Peltzer stops taking his medication, he finds himself revisited by Ronnie, his childhood imaginary friend (Damian Morter, director of The Eschatrilogy, Bicycle Day and The Day After Dark, who was also DP and editor on this film). The basic premise of a sad sack forced into asserting himself by a demonic-looking, impishly amoral, invisible companion is superficially similar to Peter Anthony Farren’s obscure 2012 BHR entry Kenneth but Regan’s film works a lot better than Farren’s, because both Peltzer and Ronnie are more interesting characters than Kenneth and his annoying ‘ear-goblin’.

Although no-one else can see Ronnie, he is able to interact with the real world – pushing a trolley full of cakes or setting a deadly trap on the company sports day – and no-one seems bothered by that. Rather than trying to justify or explain such inconsistencies, Regan simply scoots over them with glorious abandon and the film is all the better for that. Or perhaps this is all in Peltzer’s head anyway.

There’s an enormous amount of both horror and comedy to enjoy in Banjo which has deservedly been a big hit at festivals including the 2015 Frightfest and the 2016 Horror-on-Sea. Plus there are assorted little nods to some of Liam Regan’s favourite horror movies and movie-makers scattered within the film (it all takes place in a town called Henenlotter!). The corporate setting puts this into a subgenre with the likes of Lock In and Fired although it’s thematically and stylistically a very different film to both of those. The humour throughout is both scatological and sexual, with no concern about such arbitrary concepts as ‘good taste’. That said, the story is more character-based – hence the politically incorrect humour is less full-on – than something like Zombie Women of Satan.

Other employees at ‘ReamsforLess’ include The Human Centipede’s Laurence R Harvey, Stalled’s Dan Palmer, David Curtis (Bad Moon Rising), Eloise Daye (Dead Strange Jam), Paul Sutton (Exorcism of Evil, Apparition of Evil) and Steve Pollard (Clown Syndrome, Blaze of Gory). Ernest Vernon (Blood and Bone China, Molly Crows, The Singing Bird Will Come, The Wrong Floor) is a priest.

Banjo is an expansion/remake of Liam’s 14-minute 2012 short Banjo: Confessions of Peltzer which can be found on YouTube with a bit of diligent searching. The short featured Liam Perrons as Peltzer (in a wheelchair), Louise Stevenson as Deetz, Mike Crone as Sawyer and Oliver Kenny as Ronnie. In lieu of make-up, Kenny wore a green-painted Ronald Reagan mask (hence the name). This was included in the Self Induced Nightmares multi-director anthology.

Banjo is a tasteless, outrageous hoot from start to finish. It’s great that someone in the UK is carrying the Tromatic torch so proudly.

MJS rating: A-

The Stay

Director: Frazer Lee
Writer: Frazer Lee
Producers: Frazer Lee, Alan Stewart
Cast: Daniela Finley
Country: UK
Year of release: 2015
Reviewed from: online screener
Website: thestaymovie.wordpress.com

The Stay is a slickly crafted nine minutes of spookiness with a neat-o central performance and adroit direction which frustratingly stumbles in the narrative department. It’s good, it’s very good, but it doesn’t really go anywhere. Nevertheless, as the first film directed by Frazer Lee since 2002, I can’t help but recommend it to you.

Either side of the millennium, Frazer directed a pair of critically acclaimed shorts, both starring Sir Douglas Bradley: On Edge (adapted from a Christopher Fowler story) and Red Lines. In the 13 years since then he wrote Jason Fragale’s 2010 short Simone and was one of the many hands who made heavy work of the Panic Button script. The IMDB throws up a few other curious credits I didn’t know about: production assistant on legendary, unfinished, Alex Chandon scripted oddity Siamese Cop, script editor on a 2009 Norwegian horror short called Palazzo Massacre and best boy on Urban Ghost Story(!). Mostly he has been writing novels: six to date including The Lamplighters (which was shortlisted for a Bram Stoker Award) and a novelisation of Panic Button.

Now comes The Stay. Daniela Finley (who was in a Dizzee Rascal video) gives a bravura, solo, dialogue-free performance as a young woman who arrives at a holiday cottage for some me-time. A bit of supper, a glass or two of wine, snuggle under the blankets – lovely.

What sets the spookiness in motion is the discovery of a shattered, circular, black mirror. Initially spotted in the bin, this item recurs in both broken and unbroken forms throughout the film. Unlike some mirror films, there is actually something spooky to be seen in the mirror, and Frazer’s direction of these creepy moments ably demonstrates his mastery of the genre.

Individually, the various moments work brilliantly but there doesn’t seem to be anything tying them together. The ending, while effective, doesn’t relate in any noticeable way to what has gone before (except maybe the loose concept of a mirror image, I guess). The plot is basically ‘woman arrives at cottage, weird things happen, the end’. Even in a film running just eight and a half minutes, there should be more than that. The absolute minimum, smallest thing that can constitute a narrative is two connected events. A cause and an effect. Something has to happen because something else happened. But as with some other shorts I’ve reviewed here recently, there’s really just one thing here: a random sequence of weird events in a cottage. At least there is a thing, the brief story progressing smoothly and satisfyingly, unlike some of the disconnected, unsatisfying stories I’ve recently watched.

But within that story, each of the spooky, mirror-related events seems disconnected from the others, like variations on a theme rather than a progression towards a crescendo. This is less of a problem in under nine minutes than in a feature, but it’s still a little disappointing to reach the end credits without a revelation of How It All Fits Together and What It All Means.

Frazer has roped in his old buddy Alan Stewart, who DPed Red Lines and On Edge, as cinematographer and to also share producer duties. Stewart also lit Lab Rats and the Quatermass Experiment remake and has pulled second unit duty on a bunch of notable stuff including The Woman in Black, Spectre, Pan, Inkheart and both Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes films. Lee David, Tom Tatchell and Stuart Pitcher provided the smoothly integrated and subtle visual effects.

Shot over three days in February 2013 in Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire, The Stay received its world premiere at the World Horror Convention in Atlanta in May 2015 after a lengthy period of post-production. In December of that year, Frazer released the film on DVD with a solid hour of extras (plus a bare-bones VOD release).

