MY 50 FAVOURITE HORROR FILMS: 40 TO 31

The countdown continues...


40. Prince of Darkness (D. John Carpenter, 1987)
John Carpenter's often overlooked sci-fi/supernatural/horror from 1987 may not be up there in the premiere league of Carpenter’s work but it is still a stylishly intriguing affair. In the basement of an old church is a huge ancient canister of green goo apparently having been kept by the church for millennia. But the canister has recently shown signs of activity, which leads a priest (Donald Pleasance) to call in Professor Birack (Victor Wong) to investigate. Along with his team of science students, Birack makes a shocking discovery about the nature of the canister. And very soon we have possessed people stalking the dark halls and the zombie-like homeless surrounding the church, creating a siege for the scientists and priest inside. Prince of Darkness is pleasingly gloomy and creepy rather than being outright scary. The characters may be just a tad too bland but PoD makes up for its shortcomings with a real sense of slowly creeping dread, a brilliant central concept and a killer Carpenteresque ending.



39. 28 Days Later (D. Danny Boyle, 2002)
Danny Boyle's low budget not a zombie zombie film is a bleak, raw, nervy exercise in nihilistic terror as seemingly last man alive Cillian Murphy awakes in an abandoned London only to discover the nation has succumbed to an outbreak which turns people in to mindless rage fuelled monsters out for blood. Storywise there's nothing new here, with Boyle riffing on Romero and Richard Matheson along with other survivalist and disease outbreak flicks. What is new, though, is the way the material is presented - a rawness in shooting and editing helped a lot by the use of new digital cameras. And unlike traditional zombies, the infected are fast, agile and noisy, roaring at you as if the devil himself were inside of them. Terrifying. Nice one Danny.

38. Suspiria (D. Dario Argento, 1977)
By far Italian horror legend Dario Argento's finest work, Suspiria is a visual tour-de-force; a colourful, bloody, hypnotic nightmare which sees Jessica Harper enrolling in an isolated Italian ballet school only to discover it holds a horrifying supernatural secret built on murder and bloodshed. There really isn't any other film out there that looks anything like Suspiria. The photography is quite astonishing, and the Goblin score is a classic. Argento has never come close to making anything this good again I'm sorry to say. But at least we have this classic horror from him. And what is it with scary ballet? I have two films in my top 50 that centre on ballet and ballerinas. Maybe its due to the physical hell they put themselves through to try and perfect their art. I dunno. But it does seem to lend itself nicely to strange tales of horror.



37. Frankenstein (D. James Whale, 1931)
James Whale's classic film version of Mary Shelley's novel needs no explanation from me. Suffice to say it is a beautifully made film with Colin Clive on great mad scientist form as the good Doctor F. But of course it is Karloff who truly makes this movie what it is. His take on the Monster is definitive and beyond iconic. His performance is subtle, affecting, filled with childish innocence which is countered by often explosive tantrums. He is the model for all misunderstood and sympathetic monsters to come. A true classic.

36. The Wolfman (D. George Waggner, 1941)
Has there ever been a sadder more hopeless, helpless hero in a horror movie than poor lycanthropic Laurence Talbot as played here by Lon Chaney Jr? So much we take for granted about werewolf lore was either pulled together for the first time in this film or was actually created by its writer Curt Siodmak. “Even a man who is pure of heart and says his prayers by night may become a wolf when the wolfsbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright.” Classic. And all from Siodmak. Most people know the story so I won't repeat it. In the end, The Wolfman is a wonderfully melodramatic atmospheric tale with a wonderful central performance by Chaney and some equally wonderful monster make-up by FX legend Jack Pierce. And I love every minute of it.



