Written and directed by Duncan Birmingham
Adam and Margo’s housewarming party is a success. One couple linger after the other guests, revealing themselves to be wealthy neighbours. As one night cap leads to another, Adam and Margo suspect their new friends are duplicitous strangers
Read the full review at Ginger Nuts of Horror HERE
written and Directed by Hannah Barlow and Kane Senes
Teen best friends Cecilia and Emma, after a decade run into each other. Cecilia is invited on Emma’s bachelorette weekend where she gets stuck in a remote cabin with her high school bully with a taste for revenge.
Read the full review at Ginger Nuts of Horror HERE
By A. M. Shine
This forest isn’t charted on any map. Every car breaks down at its treeline. Mina’s is no different. Left stranded, she is forced into the dark woodland only to find a woman shouting, urging Mina to run to a concrete bunker. As the door slams behind her, the building is besieged by screams.
Mina finds herself in a room with a wall of glass, and an electric light that activates at nightfall, when the Watchers come above ground. These creatures emerge to observe their captive humans and terrible things happen to anyone who doesn’t reach the bunker in time.
Afraid and trapped among strangers, Mina is desperate for answers. Who are the Watchers and why are these creatures keeping them imprisoned, keen to watch their every move?
Shine’s debut novel, The Watchers throws a disparate group of unfortunates together in a mysterious woodland prison where they are watched at night by the mysterious, and clearly very dangerous, creatures that live in the tunnels beneath them. Hiding away during the day, the creatures leave the group in peace to complete their daily chores, collecting water and scavenging for food to keep themselves alive long enough to live in fear the next night.
Written by James Mark & Matthew Nayman
Directed by James Mark
Get ready for a mind-bending sci-fi thriller. With a fragmented memory and no clear way out, Eileen (Sara Mitich, Star Trek: Discovery) is forced to complete tasks by an unseen entity whilst trapped in a mysterious room, or else her daughter will be killed. Her only clue is Roger (George Tchortov, Kick-Ass), the man imprisoned alongside her, claiming to be her husband – thrust into a reluctant partnership, the two must work together to save Eileen’s daughter. However, nothing is truly as it seems, and very quickly, a much greater plot is unveiled – with Eileen at the centre.
Overall, I enjoyed my time with CONTROL and, if the synopsis interests you, then I think you will too. It’s always a personal thing, but the lack of detail around Eileen’s incarceration may annoy some, but it is not a deal breaker on what is, otherwise, a decent low-budget thriller.
Control comes to UK streaming platforms on 26th September 2022.
See the full review at Ginger Nuts HERE.
Written by Conor Boru and Ed Hartland
Directed by Conor Boru
When Norman Graysmith is invited into the home of an aspiring serial killer, Aidan Mendle, he believes he has the subject for the documentary that will make his career.
If you like daft films with silly humour, but with a human touch underneath the jokes, then When the Screaming Starts will definitely keep you amused.
See the full review at Ginger Nuts of Horror HERE
The Invitation (2022)
Written by Blair Butler
Directed by Jessica M. Thompson
Review by: Mark Walker
A young woman is courted and swept off her feet, only to realize a gothic conspiracy is afoot (IMDB)
There are likely some spoilers in this review but nothing that I don’t think has already been shown in the trailers.
Nathalie Emmanuel plays Evie, a struggling artist, working as a waitress for a crap boss and mourning the recent loss of her sick mother. With her father having died when she was 14, she is all alone apart from her close friend, Grace (Courtney Taylor). After sending off her DNA using a kit from a goody bag she and Grace nick from an event they are waitressing at, Evie discovers that she has distant family in England and agrees to meet up with her newfound cousin Oliver who is in New York on a business trip.
After getting to know each other over lunch, Oliver tells Evie about another relation marrying into a wealthy family and invites Evie to join him.