The Stay is one of those films I feel bad about for not being more effusive over. It’s extremely well-made and undeniably atmospheric. If there had just been a distinct narrative arc, it could have been even better. Still, it’s great to see Frazer Lee back in the director’s chair and I hope we won’t have to wait 13 years for his next movie.

MJS rating: B+

The Railway Carriage

Director: Ross Adgar
Writer: Ross Adgar
Producer: Ross Adgar
Cast: Dean Sills, David Chambers, Geri Preston
Country: UK
Year of release: 2015
Reviewed from: online screener
Website: www.facebook.com/The-Railway-Carriage-1457082814587031

I seem to be getting sent a lot of non-narrative films recently. Or at least films which are so obtuse in their storytelling as to be effectively non-narrative. I don’t mind. I’m not some reactionary old duffer who believes that a film must have a beginning, a middle and an end (in that order), although I can’t deny I do like a good hero’s journey. Even if it’s just the old climbs tree, falls out of tree, is he alive (comedy) or dead (drama) hero’s journey.

The Railway Carriage is ten minutes of imagery which is probably meant to be allegorical or metaphorical or symbolic but comes across more as hallucinatory. We have an old church, containing a few candles and a metronome. And we have an old-fashioned railway carriage (empty, stationary) containing a framed photo and an old-fashioned portable radio. The photo is of the two teenage children of our protagonist, John. The radio carries a news story about a father (presumably John) abducting his children from his ex-wife and killing them.

In some way, this railway carriage and this church are the same place, in that when John steps out of the church we cut to him in the carriage and vice versa, although naturally our initial assumption is that there is an edit there and he has travelled between the two. Like I say: hallucinatory. The two children appear intermittently in the carriage, dressed as they are in the photo.

Eventually John wakes up somewhere else, although I’m not sure whether that’s meant to be a return to reality or more of the dream. If the former, it raises the unanswered question of why he has a metronome on his bedside table, which is an odd thing to have. (As indeed is a very collectable vintage radio.)

The Railway Carriage is competently and sincerely made, but I’m afraid that it left me cold. Does it just represent the anguish in the head of a man who has lost – either literally or metaphorically – his children? That’s the only interpretation I can come up with, but that’s a bit clichéd and obvious. There must be more to it than that, surely. And: apart from being a nice location, what is the actual significance of the railway carriage? Or indeed of the metronome?

I’m not looking for pat, simplistic answers, but that’s probably because The Railway Carriage didn’t really raise any questions. A film like this should make the viewer think, but it only makes me think about this film - What does it mean? – instead of making me think about the subject of the film, whatever that might be.

The Railway Carriage bills itself as a horror film but that doesn’t come across. Dean Sills (Blaze of Gory, Cleaver: Rise of the Killer Clown, Xmas Creep Tales) delivers a solid, largely wordless performance as John but he seems only confused, not frightened. The film is dreamlike but not nightmare-ish and I really couldn’t say in what sense it could be considered ‘horror’ except in the very basic sense that (a) our protagonist doesn’t know what’s going on, and (b) there are references to two kids being killed.

Writer-director-producer Ross Adgar set out to tell his story in an ‘unconventional way’ which is very laudable, but conventions exist for good reason. Conventions aren’t clichés, they’re tools that allow a storyteller to tell a story without getting bogged down in details and allow audiences to concentrate on what's important. If you leave out the conventions you’re working without your best tools.

Rarely am I completely ambivalent towards a film, but I’ve watched The Railway Carriage twice now and it has just washed over me. I felt no involvement, I took no interest, I found no empathy. Sorry. Nevertheless, it has been picked up for a couple of festivals and Ross Adgar shows definite promise. But for his next film he needs to explore how cinematic conventions can help and support him, if used skilfully, rather than aiming for something abstract which renders itself inaccessible and hence unsatisfying.

MJS rating: B-

Silverhide

Director: Keith R Robinson
Writer: Keith R Robinson
Producer: Keith R Robinson
Cast: Kelly Wines, Lucy Clarvis, Jordan Murphy
Country: UK
Year of release: 2015
Reviewed from: DVD (101 Films)
Website: www.otherdimensionfilms.com

Writing, directing and producing a feature-length film is an achievement in and of itself; one not to be sniffed at. When that film is selected to play at a festival or, even better, receives some form of distribution, that’s a tremendous validation that all the hard work was worth it. You have to admire anyone who has, from scratch, ended up with their name on the back of a DVD sleeve in a branch of HMV. Keith R Robinson should be very proud.

Having said that, my duty as a film reviewer of this parish is to let you know about not just the content and themes of a movie but also its quality, both overall and in specific aspects of the cinematic experience. In short, you want to know whether it’s worth parting with your shekels for a particular film. And in the case of Silverhide, even if you’re buying it for a couple of quid in a closing down sale at a branch of That’s Entertainment (say, for example, purely hypothetically…) the answer has to be no. I wouldn’t recommend you to buy it, or to spend 72 minutes watching it, because – with all due respect to Keith R Robinson and his cast and crew – it’s absolute rubbish.

Which is a shame. I was quite excited about this one. The film’s release through 101 Films in April 2015 had passed me by, possibly because I had it on my master-list of unreleased British horror films under its production title of Pounce. I’m a sucker for a good werewolf movie. And while this isn’t actually a werewolf movie, it’s a wolf-monster movie and that’s close enough in my book.

But honestly this is terrible. It’s one of those films where there’s almost no chemistry between the cast because for the most part they’ve been filmed in different locations and/or on different days. There’s no attempt at characterisation. The threadbare, half-hearted plot is barely deserving of the term. The dialogue is clunkier than a Tonka toy falling down a flight of stairs. The performances are ripe, the direction vapid, the design almost non-existant, the camera-work not much better than the average holiday video and the sound recording and mixing is so bad, alternating between too loud and too quiet, that one has to seriously consider the possibility that someone had the mixing desk upside-down.

The ‘Silverhide’ of the (re)title is a type of wolf with some unexplained property in its fur which renders it invisible in moonlight, which the military have been testing since they captured it in the 1920s. Is it worth going on, or shall we stop the review right there? Because frankly that précis, combined with the preceding paragraph, ought to be enough for most people.