35. Switchblade Romance aka High Tension aka Haute Tension (D. Alexandre Adja, 2003)
Alexandre Adja's ferociously brutal, unpredictable stalk and slash is an evil little gem. Rural France and two young women, Marie and Alex, go to stay with Alex’s parents in their remote farmhouse. Later that night a stranger breaks in, brutally murders the parents and wounds badly Alex. Marie manages to escape, taking Alex with her, the savage stranger hot on their heels. What follows is a chase and slash as the two girls, one badly wounded, try to evade capture...at least until the shocking truth is finally revealed. A nasty, bloody, clever little movie, Switchblade Romance marked Adja as a name to watch as well as marking the start of the current French new wave of horror.

34. The Others (D. Alejandro Amenabar, 2001)
A classic ghost story with a twist, Spanish director Alejandro Amenabar’s The Others is a moody, elegant and splendidly old-fashioned chiller. It’s the end of World War 2 and Nicole Kidman in a wonderfully brittle performance, is Grace, a widowed mother living with her two young children in a big isolated house on the island of Jersey. It soon transpires that the house is most likely haunted as strange goings on abound, with sudden noises, doors opening, strange sightings all making for an extremely effective scare show for poor mummy Nicole and the audience alike. The film looks beautiful too and Kidman has never been better. The Others proves you don't need elaborate effects or gore to make for a truly scary film. It's only a 12 certificate for cripes sake. Marvellous!

33. Zombie Flesh Eaters (D. Lucio Fulci, 1979)
The other Lucio Fulci film in my countdown is his most obvious cash in on the success of Romero's Dawn of the Dead. But it is also Fulci's most accomplished film too. Zombie Flesh Eaters sees New York journalist Ian McCulloch accompanying Tisa Farrow (Mia's sister) on a trip to an island in the Caribbean to find Tisa's missing scientist father. Once at the island our heroes meet up with another young couple who are there doing scientific research. And together the four of them along with local doctor Richard Johnson attempt to discover what is happening to the island's inhabitants who appear to be dying from a mysterious plague. Pretty soon, though, the dead begin returning to life and munching on the living in good ol' zombie style, leading our heroes to try and escape the island before they too become walking corpse food. I love this movie. It's a full-on gorefest with all kinds of bloody kills and offal eating. It also contains two of the most memorable zombie related sequences ever: a girl's eye vs. a broken piece of wood, and an underwater zombie vs. a real shark. Like City of the Living Dead, Flesh Eaters has a strange, dreamlike quality to it. It feels slightly surreal, disjointed. Strange camera angles and random editing is employed to enhance the feeling of unease. And it works. It is also very, very gory and has a wonderfully apocalyptic ending. One of my all time fave zombie films.



32. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (D. Tobe Hooper, 1974)
Tobe Hooper's black humoured tale of red neck cannibals vs. annoying kids is a great movie, if not the grisly terrorfest the myth leads us to believe it is. For a start, you don't actually see much of any graphic violence. Most of it is implied or happens just off screen. The horror comes from the idea and the situation and the grotesque family who ply their human slaughterhouse trade. The first time I ever saw this film was on a cinema re-release back in the 90's. And I was severely disappointed. I thought it was just very silly and not scary at all. But having watched it since... I've got the joke. It IS a black comedy, a satire on the state of Vietnam era America. Not that horrific then, but still a great movie.

31. Ginger Snaps (D. John Fawcett, 2001)
John Fawcett's brilliant werewolf film is a bloody and darkly humourous coming of age/entry in to womanhood parable for young girls. Moody, death obsessed teen sisters Brigitte and Ginger (Emily Perkins and Katherine Isabelle) live in a bleak and boring Canadian suburban housing estate menaced by a wild animal that's killing and eating the local pets. While out one night, the sisters are attacked by the very same animal. And Ginger is bitten before the animal goes and gets mashed on the road. It turns out the beast was a werewolf. And now Ginger is slowly turning in to a werewolf too, complete with growing tail, sharpening teeth, yellow eyes and a thirst for sex and blood. Can Brigitte find a way to save her sister before she goes full wolf? Karen Walton's script is keenly observed and full of sharp jabs at suburban family life as well as the horrors of growing up and 'maturing'. Ginger is horrified at the idea of her period and all that it means. To Ginger, becoming a werewolf is nowhere near as revolting as becoming a woman. Fawcett's direction is steady and assured with some decent frights and plenty of wry black humour, and the two lead performances of Perkins and Isabelle are pitch perfect. Teen angst body horror at its finest.



