Genre: Horror

Coming with a boatload of deserved hype, ‘Godzilla Minus One’ really does live up to the love that has been showered upon it.

I walked into it expecting ‘Godzilla’ given a British spin on a Dr Who episode budget, instead it is a great, colourful thriller of a bygone age.

There is some pontificating about evil and society and love but ‘Grotesque’ is essentially one long torture set piece.

The somewhat sluggish pace, the constant need to flashback to an incident from Li’s past, and a surfeit of cardboard characters rob the flick of any adventure fun.

Strange, gross, manic and bonkers are all good terms to help describe ‘GYO’ but the film is also curiously gripping.

Whilst not without some near-peripheral flourishes of merit, To’s film is perhaps no more (or less) notable than many other similar productions of the era.

‘Heaven and Hell’ is actually a whole lot more interesting, and engaging, than one would outwardly expect from its (largely) negative reputation.

You are either into these kinds of flicks or not but with an infectious energy, a musical score that propels all the lunacy and a complete commitment to going insane, ‘Helldriver’ is, well, as mad as a bag of smashed frogs!

A pretty cool concept for this Taiwanese horror is all but wasted under a slew of clichés, incredibly muddled plotting, and not enough decent scares.

‘House of the Damned’ is just another of the numerous B-grade horror entries that emerged from the late-nineties, albeit sexed up with lashings of gratuitous nudity and as loud, crude and unruly as any of its peers.

Not even the odd moment of black humour and Kim Jee-Woon’s knack for crafting exhilarating sequences of action and tension can elevate his film beyond pure nihilism.

A palpable sense of all-consuming dread is maintained throughout the runtime and the makers never resort to jump scares just for the sake of them.