There’s a morsel of a good film – or, at least, a modestly entertaining one – twitching inside director Alister Grierson’s Bloody Hell. An oddball and often ill-advised mashup of genres, tones, and plot elements, the film hinges on leading man Ben O’Toole, whose performance as luckless hothead Rex is not so much “good” as a kitschy highlight that gradually grows on you. Through a convoluted series of events not worth recounting, Rex travels to Finland, where he falls into the clutches of a clan of murderous cannibals. O’Toole also portrays the mental projection of Rex’s abrasive, alpha-male id, a somewhat superfluous embellishment in a film that cribs haphazardly from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Humongous, Hostel, and other, better horror flicks. Still, the dual role and accompanying devil-on-his-shoulder conceit are the least-bad things about Bloody Hell, which is drowning in grating, post-Tarantino stylistic flourishes. Between the dismal edgelord humor, never-ending flashbacks, and overcranked sound design, the film is doing far too much with far too little restraint.

Rating: C-

Now available to rent from major online platforms.

A survival thriller with unsubtle fairy-tale overtones, Hunted aims to transform a standard woman-vs.-maniac scenario into the stuff of Jungian nightmare. It doesn’t really succeed on this score, in part because writer-director Vincent Paronnaud can’t decide whether to focus on protagonist Ève (Lucie Debay) or the nameless serial killer (Arieh Worthalter) who abducts her. (Unless one is going postmodern, it’s usually best to center the story on the Hero rather than the Dragon.) Ève eventually gives this predator and his timid accomplice (Ciaran O'Brien) the slip, setting up a harrowing, days-long cat-and-mouse game in the misty, trackless forest. Storybook motifs abound – prowling wolves, dress-up deceptions, Ève’s crimson coat – but Hunted truthfully works best when it leans away from pretensions of mythic resonance and embraces nuts-and-bolts thriller fundamentals. Although it requires some daft plot points and Mel Brooks levels of feverishly absurd escalation, Debay’s transformation from terrified prey into an unhinged, shrieking avatar of vengeance is one of the film’s highlights.

Rating: C+

Now available to stream from Shudder.

In an era when nostalgia has been thoroughly commodified, Psycho Goreman – a winking retro schlockfest from The Void director Steven Kostanski – almost feels charmingly naïve. Sure, this sci-fi horror fable is ridiculous, juvenile, and indulgently gross, but it also has the low-budget, psychotronic eccentricity of a feature made for an audience of one. As much a practical-effects sizzle reel as it is a comprehensible story, PG looks on in amusement as the titular immortal galactic warlord – entombed on Earth eons ago for Reasons – accidentally falls under the control of precocious, self-centered tween Mimi (Nita-Josee Hanna). When Kostanski’s feature isn’t piling up daft alien creatures, over-the-top carnage, or knowingly crude animation effects, it’s often tossing off unfunny gags that feel like they were workshopped in a junior-high creative-writing class. Meanwhile, Hanna’s hyperactive performance as Mimi is both numbingly overwritten and the best thing about Psycho Goreman, as her constant, cynical yammering is frequently the source of the film’s more indelible weirdness.

Rating: C

Now available to rent from major online platforms.

There are plenty of strange choices in writer-director Aaron Fjellman’s psychological horror-thriller Caged, even if none of them are quite so head-turning as casting Melora Hardin in the role of a sadistic prison guard (complete with villainous facial scar). At some point, Fjellman seems to have envisioned his feature as a pointedly political work, a fictional case study in the human-rights horrors of solitary confinement. Shortly after he is convicted of murdering his wife, psychiatrist Dr. Harlow Reid (Edi Gathegi) is shunted into “the hole,” where he is terrorized for months by the racist guards, severe isolation, and his own disintegrating mind. What might have been a claustrophobic character study is dragged down by Fjellman’s preference for chintzy, aimless nightmare theatrics, all with the questionable aim of injecting a Jacob’s Ladder-esque mystery into a grave social-issues drama. Gathegi gives it his all in a conventional yet committed performance, but the film that surrounds him is regrettably uninterested in offering either narrative novelty or thematic clarity.

Rating: C-

Now available to rent from major online platforms.

Scripted by folk-horror auteur Joko Anwar, The Queen of Black Magic borrows its title but little else from an obscure 1981 Indonesian feature. Like many of Anwar’s own films, TQOBM adheres to the familiar rhythms and formal attributes of 21st-century American and Japanese horror, while adding its own distinct Javanese spin to such formulae. Arior Bayu (Headshot, Gundala) is the name star in this ensemble-driven ghost story, in which three adult friends bring their families to pay their respects to the dying orphanage headmaster who once raised them. Not all is as it seems, however, and as the layers are peeled back, the film piles on the hallucinations, witchcraft, and stomach-churning gore. Granted, the backstory is unnecessarily convoluted, and the plot leans too heavily on keeping the characters separated for long stretches. However, director Kimo Stamboel – himself a rising international action and horror filmmaker – is clearly most invested at the set-piece level, where he serves up a giddy mixture of raw fear and extravagant bloodletting.

Rating: B-

Now available to stream from Shudder.

In the wee hours of the morning, married couple Babak (Shahab Hosseini) and Neda (Niousha Noor) stumble into the lobby of Los Angeles’ boutique Hotel Normandie – playing itself – with their 1-year-old daughter. Buzzed on booze and weed and confounded by a malfunctioning GPS, Babak concedes to Neda’s request that they rent a room rather than risk the long drive home. What soon unfolds for the couple is akin to a harrowing rite of atonement, as the hotel mutates into a surreal nightmare realm that traps them like flypaper. Director Kourosh Ahari uses the Normandie’s deserted Renaissance Revival interiors to brilliant, Lynchian effect, playing with the way that liminal spaces create a stage for potentially traumatic transformation. The film occasionally tips over from cryptic menace into pointless repetition – it’s easily 15 minutes too long – and it concludes on a note of frustrating vagueness, but overall, The Night is a chilling showcase for the kind of Twilight Zone uncanniness that worms is way into the viewer’s mind.

Rating: B-

Now available to rent from major online platforms.