30 to 21 coming soon. MWAHAHAHAHA!

MY 50 FAVOURITE HORROR MOVIES: 50 TO 41

Greetings fellow horror hounds!

This year, to celebrate Halloween, I thought I’d do a countdown of my own personal favourite horror films of all time.

Now, I don’t claim these to be the ‘best’ horror films, just the ones I find I enjoy the most and can watch the most. In doing this I’ve tried where possible to steer clear of comedy/horror and to concentrate on pure horror, though there will be a few notable exceptions to that rule. I’ll aim to post my fave fifty in blocks of ten starting here with fifty to forty one, leading up to the final top ten being posted around Halloween itself.

This has been far from an easy task and almost certainly isn’t gonna be definitive as I’ll probably end up remembering titles after the fact that I should have included. But hey ho, it’s all just a bit of ghoulish seasonal fun.

Feel free to comment and slag off my choices and to suggest your own faves.

So, without further ado, here numbers fifty to forty one:


50. Ginger Snaps 2 (D. Brett Sullivan, 2003)
Brett Sullivan's sequel to John Fawcett's brilliant Ginger Snaps is a rare beast: a direct to dvd sequel that is not only a worthy follow up but a logical and smart continuation of the story begun in the first film. The excellent Emily Perkins returns as Brigitte, who after the death of werewolf sister Ginger in the original, is also now infected and is regularly injecting herself with wolfsbane to keep the curse at bay. This soon leads to a mix up with Brigitte being locked up in a drug rehab centre. Separated from her wolfsbane she must try to stop her change while also avoiding a new werewolf who is apparently tracking her down, looking for a mate. Smartly written, crisply directed and with two excellent performances from Perkins and Tatiana Maslany as a strange young girl called Ghost, GS2 is a sequel almost as good as the original.


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49. City of the Living Dead (D. Lucio Fulci, 1980)
The first of two films in this countdown from Italian horror legend Lucio Fulci, City is the first instalment of Fulci’s unofficial Gates of Hell trilogy, which also includes The Beyond and The House by the Cemetery. City is a weird surrealist mash-up of atmospheric Lovecraftian horror and Romero inspired zombie flesh munching. The story is something to do with the gates of hell about to be opened in the small US town of Dunwich, New England due to the suicide of a local priest. For some reason this suicide has gone and unleashed a horde of ghostly teleporting zombies to eat people up as well as various nasty curses which sees one young girl literally (and grossly) puke up her own guts. Like the best of Fulci, City doesn't make much sense but it is stylish, weirdly dreamlike, supremely atmospheric and utterly gross. Great demented fun.


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48. Rec. (D. Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza, 2007)
This Spanish found footage/mockumentary about a city building under quarantine after some kind of deadly outbreak is a swift, intense, super tense, super scary rollercoaster ride. Being shot almost in real time lends extra urgency and desperation to the whole affair with the dark hallways and rooms of the labyrinthine building being a non stop terror trap with hostile zombie types ready to leap out and attack at any second. The final ten minutes in the pitch-black attic is one of THE scariest sequences in horror history. The sequels are pretty damn good too.


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47. Trick r Treat (D. Mike Dougherty, 2007)
Mike Dougherty's gleefully nasty anthology celebrates Halloween with a slice of twisted small town Americana. It's as if Amblin had decided to make a proper horror film, if say, they'd pushed Gremlins that extra couple of notches to make it really gleefully nasty. The film's four separate tales intertwine cleverly, linked together by the presence of tricky little Halloween sprite Sam, before becoming one big and hugely satisfying whole at the end. Shot for only $12m and produced by Bryan Singer, the film looks gorgeous and is full of splendid actors including the fabulous Dylan Baker, Bryan Cox and Anna Paquin. No trick, this is a brilliant Halloween treat. Just don't be dissing the 31st October or little Sam will come get you.