I mean, people do realise that ‘moonlight’ is just reflected ‘sunlight’, right? It’s not a thing. I wouldn’t mind if this was a supernatural wolf-man fantasy but this is presented as a horror/sci-fi mash-up so I’d like at least a bit of the ‘sci’ please. More to the point, how has this thing been around since the 1920s? Since there’s no suggestion that the British Army has a breeding colony of silverhides, that leaves the possibility that it’s a 90-year-old wolf, which would be pretty arthritic and toothless by now, I would imagine.

Our principal characters (in the loosest sense of the term) are Siobhan (Kelly Wines, who also helped with make-up), Laura (Lucy Clarvis: Curse of the Witching Tree, also in a Rebecca Gosnell horror short called Wolf) and Marty (Jordan Murphy). These three dull twentysomethings work for a magazine about the paranormal, and I can’t help thinking that might sound more believable if it was a website.  Their plan (once again I use the term in its loosest possible sense) is to camp somewhere near an air base in the Welsh mountains, where they have a tip-off that something “way, way above top secret” will be tested in the small hours of the morning. Siobhan spends the entire film in an underground bunker, allegedly unused since the 1980s (and the only actual ‘set’ in the whole film). There is no obvious reason why she should be in there, nor why Laura is on her own in their tent, nor why Marty goes wandering off on his own. Furthermore, although they have three radios, Marty has left his in the car. So he’s an idiot and deserves everything that’s coming to him.

Most of the first half of this mercifully short feature is taken up with pointless, dull, badly written, boring conversations between any two of these nerks. We learn nothing about who they are, what their goals are, or why they think sitting in a tent on a Welsh hillside near a heavily defended military establishment is a good idea. We learn only, through astoundingly clunky exposition, that Siobhan’s father was some sort of Government scientist who was forced into committing suicide (shades of the David Kelly affair). And that Laura and Marty are a couple and that the former is pregnant. We learn about the pregnancy first from Laura telling Siobhan that her and Marty’s “circumstances have changed” then because that leaden, clichéd infodump might be too subtle for some people, from Marty actually telling Siobhan (after returning to the tent to find Laura missing) that his girlfriend is pregnant. And then, because there might be some people in the audience who are really, really hard of thinking (or, charitably, have just lost the will to live and stopped paying attention), we’re shown a magazine in the tent that’s actually called ‘Pregnancy’.

Many doctors advise pregnant women to spend their nights on drafty, damp hillsides, apparently.

Intercut with this we have shots of soldiers wandering around in the dark. According to the credits there’s three or four of them, but we literally only ever see one at a time, and since they’re all dressed identically and only ever converse with a radio voice back at some unspecified HQ, for most of the film it seems to be a single soldier, responsible for guarding this entire area. Guarding against what? Well, if he’s guarding against characterless paranormal magazine journalists, he’s not much good at his job. Occasionally the soldier says things like “Everybody move out!” in a risible attempt to convince us that he has a whole (silent) squad with him that we just haven’t been shown.

There’s also a photographer somewhere else on the hillside who, in a thrilling prologue, we saw taking a photograph of a sheep. And there’s a guy in a suit, because both Laura and Siobhan reckon they’ve been followed by men in suits. Wow, that’s spooky. Except wait, no, lots of people wear suits. This is not the stereotypical MiB get-up, this is literally just a guy wearing a normal suit, like you might wear to work. He will become significant near the end when he joins Siobhan in the bunker and I’m sure you can’t possibly guess who he turns out to be. (The photographer is in the bunker too but he simply disappears from the scene for about ten minutes so Siobhan can have a bland, badly written conversation with her dad (oops – spoiler!).  The actor is John Hoye who was in Heathen and was apparently casting director on POV.

It’s all “You must tell them. You must get the message out,” etc. Tell them what? What message? You have precisely zero proof of anything and even if you did, so what? The Army is testing a new technology based on a magical type of animal fur on an arthritic hound. I mean, what are they even testing? Just take some of the fur and study it in a lab. Or say the hell with it, kill and skin the beast and just fashion a coat, boots and hat out of its hide. Who cares how it works?

Of course, normally the Silverhide is kept safe behind a big fence that runs across the hillside (instead of in a contained environment like a paddock or something, you know, like the wolves at the zoo). Tonight there’s a storm – one of those storms that has lightning and thunder but no actual wind or rain – and a bolt of lightning has hit the metal fence and thereby somehow let the animal escape.

Oh man, I’m getting tired of typing about this tripe. It’s just dreadful. The only two things it has going for it are a surprisingly good wolf-head prop and tight, fast editing of the attack scenes. Which unfortunately cancel each other out. Designed and built by David Foxley of Fox Zumbi Dark Arts FXs (who also did the make-up effects on Writers Retreat) the development of the wolf head from initial sketches to finished prop is documented on this Facebook page.

Keith R Robinson doesn’t even have the excuse of this being his first feature. He partnered up with US executive producer Jay So in 2005 after the latter found a couple of Robinson’s scripts on script-sharing website InkTip. In December 2009 it was announced that he had wrapped his feature debut (as director, writer, producer and editor) This was The Unwelcome, based on the famous Enfield poltergeist case, which according to my records had a VOD release in May 2012, although I can now find no trace of that. It’s possible that I confused it with the Marysia Kay/Eleanor James picture Aggressive Behavior which was shot as Unwelcome. Or maybe not.

Shot in April 2012, Pounce premiered at the Freakshow Horror Film Festival in the States in October 2014 (under its original title) and hit UK shelves (retitled) six months later. Bizarrely, in July 2015 Foxley's wolf head was featured on the front cover of Fortean Times, illustrating a story about a supposed werewolf incident in Germany!

I really don’t like trashing any British horror film like this but Silverhide is just so poor. It manages to be both overambitious and underambitious at the same time: seeking to tell an epic story of Government conspiracies, clandestine military operations and deadly monsters through a series of lacklustre scenes in which characters we neither know nor care about trade wooden inanities. Please, Keith R Robinson, do something different with your next film. Work on your script a bit more. Think about your limitations and try to turn them to your advantage instead of just blundering through them and hoping no-one will notice.

Also, and I mean this as genuine advice to both Keith and other film-makers, don't put your possessive name above the title, as in Keith R Robinson's Silverhide (the on-screen title here). Honestly, unless you are actually a 'name' - you know, a name like Craven or Carpenter - that just makes you look like such a knob.

