elaine-105

I'll be the first to admit that I know very little about football. No matter how many times I get the off-side rule explained to me via the medium of table condiments, I still don't understand it – I'm still waiting for a giant vinegar bottle to lumber into view from the right wing. Fortunately, you don't need a firm grasp of the beautiful game to appreciate Half Time and Down, a pithy short film by The Guvnors actor turned writer/director Mark-John Ford.

Sadly, a good grasp of the game is exactly what Stanley Beavers FC lack. We meet this hopeless bunch of misfits in their dressing room before a match: alternately overweight, underfed, stoned, bored, old or just plain useless, they're like a usual suspects line up of the last kids ever to be picked for a team at school, all grown up and still without a clue. And no amount of sweary haranguing from their overbearing, bullying manager (Tom Davis) is going to kick them into shape. And of course, as the title suggests, at half time they're six goals down. Ouch. Even I know that's not good.

Frankie John and Tom Davis in Half Time and DownCue twenty minutes of blokey banter that, while often very funny, is also rather sad, picking at the scabs of the teams' lives to suggest all kind of unresolved issues lying beneath. Like Dog Soldiers crossed with Full Metal Jacket, the script captures both the casual cruelty of lads larking about and also the way in which a little bit of power can make a man (or in this case, a manager) a little bit mad.

That said, Half Time and Down is hardly subtle in its delivery (the team are, after all, called the Beavers, and every other word starts with an f), but it does a lot with a small budget and a largely unknown cast. Not entirely my cup of tea, but a promising debut all the same. Go Beavers!

John Paul Sartre hadn't seen The Divide when he declared that 'Hell is other people', but believe me, the film would do nothing to dispel his belief. It begins predictably enough: as a nuclear explosion ravages New York, the residents of an apartment block take refuge in the bunker-like basement, which also happens to be the home of survivalist janitor Mickey (Michael Biehn).

From the start, the combination of characters is not a happy one: quiet, determined Eva and her weak husband Sam (Lauren German and Iván González), shell-shocked mother Marilyn (Rosanna Arquette) and her young daughter Mary, short-tempered Delvin (Courtney B Vance), arrogant bully boys Bobby (Michael Eklund) and Josh (Milo Ventimiglia) and Josh's sensitive brother Adrien (Ashton Holmes).

Of course they immediately start bitching, bickering and ganging up on each other, but when armed, biohazard suited soldiers burst in to the bunker, snatch Wendy then, after a surreal, aborted sortie by Josh, weld the iron door shut, the trouble really starts. What follows is a powerful, disturbing, down right nasty depiction of the mental and physical deterioration of a band of desperate, disparate people suffering from cabin fever, radiation sickness and, eventually, full blown certifiable lunacy.

The performances in the film are of a calibre rarely seen in this kind of genre picture. In particular, Milo Ventimiglia (from Gilmore Girls!!) descent from regular guy to Lord of the Flies-style underground overlord is horrifically chilling, but even he is outshone by little known actor Michael Eklund's extraordinary turn as the psychotic, sexually depraved Bobby, whose sordid treatment of Marilyn is nasty in the extreme. (Poor Rosanna Arquette – what did she do to deserve this?)

The Divide is seriously not for the faint-hearted – with some scenes you'll really need your mental floss handy. But it's a stunning achievement for director Xavier Gens (whose last output was the creaky action flick Hit-man, which even Timothy Olyphant couldn't save) and a must for any self-respecting horror fan.

Just don't expect to come out of this bleak drama smiling: as the nuclear ash falls silently across a desolate New York City, we are left with the feeling that, to misquote Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds, there is nothing worth fighting for in the spirit of man.

What do you get if you cross the plot of Let The Right One In with the special effects of a budget Hulk movie, then set it all in Trainspotting territory, with a bunch of Irish Gypsy mumbo jumbo thrown in for good measure. Well, fairly obviously, you get low budget horror thriller Outcast.

Intense, witchy Mary and her teenage son Fergal (Kate Dickie and Niall Bruton) are on the run. But when they set fire to their van and accept a scummy council tenancy in a run-down scheme on the outskirts of Edinburgh, it appears that their days on the road are over. Big mistake, as mysterious, tattooed, radge hit-man Cathal (James Nesbitt) is hot on their heels, tracking them down using bizarre divining rituals involving pigeons' entrails. Well, it's hardly as if the reclusive pair are on Facebook.

But while Mary sets about weaving protective spells around their flat, Fergal is off getting to know his new neighbourhood, and in particular feisty 'teenager' Petronella (Hanna Stanbridge), who spends her days caring for her mentally disabled brother while her alcoholic mother lies sprawled on the sofa sleeping off the grog. But as a sudden, awkward and rather unlikely romance starts to blossom, Cal is closing in, having been given the go ahead by the local gypsy king or Laird (played, of course, by James Cosmo, as it is illegal to make a film in Scotland without offering him a part).