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46. The Ring (D. Gore Verbinski, 2002)
Gore Verbinski's US remake of the Japanese original is to my mind the superior version of the story. Verbinski manages to capture the atmosphere of the original (something no other US remakes of J-horror have been able to do) while also building a deeper and more satisfying story around the cursed videotape and the dead girl who haunts it. Tense, chilling, and featuring a great central performance from Naomi Watts, The Ring will make sure you never watch TV the same way again. Seven days!


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45. The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue (D: Jorge Grau, 1974)
Spanish director Jorge Grau's zombie horror is a strange one. It's a Spanish/Italian co-production set in England featuring the Manchester Morgue in the title yet set somewhere up in the Lake District instead. An experimental sonic pesticide machine being tested on a farm has the bizarre side effect of raising the recently deceased as flesh hungry zombies who roam the countryside killing and eating locals. It's up to a local copper, a young female tourist and a biker dude to combat the undead menace. A weird film, TLDatMM succeeds for three key reasons. First, the English locations (mostly the Peak District) are beautiful and Grau films them with an artist’s eye for composition and capturing natural beauty. Second, there is a strong eco theme running throughout the film re. science messing with nature. And third, the zombies, though not that many of them, are fab and do some very gory kills. Thanks to Grau, a good director, the film has atmosphere and though overall it might not make a whole heap of sense, it does stay with you.


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44. Audition (D: Takashi Miike, 1999)
Acclaimed Japanese director Takashi Miike's deeply disturbing tale of obsessive love and pain is a hard watch, especially once things get really full on and the wire saw comes out. Middle aged widower Shigeharu is looking for a new wife and decides to accept his film producer friend’s offer to hold an open audition for his prospective new bride with Shigeharu soon becoming smitten by Asami, a seemingly sweet young ex-ballet dancer. But Asami hides an appalling secret. And what follows is an exploration of how the search for true love can go horribly, horribly wrong, shown to us as only Miike can. Ghastly but great.


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43. I Walked with a Zombie (D: Jacques Tourneur, 1943)
The first of two films in this countdown by French-American director Jacques Tourneur is a dark, dream-like tale of jealousy and betrayal set on an island in the West Indies where a young Canadian nurse relocates to look after the sick wife of a rich white land owner. The nurse is introduced to the landowner's dysfunctional family as well as to the local legends of voodoo, which may or may not have something to do with the zombie-like state the sick wife is now in. Tourneur, who previously made the seminal Cat People (a toss up for this spot), was a great director for creating mood and atmosphere and went on to become a major player in film noir. Here, a deep sense of creeping unease permeates every frame of film, which also includes sound effects of omnipresent distant drums and whispering grasses and rumbling storms. Tourneur was also one of the first directors to use and to master the jump scare, with this film having one great one. A correctly regarded classic of the period.


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42. Braindead aka Dead Alive (D: Peter Jackson, 1992)
Peter Jackson's crazy, OTT, blood and gore soaked period Kiwi horror nearly didn't make this list as it also falls in to the comedy genre. And I've tried with this countdown to focus more closely on pure horror (with a couple notable exceptions). But Braindead is such a riotous affair and is so, so gory and so much horrible fun that it simply can't be ignored. A rare Sumatran Rat-Monkey is captured and taken back to New Zealand where it bites the ghastly mother of hapless put upon Lionel, turning her and then others in to depraved, flesh hungry zombie mutants. What follows is a Grand Guignol of Sam Raimi inspired sick, gory lunacy. Fun with a capital F.