One final point. On the movie’s IMDB User Reviews page, among all the one-star excoriations, someone named 'Andy Read' has posted four copies (on the same day) of the same hilarious ten-star review (his only ever IMDB contribution, which doesn't look at all suspicious). If ‘Andy Read’ isn’t Keith R Robinson, he’s clearly someone who knows him: “Gee, these armchair filmmakers… It's easy to criticise when you've never done anything yourself isn't it?” is a bit of a give-away. He tears into the other User Reviewers for allegedly expecting some big Hollywood blockbuster, claiming the film has been misleadingly packaged to make it look more than it is.

But dude, Andy/Keith, it hasn’t been misleadingly packaged. No-one could pick up this DVD and mistake it for anything except a low-budget indie horror. And that's what people are expecting to see when they pop the disc into the machine. Just, you know, a good low-budget indie horror. “This is a low budget film made for cult fans and schlocky horror aficionados” he rants. Yes but the cult fans and schlocky horror aficionados hate it, not because it’s not a blockbuster, but because it’s boring and badly made. “It should be being packaged as a GRINDHOUSE movie – for B Movie fans” he yells, making strategic use of the old caps lock to emphasise his point but betraying that he has absolutely no idea what ‘grindhouse’ means. It doesn’t mean any old horror movie and Silverhide is about as far away from the ‘grindhouse’ genre as it’s possible to get without actually starring Judi Dench.

Any sympathy I may have had for this little film evaporated when I read that ridiculous ‘User Review’ which effectively cancelled out the good work of the genuinely impressive wolf head. So sorry, Silverhide, you’re going at the bottom of the heap.

MJS rating: D-

Do Not Disturb

Director: Jon James Smith
Writer: Jon James Smith
Producer: Alexander Glenn Prather
Cast: Ron McMahon, Kathryn Leeman, Richard Shelton
Country: UK/USA
Year of release: 2015
Reviewed from: online screener
Website: www.jonjamessmith.com

Well, here’s an absolutely terrific little short that ticks all the right boxes. Do Not Disturb is a skilfully crafted thriller with a twisty-turny plot and really the only criticism I can lay against it is that, once it has subverted our expectations a couple of times we no longer believe anything it tells us. Which unfortunately makes the final twist completely predictable. But this is so well made, in every respect, that this really, really doesn’t matter.

Running just 14 minutes, this is tautly plotted; not a word of dialogue, not a shot or edit is wasted in telling us an actually quite complex story. I’ve seen films that took 30 or 40 minutes to tell a tale simpler than this.

George (Ron McMahon: The Witch Chronicles) is a married businessman with a penchant for motels and hookers. When his latest rental proves more interested in violence than passion, he’s forced to tell his wife Margaret (Kathryn Leeman) to empty all the bank accounts as ransom for his release. And more than that it would be remiss of me to tell you. I came to this film completely blind; I recommend you do so too. Only to note that the other main role, Detective Forbes, is played by Richard Shelton who used to be Dr Forsythe in Emmerdale and is now a Hollywood actor and Frank Sinatra impersonator!

It’s Jon James Smith’s attention to detail that really impresses. After a night tied up, the first thing that George’s kidnapper does is pour a little water into his mouth. A scene on some baseball bleachers has one other person sitting there: no-one would have sent the wrong signals, as would multiple background extras. Just that one guy, in that one place on the screen: that’s what good mis-en-scene is all about.

The camera-work by Leonardo Agrizzi Netto (Harry and the Succubus, Making a Monster) is bang-on, in both the lighting and the crucial framings which are as much a part of the story-telling as the actors and the script. And a big thumbs-up for sound mixer/recordist Elizabeth Avalos whose work is a huge part of the film’s success. It’s clear that writer-director-editor Smith and producer Alexander Glenn Prather have pulled together a talented cast and crew who have synched perfectly.

Smith is a British director/cinematographer whose DP credits include Anthony Powell’s short Slashimi and Jason Croot’s original Le Fear (but not its sequel). His previous shorts as director were Spira (horror) and Linen White (sci-fi). For Do Not Disturb he travelled out to LA with a mixture of British and American crew, and he considers this a UK/US co-production – which is good enough for me.

Do Not Disturb has won a bunch of awards including some at the 2015 British Horror Film Festival, and is scheduled to screen at the 2016 Horror-on-Sea. Which is slightly odd because, apart from the opening scene with the prostitute (who owns a Stanley knife) there’s nothing approaching horror here and I certainly wouldn’t class this as even a borderline horror film.

Nevertheless, hugely recommended.

MJS rating: A

The Day After Dark

Director: Damian Morter
Writer: Damian Morter
Producer: Nicola Morter
Cast: Dawson James, Nicholas Vince, Sarah Cragg
Country: UK
Year of release: 2015
Reviewed from: online screener
Website: www.facebook.com/The-Day-After-Dark-157914397751157

The Day After Dark is a half-hour vampire short from Damian Morter, director of the terrific Book of the Dead (aka The Eschatrilogy) and the impressive but unreleased Bicycle Day. It’s a good-looking, well-produced picture with a solid central performance from Dawson James, but it’s not exactly overburdened with plot.

James (whose own short films include the sci-fi pictures HUD and Scale Down) plays Christian, a young man staying in a hotel for unspecified business reasons. His creepy boss Robert (Nicholas Burman-Vince, credited as just Nicholas Vince: Chatterer in the first two Hellraisers, more recently in Ashley Thorpe's Borley Rectory) calls him from a dodgy nightclub to explain that he has arranged a visit from an ‘escort agency’ for his star employee. A young lady (Sarah Dunn: The Stone: No Soul Unturned, House of Sin) duly turns up, clad in provocative red, gives Christian a lap-dance and then munches on his jugular – which would probably be a shock if someone came to this blind but most viewers will be aware that they’re watching a vampire film so will be fully expecting this. (They will also be wondering whether Robert's clearly visible red drink is just a Bloody Mary or whether the guy is actually in some sort of secret vampire establishment sipping type AB negative.)

