Dark House(2014) *

A bafflingly stupid, fright-free horror movie from the makers of Jeepers Creepers.

The preposterous Dark House centres on Nick Di Santo,(Luke Kleintank) a young man who has the uncanny ability to see -through premonition- how someone will die just by touching them. Early on, Di Santo goes to a bar were he finds that his dark ability to ‘see’ death, however disturbing, is a total turn-on for Alex McKenna’s character, Eve, who finds his shrieking and convulsing on a barroom table just totally irresistible. Less interestingly, we learn that Di Santo’s mother is a complete basket case who has been locked away in an asylum for most of her son’s life. As the narrative leaps forward many years, Nick discovers that a house he has been drawing since he was a child is in fact real and may turn out to be the key to unlocking his mysterious past - all the while - a strange fraternity of weirdos communicate through air vents and seek to hinder our protagonist from learning about his deranged antecedence.

Whereas Jeepers Creepers had a certain likable goofiness, nothing in Dark House makes any sense. To say that it is a shambling mess of incoherent horror ideas is to misrepresent just how insipidly boring and befuddling this dreary crockpot of drivel really is. The idea of a character ‘seeing death’ is ripped from the Final Destination franchise and subsequently fudged here – Salva’s movie is at once utterly stupid and aware of its own stupidity, which would mitigate its terribleness if any of the film was in any way scary, funny or indeed entertaining. The real low moments are when a jaded looking Tobin Bell turns up to do a bedraggled Jigsaw pastiche, Kleintank touches a tree and sees dead people and a synchronised troupe of axe-wielding mutants tear through a wooded area - which is meant to be scary – but they just look like the most appalling dance crew dropouts in an undead version of Britain’s Got Talent. Total rubbish.

Wolf Creek 2 *** McLean strives for a more mainstream audience with this horror sequel - but it is superficially enjoyable.

Greg McLean’s original Wolf Creek was a consummately brutal horror film that used the wide panoramic Australian landscape and transformed it into something profoundly empty and bleak. From within this chasmal backdrop came Mick Taylor(John Jarrett), a serial killer that was a dark, satirical pastiche of the Crocodile Dundee – indeed, Jarrett described Taylor as an “anti-Dundee” character when promoting the first film. Much of what was compelling about the original was the sense of realism and tension that was constructed through the scratchy documentary camerawork and the directors strong focus on character development, so when it came to the splatter, you really felt the pain and the whole experience was a lot tougher because so much time had been invested in the onscreen victims.

Wolf Creek 2 begins in a manner that suggests a significant tonal shift has been made between the sequel and its predecessor. Instead of prolonging and sustaining a void-like tension, McLean slices away any character development and pushes his antagonist, Mick Taylor, to the forefront of the drama. The camerawork is slicker and flashier, the gore is nastier and from the film’s opening splattery setpiece, the wheels are set in motion for a blood-soaked thrill ride.

However, it is a much shallower film than its predecessor and it is difficult to ignore the fact that it has lost most of its distinctive qualities in favour of cranked-up, cheap mainstream thrills. Though it is superficially entertaining – John Jarett’s portrayal of Mick Taylor has lapsed into self-parody somewhat and the final act is nonsensical in its weirdness – but it is an efficiently machine-tooled horror sequel.