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41. Dracula: Prince of Darkness (D. Terence Fisher, 1966)
It took Christopher Lee eight full years to be convinced to reprise his most iconic role for a sequel to Hammer's huge 1958 hit The Horror of Dracula. And according to Lee he only did it under the proviso that all of his dialogue was thrown out and that he wouldn't say a single word on screen. A genius move as it turned out. DPoD is essentially Dracula as The Terminator – a single minded, utterly unstoppable killer focussed on tracking down and getting the one woman he wants. And nothing will get in his way. Lee is all red eyes and snarling fangs, charging around with a manic animalistic energy. In his way is the gruff gun toting friar Father Sandor played by the late great Andrew Keir who delivers a performance as charismatic and charming as Lee is intense and bestial. A simple, streamlined plot and stylish and energetic direction by Hammer legend Terrence Fisher together with Lee's intensity and Kier's gruff charisma makes DPoD the very best of the classic Hammer catalogue.


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40 to 31 coming soon. Stay tuned.

If this is the Afterlife then count me out

Resident Evil: Afterlife

I’m not a fan of this franchise. At all. I quite like the first Resident Evil movie if for no other reason than Milla was cute in it and that laser slicing and dicing scene was sweet. Apart from that it was not so much. The second one, Resident Evil: Apocalypse, was terrible on every front. The third, Resident Evil: Extinction, was not too bad but I can’t remember much about it…zombie crows maybe? And Ali Larter. Yum!

When film number four came out last month in the now obligatory 3D I really didn’t wanna pay good money to see it. I’d seen the trailers and thought it looked rubbish – highly derivative and ripping off The Matrix ten years too late. I had the strong feeling it would indeed be just as rubbish as it looked. But giving writer/director Paul W.S. Anderson (Event Horizon, Resident Evil, Alien vs. Predator, Death Race) the benefit of the doubt I sat down on Sunday and gave it a watch, hoping for the best (for free I hasten to add and not in 3D).

Guess what?

It was actually worse than I thought.

God I was bored.

Anderson has basically made a film with no story. And no characters. And no excitement. And no tension. And despite some nice photography, no style at all. Anderson thinks that style means aping The Matrix whenever he can. But in his mind that just means the endless use of slomo for jumping, shooting, dodging, hitting, rather than creating and filming skilfully crafted action sequences with real visual impact and coherent structure. But then coherent structure is almost entirely missing from this film, the bulk of which takes place in a grimy abandoned prison where Milla arrives and must help the stranded people inside escape and get to a ship in the harbour. And that's pretty much it. And when they do eventually get to said ship, Milla finds this bad guy from the movie's beginning (who she thought was toast) waiting to trap her. Now, I had no idea who this bloke was when I saw him at the start…only that he was doing the worst Agent Smith impression ever. Utterly cringeworthy. So when he comes back at the end I'm still baffled. However by then I'd long since given up caring about any of it and was reading a magazine. Out of the corner of my eye I saw shitty Smith dude and Milla have an equally shitty matrixesque fight while some other stuff happened to the lunk from Prison Break and cute Ali Larter. And then (thankfully) it ends...BUT with an obvious set-up for yet another RE film. Please God make them stop!

There is no story here folks, nothing. Land a plane in a prison, meet some very dull, one dimensional characters, get on a ship, have a fight, The End. None of the monsters are remotely interesting - except the big bloke in the shower with the axe, and that was ripped off from the vastly superior Silent Hill movie.

Now look, I don’t mind formula schlock.

Hell, I love me some quality formula schlock.

But this ain’t quality.

The script is basic back of a postage stamp stuff with no thought to originality, character or dramatic tension. Stuff just happens. For example the whole subplot about Wentworth Miller stuck in the Hannibal Lecter cell is not developed and goes nowhere. I thought they might pull a twist on us and try to introduce a cool badass anti-hero character such as Carpenter would do. But, no, he is exactly who he says he is - a charmless lunk. Milla, bless her, not the best of actresses, still looks the part, though age is slowly creeping up on her as it is to us all. Still, she can still kick ass and fire guns pretty good. Ali Larter is okay, reprising her role from the last RE, but everyone else is either awful or makes no impact at all.