(A quick note on Sarah Dunn as there are several performers with this name. This is the blonde lass from Manchester who sang 'Barbie Girl' on The Voice. Also does gigs as a Kylie tribute and does parties as Elsa from Frozen. Not to be confused with Sarah Dunn the former Miss Essex who plays Angelina Ballerina on stage and does gigs as a Jessie J tribute; or Sarah Dunn who was on X-Factor in 2010 as part of girl group Rococo; or the lead singer of American country and western act the Sarah Dunn Band; or indeed Sarah Jayne Dunn off of Hollyoaks. Anyway she's actually credited on screen as Sarah Cragg, which seems a sound professional move.)

The next day Christian awakes with confused memories of the day before, an aversion to sunlight, increased strength and a hankering for raw meat (there’s a nice little comedy scene with a waitress: “Well, I’ll ask the chef…”). However this is actually quite confusing because, Christian having just awoken and gone down to the hotel dining room, we assume he’s having breakfast. But he orders “the steak” and other people are drinking wine so - what, is it now lunchtime?

Wandering around afterwards, he despatches a couple of muggers before an encounter in a late-night car park reveals what he has become (which is fairly obvious, let’s face it) and why (which is a bit vague and unsatisfying, to tell the truth). He has a moral dilemma at the end, a choice which he sees as "no choice", then there's an unexplained, very brief final scene somewhere else, the significance of which is not clear.

The problem with The Day After Dark is that it’s all set-up. It feels like the first act of a feature or the pilot for a TV series. What will (or might) happen to Christian afterwards promises to be more interesting than the frankly generic story presented here. There is a sort of three-act structure admittedly: the phone call and lap dance; the breakfast and the muggers; and a very static, talky last ten minutes or so as Robert explains what’s going on. But we never find out anything about who Christian is or where he is or why he’s there or what he’s doing. He’s a completely blank canvas and consequently very difficult to empathise with.

The fact that his boss makes business-related calls from a pole-dancing establishment strongly implies (to this reviewer at least) that the two are involved in some seedy, probably illegal operation but if this is the case then it’s not touched upon. This is again problematic: is Christian a decent, honest bloke whose boss has decided to ruin his life (for his own Machiavellian ends) by ‘turning’ him; or is he a well dodgy minor gangster who deserves everything he gets? Christian doesn’t seem to have any serious qualms about calling a hooker recommended by his boss, and he evidently knows what’s expected when she gets there. So is he a good boy or not? Is he an innocent victim, or paying the price for getting mixed up with whatever nefarious business Robert runs?

Technically and artistically, The Day After Dark is some good, solid work (as one would expect from writer-director-editor Damian Morter), albeit bedeviled with a few pedantic, distracting background snafus. Christian’s phone seems to appear and disappear between shots; Robert asks him to look in the bedside drawer but it’s actually a cupboard; and in the restaurant scene an extra playing a different waitress, taking the order of a guy with a really stupid haircut at the next table, is still standing there a couple of minutes later. Well, she’s not going to last long in that job, is she?

The plot here is, in a nutshell: man gets turned into vampire. But that’s not a story, that’s an incident. I’ve recently been working on some two-minute scripts for The Impact, a project that Chris Jones (of Urban Ghost Story and the London Screenwriter’s Festival) is organising, and it got me thinking about what constitutes a story. It seems to me that a story, in its simplest form, is when something happens because of something else. There has to be both cause and effect. And that’s what’s missing here. If Christian being vampirised is the effect, we don’t have the cause. Robert’s explanation essentially boils down to him thinking that Christian is the sort of bloke that the vampires should have on their side, but there’s no justification for this: Christian isn’t special in any way: why him, why now? Conversely, if Christian’s vampirisation is the cause, then we’re left to guess the effect - on Christian and on Robert’s vampire society - as the credits roll.

‘Man gets turned into vampire’ is all well and good but it's only ever going to be part of a story. Furthermore we need to meet the man beforehand so that we can see the difference. We know absolutely zip about Christian, hence we’re looking everywhere for clues. Is he a gangster? Is he a shoe salesman? Is he married or single? Gay or straight? Does he have any friends or social life? Is he a workaholic? We look, but there’s nothing to see – and it’s quite possible that this enforced, unfulfilled attention to detail actually impairs the movie by increasing our likelihood of spotting irrelevant minor goofs like the moving phone and the static waitress.

The cast also includes Clay Whitter (Banjo, The Lost Generation), Zoe Simone (Bicycle Day), Kris Sommerville (Cockneys vs Zombies, Shame the Devil, Eve's Demons) and Tim Grieveson. All of those were also in Book of the Dead. Rock guitarist Mik Crone is a policeman; Sandy Slade (Wasteland and assorted Philip Gardiner pictures) is in the epilogue; one of the pole dancers in the opening scene is Jane Haslehurst from Legacy of Thorn.

I enjoyed The Day After Dark. It's well produced and deftly directed - but I couldn't help but be disappointed at its lack of narrative ambition.

MJS rating: B

The Devil of Kreuzberg

Director: Alexander Bakshaev
Writer: Pippo Schund
Producers: Alexander Bakshaev, Mathis Vogel
Cast: Ross Indecency, Sandra Bourdonnec, Tomas Veit
Country: Germany
Year of release: 2015
Reviewed from: online screener
Website: www.facebook.com/devilofkreuzberg

The Devil of Kreuzberg is what we used to call – and I guess still do – Eurosleaze. It’s very sleazy, and very European. It channels the spirits of Jean Rollin (whom I once had the pleasure of interviewing on stage) and Jesus Franco (who I never met). Scenes filmed guerrilla-style on the streets of Hamburg among lapdancing clubs, sex shops and gay porn cinemas almost look like they have been edited from something shot in the 1970s. These things, these places, they don’t still exist, do they?

Apparently they do.

Although it starts off rather confusingly, introducing us to several different characters, only some of whom will become relevant, after a bit this sub-feature length film settles down to a relatively straightforward plot.

Jakob (Ross Indecency) is a thin, rather fey German writer with a mixed-race girlfriend, Linda (French actress/singer Sandra Bourdonnec). But he’s getting tired of her so asks his dour, East Mediterranean best friend Kurt (Tomas Veit) to kill her, which isn’t unreasonable as Kurt is a professional hitman. But Linda has been convening with the spirit of her late grandmother (a graveyard voice which may be genuinely supernatural or may be in Linda’s head) who tells Linda that she is destined to kill her lover, just as previous generations of her family have done. Her surname name is revealed to be Karnstein but whether that’s meant to imply she's a vampire or whether it’s just a Hammer homage is something you’ll have to decide for yourself.

