Behind the Couch

Maya and her boyfriend Ryan are driving across the country so she can attend a job interview. When they stop off in a small town, their car breaks down and they’re forced to stay the night at an Air B&B in the surrounding woods. After dark they are menaced and brutalised by three masked strangers.  A reboot in the form of a prequel that could also be a remake, The Strangers: Chapter 1 is the first in a new trilogy of films set to follow the exploits of the three titular antagonists. Taking its lead from Leigh Janiak’s Fear Street Trilogy , the films have been shot back to back and are set for release in fairly quick succession. As the first instalment, Chapter 1 sets the scene and unfolds in an enjoyable if perfunctory way (it's very much a re-tread of the original 2008 film). The main issue is, it sticks too closely to the blueprint of the first film (hence it feeling like a remake), and when a number of moments from the original are replicated, they just don't muster t...

Akin to titles such as Cujo (1983), Crawl (2019) and Bait (2012), Burning Bright is a high-concept horror about a young woman and her autistic brother who are trapped in a house with a ravenous tiger during a hurricane. After a brief set up, which establishes the fraught family dynamics (mother recently died, stepfather is struggling financially, daughter Kelly desperately wants respite from her responsibilities so she can attend college) director Carlos Brooks cuts straight to the chase. From the moment Kelly (Briana Evigan) realises there is a wild animal in the house and finds herself in a situation that threatens to eat her alive, the tension never abates. Using low-level camera work to suggest the POV of the stalking predator, Brooks exploits the limited space of the family home to crank up the claustrophobic suspense and offer some incredibly striking imagery. Kelly not only needs to evade the tiger herself, but also keep safe her younger brother who can’t fully comprehend th...

A group of carnival sideshow workers are abducted and forced to fight for their lives against a gang of killer clowns as mysterious, bewigged oligarchs in aristocratic period garb wager bets on who will survive. 31 is a film about violence as entertainment and death as spectacle. It’s a film about the depths of human depravity. It’s also about survival and the things rational, sane and civilised people will do when they are backed into a corner and forced to fight for their lives. While it riffs on the likes of similarly themed films such as The Most Dangerous Game (1932), The Running Man (1987) and Death Race (1975), it is all, obviously, presented in Rob Zombie’s inimitable and furiously violent style. Like so much of Zombie’s film work, 31 has strong echoes of Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), though more so of its sequel (1986), both stylistically and in its fiendishly warped sense of humour. Film scholar Robin Wood once said The Texas Chain Saw Massa...

2013 Dir. Bobcat Goldthwait When young city couple Jim and Kelly venture into the wilds of Bluff Creek, California, in search of the legendary Sasquatch, they find much more than they bargained for in this lean, mean tale of man vs. nature. While ‘found-footage’ horror has been much maligned of late, a few titles have proven the effectiveness of the formula — most notably The Blair Witch Project; [REC]; Lake Mungo; The Last Exorcism ; and more recently Trollhunter and The Borderlands . Willow Creek also demonstrates that the format, when utilised effectively, can still offer a downright chilling viewing experience. Even though writer/director Bobcat Goldthwait never strays far from a well-trodden path, his subdued approach and subtle direction result in some rather nerve-shredding moments of tension. Much like The Blair Witch Project , the tension and dread here is established largely through a reliance on sound, shadows and suggestion, and after the initial slow-burn approac...

2010 Dir. Franck Richard For several years now, some of the most extreme, controversial, sadistic contributions to horror cinema have been coming out of France. Kick started by the likes of Alex Aja’s influential Switchblade Romance/Haute Tension , other titles in this ‘new wave’ of French horror, or ‘New French Extremity’, have included the likes of Inside/À l'intérieur, Sheitan, Ils, Martyrs , Frontier(s) , the Belgian film Calvaire and the work of Gaspar Noé. The latest horror offering from France, the folk-horror tinged  The Pack,  offers twists, turns, grotesquely violent imagery and a socio-political subtext about the plight of rural farming communities left in the wake of industrialisation.  Beginning as a tautly wound riff on the likes of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Wrong Turn and The Hills Have Eyes , an impetuous young woman, Charlotte (Émilie Dequenne), is driving through deepest, darkest rustic France when she picks up a hitchhiker. Stopping at a r...

2010 Dir. Roel Reiné AKA The Lost Tribe The Forgotten Ones After Dusk They Come When a group of friends onboard a yacht rescue a delirious man from the sea, they find more than they bargained for when he shipwrecks them on an uncharted island during the night. Exploring the jungle the next day, the group discovers a deserted military camp and an abandoned archaeological dig site. But no people. Hearing strange noises and movements in the trees, they soon realize that the island is actually inhabited by a tribe of primitive humanoid creatures, and that they have now become the prey... Given its highly troubled production history, it is a wonder that Primevil has made it to DVD at all. When it was shot, it was originally titled The Tribe , and featured a plot revolving around a group of teens that are shipwrecked on an uncharted island and come face to face with a tribe of humanoid creatures who pick them off, one by one. Due to some major problems during post-production, th...