I can’t stress how much I hated this. I was sooo bored by it. Unforgivable for any film. I couldn’t care less what happened to any of the so-called characters and I just wanted it all to end so I could watch something else instead, something remotely interesting. Paint drying for instance. Maybe I'm being unfair. Maybe it would have come across better in 3D at the cinema. I dunno, but I doubt it. A turd in 3D is still a turd...only closer to your face.

In the past I’ve been an apologist for the much hated (in geek circles) Paul W.S. Anderson. I like the first AVP movie. I love Event Horizon. But what with the rubbish Death Race and now this...Yikes! (0/5)

Swedish Zombies Go For The Heart

I recently finished Handling the Undead, Swedish author John Ajvide Lindqvist’s acclaimed follow up to Let The Right One In. Handling the Undead is actually several years old now and has only recently been published in the UK (on the back of the LTROI movie success.) It first saw light in Sweden back in 2005 but it took four years for the English translation to appear. Never mind. Better late than never I guess.

The story goes something like this:

For some inexplicable reason the recently deceased of Stockholm (those dead for up to six months) have come back to life. This includes all those who have been buried as well as those previously undiscovered bodies including, in one memorable incident, a man who had drowned in a lake and whose body had been hidden beneath the water for weeks. Needless to say he is not in a good state when he wakes up. But these ‘reliving’ are not quite the people they once were. There are aspects that are familiar but they seem to be more robotic and instinctual. And they also appear to have a strange psychic effect on regular living people whenever they come together in any number. The book focuses equally on several main characters and how they each deal with the reappearance of their recently departed. There is David, a stand up comic, whose wife was killed in a car crash the same night as the mass resurrection and who has been left to care for his young son. Meanwhile, teenage metaller, Flora, and her Catholic grandmother, Elvy, are horrified when the reanimated corpse of Flora’s granddad, Elvy’s husband, arrives at their front door. And then there’s middle-aged journalist Mahler who, upon discovering what has happened, goes to the local cemetery and digs up the reliving body of his young grandson Elias who recently died in a tragic accident.

Now, a lot of this is pretty grim stuff, especially everything to do with little Elias. The little boy is a dried up corpse, yet he is also reliving. Mahler and his grief-struck daughter’s continual and rather hopeless attempts to help Elias appear and to act more human by bathing him, moistening his desiccated skin with lotion and training him to react to simple things, is difficult stuff to read. Lindqvist’s prose is simple but very descriptive and highly emotional. He doesn’t shy away from intense imagery that will make you feel rather queasy. But even so, Handling the Undead is not really a horror story. Rather it is a grim, sad fable about life and the meaning of death. It is about how people deal with death, how they rationalise it, live with it, make it in to something else through the use of religion or even make it in to entertainment using more modern cultural outlets like movies and video games. The novel’s reliving are quite similar to the classic Romero zombie in that they shuffle around and many are in a very bad way, but they don’t eat people as their Hollywood cousins do. Lindqvist uses zombie films and video games such as Resident Evil (which shows up a lot in the story) as the touchstone for how people, mostly younger people, relate to the reliving, how they dehumanise them even though there is still a spark of their humanity remaining. The book follows several groups of characters and the emotional, psychological and actual physical journeys they go on in dealing with the return of their loved ones and of the wider event. This is not a story about plot twists and turns. It is a story about people, their emotions and how they deal. Or don’t deal. It is a journey of grief, faith and eventual acceptance. There is no big climax, no big revelations. The ending is like the rest of the book: quiet, sad and emotional.