The finer details of the plot are more obtuse, but enjoyably so rather than frustratingly so. There’s a paucity of dialogue as Bakshaev tells us the story through actions and looks as much as spoken words (which are mostly German, occasionally English or French; subtitles are good and clear). Halfway through, Kurt and Jakob get up and dance to some 1980s-style synth-pop. It’s not just an interlude: it tells us about these characters, their attitudes and their relationship. The soundtrack mixes these sub-Kraftwerk keyboard noodlings with freeform jazz and spoken word samples. Like the film as a whole, it’s arty and artistic without being artsy or arse.

It takes a while to get used to the somewhat mannered acting but part of that is just the studied pretension of some of the characters. Veit is particularly good as hit-man Kurt, never betraying a hint of emotion through his face or voice yet still letting us see inside the character.

The IMDB reckons this runs 65 minutes. The online screener I was sent ran 42 and, while it didn’t have any opening titles, I doubt if they were 23 minutes long. Whether this would be better, less good or just different at that longer running time I couldn’t say. I certainly wouldn’t want to watch it for two hours, but it could probably work at just over an hour.

Russia-born Alexander Bakshaev has for several years now been an associate of Jason Impey, on both sides of the camera. He was in Jason’s feature Tortured and a number of shorts which have been subsequently combined into lash-up features. Impey starred as ‘obsessed film-maker’ George Eastman (hoho!) in Bakshaev’s 2008 sub-feature The Trip and was also in his 2009 short Bittersweet.

The Devil of Kreuzberg was mostly shot in Berlin (Hamburg sex shops notwithstanding) over 16 days for about 3,000 euros. Thomas Lee Rutter (director of Full Moon Massacre, Mr Blades etc, who receives a ‘thank you’ in the credits) gave the film a CD-R release in October 2015, including a Making Of and Bakshaev’s 2012 short Zartlichkeit.

Gritty, grimy, provocative and thought-provoking, The Devil of Kreuzberg is a toe dipped into the seedy underbelly of a world you wouldn’t want to visit except through a screen. In that sense, it’s pure, classic Eurosleaze. Bravo!

MJS rating: B+

The Brethren

Director: Shane Wheeler
Writers: Shane Wheeler
Producers: Shane Wheeler, Liam Baines
Cast: Daniel Lovett, Ian Clegg, Scarlett Jasmin Groom
Country: UK
Year of release: 2015
Reviewed from: Vimeo
Website: www.facebook.com/thebrethrenfilm

The Brethren looks gorgeous, is finely crafted, has an original and suitably disturbing plot, and I haven’t the slightest clue what it’s actually about.

It’s always difficult to synopsise a ten-minute film without just describing the whole thing. But here’s the basics. A young man wakes up, goes into his garden, digs a hole in his lawn and removes an old wooden box. Inside are six sealed glasses of liquid. He drinks each one in turn, and something weird happens after each glass.

I could tell you specifically what happens, in the sense of describing what is on screen, but what would be the point of that? The film’s on Vimeo. It’s ten minutes long. Watch the damn thing yourself. Then tell me what you think is going on.

I have no doubt that director Shane Wheeler knows what’s going on, but frustratingly that’s not communicated by the film itself. Which wouldn’t be so bad if this was a cheapo piece of silliness but clearly great time and trouble has gone into this. And the results look great. But every film brings together three elements: the artistic, the technical and the narrative. Full marks on the first two; see me on the last.

Let me give you an example. The film’s synopsis says “A young man awakens from a vivid dream, compelled to go outside and dig in his garden.” But what we see is: a young man wakes up in the middle of the night, goes out to his garden and digs a hole. We have no way to know that he is doing this because of some compulsion, and certainly not that he has had a vivid dream. He could be digging up his lawn at half past one in the morning for a number of reasons. Maybe he was instructed to do so by someone last night. Perhaps he meant to dig up the lawn yesterday evening, forgot to do so and has woken up thinking “Oh shit, I’ve left that wooden box under the back lawn.”

Perhaps this was deliberate: he knows there’s something down there and wants to dig it up while none of the neighbours are watching. Perhaps he’s fulfilling a prophecy. Perhaps he’s just a nocturnal gardener. We don’t know any of this. We just know he digs up a box. We don’t know if he buried it, if he knew it was there, if he has been searching for it for years or just dug randomly on a whim.

The Brethren is a succession of impressive images but the narrative is too obtuse to work. I’m a great believer in ‘show don’t tell’ but what you show has to do the telling instead. This isn’t a film like Devil Makes Work which was basically a film poem, a pop video without the music. I’m sure there is a narrative in these 12 minutes and I’m frustrated at not being able to access it. Why is the box under the lawn? Why does he drink the liquids? Who actually are 'the Brethren'? Damdifino.

For most of the cast and crew, this is their first IMDB credit and it’s a good showcase. Adam-Thomas Bane, a freelance body-painter and stilt-walker, provided the make-up on Scarlett Jasmin Groom whose ‘conjured spirit’ is seen briefly but features prominently in the publicity.

I feel bad criticising a film made with such care and passion, but a film rests on its script, and the script here is too full of ellipses to actually tell a story. Still, I very much look forward to seeing what Shane Wheeler does next.

MJS rating: B

Friday Download: The Movie

Director: John Henderson
Writer: Toby Davies
Producers: Jules Elvins, Jeremy Salsby, Daniel Shepherd
Cast: Dionne Bromfield, Shannon Flynn, Tyger Drew-Honey
Country: UK
Year of release: 2015
Reviewed from: screener

Despite the presence upstairs of a nearly-12-year-old couch potato nerd, the CBBC channel doesn’t really figure in this house. TF Simpson watches Deadly 60 and Horrible Histories and we used to sometimes watch Dani’s House but those are all viewed on iPlayer. CBBC is never watched in real-time the way CBeebies was, and so neither he nor his parents have any real concept of what’s on there. He tells me he’s caught a bit of the programme called Friday Download on a couple of occasions, but since he has no real interest in pop music (apart from Weird Al, whom we saw together last week!) it’s not the sort of show he would watch.