2010 Dan Garcia When bickering couple Don and Nancy’s car is forced off the road when they pass through a small, rural Louisiana town, they are taken to stay at a nearby motel by the somewhat inhospitable sheriff. They soon discover that the motel is used by a gang of twisted individuals to produce snuff movies. And Don and Nancy are to be the unwitting stars of their latest film... Beginning suspensefully with a menacing scene in which a young woman is stopped by a surly sheriff in the middle of nowhere, hauled out of her car, has her keys confiscated and told she must either spend the night in a jail cell or a nearby hotel because she’s in ‘no fit state to drive’, Terror Trap sadly goes down hill from here on in. The taut uneasiness created in this scene, depicting a helpless individual powerless to do anything when a corrupt authority figure abuses his power, could have lent the film real suspense had writer/director Garcia incorporated more instances like it throughout. Wh...

2006 Dir. Michael Bassett After the suicide of one of their dorm-mates, a group of young offenders are sent to a remote island off the coast of Scotland for some character/team-building exercises. Once there, the wardens are viciously slaughtered by a mysterious assailant commanding a pack of fierce hunting dogs. The group must work together to stay alive and find a way off the island before they too fall prey to the stealthy stalker. A grim prologue unspools in the young offenders’ centre where we are introduced to the eclectic group. The use of young offenders as main characters adds an interesting element to the mix and the prologue expertly introduces us to the volatile young men. Once the story moves to the island location, it navigates into very familiar slasher movie territory, and utilises an abundance of that genre’s conventions - right down to the use of a killer extracting revenge for a past misdeed, picking his victims off one by bloody one. The most interesting eleme...

A group of tourists are forcefully nuzzled down the food chain when they encounter a giant crocodile whilst exploring the lush and eerily beautiful backwaters of Australia’s outback. Director Greg Mclean is well known to horror audiences for his grim and ultra-sadistic feature debut Wolf Creek . With Rogue , a tense and nasty giant crocodile Creature Feature, the director has turned from the horror of man to that of nature – and proves it is every bit as harrowing. With a cast of likeable characters (including Radha Mitchell, Michael Vartan and Sam Worthington), a sturdy script, seductively lush cinematography, a haunting and evocative score and a very realistic monster, Mclean has deftly side-stepped the quagmire of horrendously bad giant croc films such as Primeval and Crocodile to deliver a genuinely pulse-pounding and effective chiller that begins as an ominous ripple and ends with an almighty, blood-soaked tidal splash. Intrigued? Head over to Eye for Film to check out my f...

2008 Dir. Fabrice Du Welz The lives of Jeanne and Paul Bellmer (Emmanuelle Béart and Rufus Sewell) are thrown into chaos when they think they see their son, thought drowned in the Southeast Asia tsunami in 2004, in a film they watch about orphans living in the jungles of Burma. They set off into an impenetrable heart of darkness in search of an elusive and perhaps unattainable truth, aided only by human traffickers who are intent on exploiting their heartache. Stranded in the middle of a strange and hostile country, the couple are besieged by a band of feral children and begin to lose sight of the hope they once so desperately clung to. ‘When someone dies a horrible death, their spirit becomes confused and angry. It becomes…Vinyan.’ Vinyan unfolds as a strange reflection of Don’t Look Now in its exploration of a couple’s grief, denial, hope and obsession as they try to come to terms with the death of their child. The story tracks Jeanne and Paul’s personal descent into the ma...

1981 Dir. Andrew Davis AKA Campsite Massacre Bump in the Night Carnivore The Creeper The Forest Primeval A group of forest rangers and their girlfriends head up into the wild woods for a few days hiking. Unbeknownst to them they are being stalked by a vicious and deranged killer who begins to pick them off one by one… Trespassers will be prosecuted, indeed. This probably sounds familiar by now, right? A group of people in the middle of nowhere, being murdered one by one by a largely unseen, unhinged lunatic. The early Eighties were saturated with slasher movies set in the backwoods of rustic Americana, where partying young people from the city were hacked and slashed without mercy by inbred rural cannibals when investigating strange noises in dark forests. Friday the 13th (1980), Just Before Dawn (1981), Madman (1982), The Burning (1981), The Prey (1984), sorry, getting a bit carried away, I’m sure you get the drift. ‘Killer in the woods’ films were popular in the ea...