Defying all common sense, Evie agrees to go, despite the protestations of Grace, the sensible, sassy best friend. So far, so GET OUT; the lone black woman in a sea of white faces, far from home and out of her comfort zone. While the set-up is familiar, The Invitation takes a vastly different turn from GET OUT and doesn’t quite work as well.
Written by Kevin Lucia
Two Kevin Ellison Stories in One!
Mystery Road
Choices are like roads, taking us to destinations both planned and unexpected, but lofty thoughts like that are of no concern to young Kevin Ellison, who only cares about his dreams of basketball glory.
One day, however, while riding his bicycle to shoot baskets with his best friend, he comes across a side-road he doesn’t recognize, curving away into the woods. Intrigued, he rides down this unmarked road and encounters something both wonderful and quietly terrible, something that forever changes his understanding of the world…
A Night at Old Webb
Old Webb, an abandoned grammar school just outside Clifton Heights, is the place to be late summer nights in Webb County. A gathering place for friends to be themselves, away from grownups who have forgotten what it means to be young and free.
The summer of 1992, Kevin Ellison spent his Saturday nights there like everyone else. Everything was running according to plan: a college basketball scholarship, school, all the things everyone expected of him.
Then he met a girl named Michelle Titchner, and everything changed…
There is raw emotion at work here and both stories, despite their brevity, encompass feelings of wonder, confusion, love, and sadness all beautifully portrayed on the page. I can’t help but feel that Kevin Lucia has drawn heavily from his own past, and that lends credence and heft to the impact of these tales.
Read the full review at Ginger Nuts of Horror HERE
Written by Scott Mann and Jonathan Frank
Direct by Scott Mann
Best friends Becky and Hunter find themselves at the top of a 2,000-foot radio tower. (IMDB)
See the full review on Ginger Nuts of Horror HERE
By Tim Lebbon
Available at AMAZON
With global warming out of control, large swathes of North America have been struck by famine and drought and are now known as the Desert. A young woman sets out across this dry, hostile landscape, gradually building an arcane apparatus she believes will bring rain to the parched earth.
Jesse lives alone, far from civilization. Once, he too made rain, but he stopped when his abilities caused fatalities, bringing down not just rain but scorpions, strange snakes and spiders. When his daughter Ash inherited this tainted gift, Jesse did his best to stop her. His attempt went tragically wrong, and he believes himself responsible for her death.
But now his estranged wife Karina brings news that Ash is still alive. And she’s rainmaking again. Terrified of what she might bring down upon the desperate communities of the Desert, they set out to find her. But Jesse and Karina are not the only ones looking for Ash. As the storms she conjures become more violent and deadly, some follow her seeking hope. And one is hungry for revenge.
Tim Lebbon brings us another, fantastic story that takes the usual dystopian future and turns it into something tangible and not a million miles away from where we are heading. Drought and famine are common place across North America and people are fighting to simply survive in the tough new landscape. Hope comes in the form of the mythical rainmakers, potential life-savers, who haven’t been seen for years. When one reappears and brings rain, it could be the answer to everyone’s prayers, or nightmares, as it isn’t just water that comes through.
Directed by Nico van den Brink
Written by Daan Bakker and Nico van den Brink
Betriek lives at the edge of a peat bog in the North of the Netherlands. When she and her family are attacked by a random stranger one night, Betriek sets out to find an explanation. The more she digs, the more she becomes convinced that she is being hunted by something ancient. (IMDB)
Moloch opens on what appears to be the home invasion and murder of Betriek’s (Sallie Harmsen) grandmother when Betriek was a young girl. We then fast forward 30 years and Betriek still lives at the family home with her mother and father (who appear to be separated) and her young daughter, Hanna (Noor can der Velden).
As Betriek, a school teacher, helps prepare the kids for the annual festival to celebrate Feike, the focus of a local folk story, a team of archaeologists unearth a number of bodies, all women, who have had their throats cut vertically before being dumped in the peat bog. The bodies come from many different eras but all appear to have died in the same way.
Dark Mark Writing 