Instead his televisual diet largely consists of Doctor Who, The Simpsons, Futurama DVDs, wildlife documentaries, dinosaur programmes and endless repeats of Top Gear on Dave. Plus whatever retro shows his parents turn him onto; we’re halfway through Lois and Clark right now.

So, working on the assumption that you know as little about Friday Download as I do, here’s a primer, largely gleaned from Wikipedia and the CBBC site. The show seems to be a mix of interviews, games and performances based around music, video games and movies. The guests are contemporary pop stars: the sort of production-line teenybop automata that you and I have mostly never heard or even heard of (and wouldn’t admit if we had). It’s presented by bland stage school Stepford teenagers indistinguishable from the bland singers they interview. A perusal of the online bios of the current presenters (not the ones in this film) shows them to be shallow and dull, their interests limited entirely to sport and pop music. None have even the slightest interest in science, or history, or nature, or art, or literature, or anything beyond vacuous soundbite pop culture.

Let’s put it this way. If Jeremy Corbyn gets elected Prime Minister and turns Britain into a totalitarian Communist state, none of this lot run any risk of being arrested for being dangerous intellectuals. One boy does list Of Mice and Men as his favourite book but then admits that it’s the only one he’s ever read(!) and in fact the only glimmer of anything approaching any sort of credibility is that one girl says her favourite band is the Stone Roses.

Friday Download has been running since 2011 and has apparently won a BAFTA at some point. The whole thing all looks rather ghastly, to be honest, like an ADHD Why Don’t You for the X-Factor generation. Presumably it’s what some kids want but you can see why someone like TF Simpson wouldn’t be interested. (Please note that I have never seen even a second of the show and hadn’t actually heard of it until I was sent this screener. All the above is based on minimal research. I wouldn’t want anyone to mistake my disdain for the programme as anything except good old-fashioned, uninformed prejudice.)

So why, you may ask, am I bothered about any of this? Because in 2015 Friday Download spawned a spin-off feature film. And dang me, it’s a haunted house horror comedy. And while it’s not something that I would ever choose to watch, as a British horror completist I feel it my duty to view the screener I was kindly sent and report back to you what’s what. So, in summary: it’s not terrible and I’ve seen worse. Like the bands who feature on the show, it’s inoffensive, forgettable and corporate.

But it also has its moments.

There are five presenters playing themselves, or rather, their one-name screen personas, in this movie. Richard (Wisker) had been a regular on the show through all previous eight series; Dionne (Bromfield) was a regular up to series 7, and a guest presenter in series 8; Shannon (Flynn) had been part of the team since series 5; George Sear since series 6. Bizarrely, Bobby (Lockwood) hasn’t actually presented the TV series (according to Wikipedia) although he plays a presenter in the movie.

I’m sure each of these kids is the life and soul of the party in real life, but there’s precious little personality to their screen personas. Bobby is a bit dim, and frequently talks about his dog Cujo (a horror reference that’s never acknowledged or touched upon). Dionne is a bit vain and obsessed with make-up, hair products and skin conditioner. Shannon is probably the most rounded and interesting character, a take-charge Mancunian with a no-nonsense attitude. Richard and George don’t seem to have any distinguishing traits at all and I’m not sure I could even tell them apart.

The plot, such as it is, has the quintet finish the latest series of Friday Download and head off for a holiday in a battered old van. After pausing for no apparent reason at a cemetery, they get lost in the fog and crash (harmlessly) into a ditch, conveniently close to an enormous mansion that looks like the Bide-a-Wee Rest Home. (It’s actually Margam Castle, a gothic monstrosity near Port Talbot which was designed by Thomas Hopper in the 1830s for William Henry Fox Talbot’s cousin.)

This vast pile of masonry is inhabited by two posh siblings, Clara (Louisa Connolly-Burnham from House of Anubis and Wolfblood) and Caleb (Tiger Drew-Honey) who live alone there since their parents died. Drew-Honey was a presenter on Friday Download series 1-4 although he is better known for either (a) playing Jake in Outnumbered, or (b) being the offspring of porn professionals Linzi Drew and Ben Dover (depending on one’s own cultural sensitivities). Invited to stay the night, the five friends are shown to separate bedrooms, each of which contains appropriately monogrammed pyjamas.

Overnight, spooky things start to happen and this is where the film proves surprisingly effective, since some of these would actually be really good and scary in a proper horror film. Shannon hears a beeping, as of a smoke alarm requiring a new battery, and opens the door to the passage only to find it leads into an exact copy of her bedroom, including another door which leads to another copy. She ends up running through room after room in a brief but hallucinatory sequence that is not played in any way for laughs.

Richard (or possibly George) is woken by a wide-screen TV switching on which he groggily realises is showing footage from a camera somewhere in the room, of himself in bed, at which point a shadowy figure appears beside him on the screen. Dionne, going through her nightly rituals in front of a mirror, finds a scary-faced version of herself staring back. Bobby hears his dog at the door but is dragged under the bed by the unseen animal, emerging with shredded, slimed PJs. And something probably happens to George (or possibly Richard) but I can’t remember what.

The spooked kids head back to their van but find that it has left the ditch and somehow got stuck halfway up a tree. Forced to return to the house, where Clara and Caleb remain welcoming and understanding (if stiffly eccentric), the gang are joined by Fraser (Ethan Lawrence: Joe in Bad Education), who runs a ghost-hunting blog and has been camping outside the mansion grounds. Once he has sneaked inside with his new friends, Fraser goes exploring.

After spending the rest of the night sharing a single room, blithely unaware of the ectomorphic entities around them, the FD team are awoken by Mr Peck (Angus Barnett: Mullroy in Pirates of the Caribbean 1, 3 and 5), a property developer who wants to buy the house, knock it down and build something else. The precise details of the financial situation aren’t exactly clear. Peck has purchased a £20,000 debt and the siblings have until sunset that day to come up with that amount, otherwise he will own the house. Or something.

We also learn that Caleb and Clara’s late parents are haunting the place. We don’t learn at this point that the siblings themselves are also ghosts, although it was screamingly obvious from the moment we first met them.

The gang decide that they can raise the required 20 grand by calling in a few pop star mates and staging a concert in the grounds – which they do. Coachloads of screaming, pubescent girls arrive (plus one or two boys) and are treated to performances by Dionne (Bromfield is a singer, rather than an actor) plus Bars and Melody and The Vamps.