There is no doubt that Handling the Undead is a good book. It is well written, atmospheric and quite disturbing in places. However, as with Lindqvist’s Let The Right One In, I found that the story, though compelling, meandered a little too much for my taste. There are many scenes where nothing much really happens, scenes that seem to just go off to places I wasn't really that interested in them going, wishing Lindqvist would just cut back to the central idea and perhaps focus more on some fewer characters. The wonderful thing about the film of Let The Right One In is how Lindqvist (who also wrote its screenplay) pared down his book to the core story and theme. He jettisoned the subplots and the excess fat from the book with the result being that the film was a superior telling of the story than the book it was based on. Don’t get me wrong, Handling the Undead is certainly a good book with an interesting and thought provoking approach to the zombie genre. I did like it. But if only it had been rather more focussed then it could have been a classic.

[Rec.] 2 - Zombie Buggaboo

Three years ago the Spanish gave us a brilliant little horror mockumentary about a TV crew who are making a documentary about fire fighters on the night shift but who end up documenting something all together more terrifying than the usual emergency call outs. No cat stuck up a tree or house fire this. No, this was a viral outbreak in a city apartment block, which rendered its infected victims as homicidal red eyed loons. Very 28 Days Later ala Blair Witch for the Big Brother /reality TV generation. It was in the films closing minutes that the real source of the outbreak was hinted at in a night-vision shot scene as tense and scary as anything ever could be.

[Rec.] 2 picks up directly after the first film ends. We follow a SWAT team, each with their own helmet-mounted cameras, as they enter the quarantined building along with a mysterious new boss on a secret mission to document what happened and find the one remaining blood sample from the original infected person – a young child locked away in darkness. What follows is a claustrophobic, chaotic, intense and bloody flight around the wonderfully dark and labyrinthine corridors, rooms and staircases of the apartment block. Needless to say the ordered plan of the team soon falls apart leading to a desperate fight to survive and to find an answer to the infection before either the building is destroyed or it spreads outside.

[Rec.] 2 is awesome! I loved it just as much as the first one…maybe even more.

It is short, scary and violent and built around one central and brilliant concept, which I won’t reveal here. Just to say it is an original take on several separate horror genres blended together. The film’s main set up is basically the same as Aliens. But then it takes a cool narrative leap halfway through by switching pov to a second group of people who have stumbled in to this apartment block from hell. We first see this second group (kind of) from the pov of the SWAT team earlier, but then the movie switches on us and replays some of the action from the second groups pov before then joining up in to one combined narrative to get to the end.

This film is rushed and panicky and grim and nasty. Which is all to its credit. The pacing is at high speed from the off. Characterisation and thematic depth is non-existent. This is a film about the situation and the concept and scaring you pee-less. Nothing more. It’s a rollercoaster and you ride it through the dark with hissing, screaming monsters clawing at your flesh from all sides. There is some great camera work and direction here. It is all shot from either soldier’s helmet-cams or hand held video cameras or from a TV camera with night-vision. But cameras are dropped or damaged or muted or accidentally switch focus etc. which lends to some wonderfully creative moments and some nightmarish images. We even get a spot of video game first person shooter action, which looks like we’ve entered a Resident Evil game, and it blows the shit out of that awful Doom movie that did the same thing a few years back. Then there is the films location, the apartment block. I just love it. It’s simply one of the scariest places in modern horror cinema. I don’t know if it is real or a set (probably a set) but it is fabulous. The high central staircase is a great feature (great for bodies plummeting down) as are all the many rooms and narrow corridors that seem to lead people in circles. And then there is the penthouse, the centre of hell itself. A dark and filthy place with hidden rooms and ceiling crawlspaces and narrow shafts, which can only be crawled down on your belly. Finally there is the films ending. It’s not as pant wettingly scary as the original but is still a creepy and grim ending in the best traditions of John Carpenter and George A. Romero. It leaves us ready (hopefully) for a third journey in to Spanish hell.

The US remake of [Rec.] called Quarantine was actually pretty good and mostly identical to its original except for a few things – one of which being the key that leads to this wicked sequel. If Hollywood does do Quarantine 2 then it will be interesting to see if they follow this films path or if they do something different. Personally I don’t really care. I just want [Rec.] 3…like now!

Mintage.