Apparently Bars and Melody are two kids who came third on Britain’s Got Talent and have subsequently had a top ten single and album. After this movie, they both became regular presenters on the ninth series of Friday Download. The Vamps are a four-piece boy-band who sound like a McFly album track and actually supported McFly on a 2013 tour (I’ve got no problem with McFly – plenty of McFly CDs on my shelf). Each of the three artists performs one song, intercut not only with shots of the screaming training-bra battalion but also with scenes of Fraser finding out the truth about Caleb, Clara and their parents.

Apparently – according to a spooky story told early on in the van, and a book browsed by Fraser – if ghosts are allowed to own the ground that they haunt, they can take over the world. Or something. The interesting upshot of this unique idea is that, in raising the required £20,000 (by passing a bucket among the crowd, most of whom presumably get decent pocket money), the Friday Download gang have actually done the wrong thing. They thought they were helping two new friends stand up to a greedy property developer, but they have actually brought about the end of mankind by unleashing unstoppable ghostly forces upon the Earth.

Well, I didn’t see that coming.

I’m prepared to give props to the film for not only that twist, but also for the way it gets out of this situation, which is that they use social media to alert every ghost-hunting nutter in Britain to the inarguable presence of two ghosts (the siblings having now revealed their true natures). An army of paranormal investigators immediately descends on the house and Fraser makes it clear that from now on the two spectres will never have a moment’s peace. This is enough for them to realise that they would be better off with their parents, which they achieve by magically entering a painting that Fraser found in an attic.

The final gag of the film sees the team heading off to a town which, it is implied, is populated by werewolves.

Obviously I’m not the target audience for this film so I can only offer my personal subjective opinion as a seasoned film reviewer. I reviewed plenty of kids movies back in the SFX days so I’m not completely unfamiliar with the genre and its tropes. What struck me most, I think, was that this is a curious chimera of two well-established themes. Normally when established entertainment characters find themselves in a haunted house, the template is Scooby-Doo and they work to solve the mystery and/or lay the ghosts to rest. Alternatively, there is the well-worn plot of needing a large sum of money to save someone/where/thing and achieving this by calling on showbiz mates to stage a mini version of Live Aid. Friday Download: The Movie bolts these two ideas together and the end result is not unsuccessful, to be fair.

More problematic for me is the subtext of the film, which is very much that there are the cool, beautiful people – and then there are the freaks and geeks. Though he is never rejected, Fraser is very much the outsider: a loner, an obsessive, someone more interested in research, discovery, heck just reading, than in ‘important’ things like pop music, partying and looking good. Because of his outsider status, he must be fat, with unstylish clothes and a bad haircut.

There’s a disturbing lack of diversity in the film. Apart from TBG Bromfield, the only non-white face is an obsessive mega-fan of the series named Darren (Nathan Bryon: Jamie from Some Girls). With his cheerily oblivious attitude to social convention and his lop-sided ‘fro, Darren is rather obviously modelled as a younger version of Moss from The IT Crowd (I don't know if he's part of the series or just created for the film). As with Fraser, he is a loner, desperately unstylish and classified as a nerd, a geek, a nutter. He can only watch the cool kids from afar; he can never be part of their gang. And that really is it as far as diversity goes in this film. There may be a few black faces among the hordes of little girls watching the concert, but everyone else is as white as sour cream. If you’re disabled, or Asian, or think you might be gay, or you’re a goth or an emo, or if in any other way you feel ‘different’ or are suffering the sort of emotional crisis that comes with puberty and adolescence – well, my friend, this is not the movie for you.

The subtext here is that cool, white kids with trendy haircuts and exciting media careers are so much better than you. If you don’t wear the right clothes, don't listen to the right music, don't have the right haircut, demonstrate weird interests like reading or science or history – then you are The Alien Other. You may look at the cool kids. You may speak to them if they speak to you first. But you can never be one of them. You are a weirdo, a loony, a freak.

In the entire film, I don’t think there’s a single character who wears spectacles. That, for me, sums it up.

Now listen. Yes, I know I’m reading too much into this. It is just a silly kids comedy with some slapstick and some pop music. And I’m not asking for some righteous, politically correct, box-ticking of a black kid in a wheelchair as a token member of the gang. I’m just saying that the presenters of a show like this, and hence the stars of a film like this, could be more representative of today’s youth, instead of all looking and sounding and behaving the same. And the script could have been less at pains to point out that Fraser and his many ghost-hunting web friends - who actually save the day, remember – are ‘nutters’ and ‘geeks’.

Just saying.

The film was directed by the very experienced John Henderson whose notable genre credits include the 1990s TV series of The Borrowers, Ted Danson starrer Loch Ness (and Loch Ness lite feature Mee-Shee: The Water Giant), Hallmarks’ The Magic Land of the Leprechauns, unfunny scifi sitcom Hyperdrive and legendary Doctor Who Comic Relief Special The Curse of Fatal Death. He also directed episodes of Spitting Image and brilliant Steve Coogan sitcom Saxondale. Scripter Toby Davies previously wrote sketches for Sorry I’ve Got No Head (oh yes, that’s another CBBC series we have actually watched) and That Mitchell and Webb Look, as well as episodes of Yonderland.

John Henderson’s regular cinematographer John Ignatius lit the picture; in his early career he was focus puller on Brazil and The Crimson Permanent Assurance. Production designer Blair Barnette started out in LA doing props and sets work on superior kidcoms like Clarissa Explains It All and Kenan and Kel before moving to the UK where she actually has a couple of BHR credits in Sightseers and In Fear.

Kevin Eldon, David Mitchell and Marcus Brigstocke make utterly irrelevant name-value cameos as respectively a creepy security guard, a comedy policeman and himself. Also credited as themselves are Connor Ball, Tristan Evans, James McVey and Bradley Simpson. I have no idea who they are (presumably they’re in the phone-round-our-celeb-pals montage) and I can’t be arsed to look them up.

Released theatrically in May 2015 as Up All Night (with a West End premiere), the film swiftly learned the lesson that TV spin-offs must have the same title as the show from which they originate so for the October 2015 DVD release it became Friday Download: The Movie.

MJS rating: C+