All sounds a bit strange. Well, it is, but it's also gory, gritty and weirdly compelling – although not always terribly convincing. Perhaps I just have trouble believing there's black magic taking place on my bus route. Or indeed that such cheesy, playground black magic could be so immediately effective – Rosemary's Baby this ain't.

But that aside, this is a brave film that's genuinely trying to do something different, and while the result is at times cheap and patchy, it's also like nothing you've seen before, a sort of dysfunctional Mike Leigh film for the Twilight generation.

Now where did I put my jar of blood and pile of dead birds? I'm off to cast a spell on a traffic warden…

See more of my reviews at www.elainemacintyre.net 8-)

Two Eyes Staring is billed as 'the scariest Dutch horror film since The Vanishing.' This, it transpires in the introductory session with director Elbert van Strien, is not that hard, as it's very nearly the only Dutch horror film made since.

Nine-year-old Lisa (Isabelle Stokkel) is a solemn, thoughtful little girl with a big imagination; a quiet, watchful little body who sees and hears more than she should. Not the kind of child best suited to living in a vast, creepy mansion in the middle of nowhere, plagued by spook, unexplained creaks and groans. But when her estranged grandmother dies, leaving her mother just such a property, guess what happens… But are the eerie and disturbing events that unfold the consequence of Lisa's fertile fantasy life, fuelled by her unnerving surroundings and the mysteries shrouding her mother's hidden past, or are there, in fact, supernatural forces at work, feeding on the sins of the past and revisiting them on the next generation? But there's more to this film than hollow-eyed ghost girls, perilous forays into the cellar and things that go bump in the night. Like Rosemary's Baby or previous EIFF showing Joshua, Two Eyes Staring is a fascinating and uncomfortable expose of the sometimes uneasy relationships that exist between parent and child. Lisa's father Paul (Barry Atsma) is by turns best buddy and stern disciplinarian, while mother Christine (Hadewych Minis) struggles to balance her career ambitions with bringing up a child who reminds her uncomfortably of demons from her past, and is in turn resentful, doting and unnerved by her quietly staring offspring.

Okay, so there isn't a lot here you haven't seen before. Spooky houses, dark pasts and creepy children are hardly novel. But unexpected twists in the plot, a fantastic use of music and sound effects to create an atmosphere of unease and some solid central performances all serve to make Two Eyes Staring well worth seeing.

But is it scary? Perhaps better ask the two girls sitting next to me, who leapt out of their skins on regular intervals. For them it was less Two Eyes Staring, more like Two Eyes Shut

Warning - contains slight spoiler about the ending!! Romeo and Juliet vs the Living Dead is either one of the stupidest or the cleverest films I've seen in ages, a movie mash-up in which Shakespearean prose and Technicolor zombie gore are as at odds with each other as the warring families of the Bard's original play. The title credits are a mini-classic in themselves, but as the hybrid Shakespeare codswallop/high school profanity kicked in for real (think the script of Animal House littered with 'prithees' and 'thous') I began to wonder whether I could really sit through an hour and a half of this nonsense.

Like a school play that the kids have put on all by themselves, it's cheap, at times incoherent and crass to the point of being puerile. Yet it's also witty, fast-paced, laugh-out-loud farcical and betrays an endearing knowledge and love of both Shakespeare's play and the late night picture show B-movie horror tradition, mixing some great textual jokes (never bite your thumb at a zombie) with styling and humour in the manner of 1980s horror classics like Night of the Creeps, Reanimator and Basketcase.

Supposedly set in fair Verona (that is, interspersing stock shots of the Italian city with footage that looks as if it was shot in a university halls of residence) the film sees our heroine Juliet (Hannah Kaufmann) fall for the unlikely charms of zombie Romeo (Jason Witter), and well, you know the story really. Although you probably won't predict the happy ending – Shakespeare's director's cut perhaps.

Sure, the joke is stretched a little thin by the end, but the general over-enthusiastic, bargain basement mayhem of the plot and 'effects' (for which read joke shop face-paint and strawberry sauce blood) and the irrepressible exuberance of the actors (particularly Juliet and Reuben Finkelstein's Elvis-esquire Father Larry) make it impossible to dislike this film, even if you are sober. Throw in a classic '80s soundtrack (never before has Lita Ford's 'Kiss Me Deadly' sounded so apt) and you have a rom-zom-com that's destined to become a drunken late night drunken DVD favourite as surely as our star-crossed lovers were destined to meet.

High school sweetheart Dawn (Jess Weixler) doesn't know what female genitalia are supposed to look like. The diagram in her sex ed text book has been covered over with a great big sticker. And, because she's a devoted member of a 'true love waits' abstinence programme, she's never had the chance to put her rose-tinted wedding day sexual fantasies into action.

But when fellow 'promise' member Tobey (Hale Appleman) pushes his luck too far, he finds out he's bitten off rather more than he can chew – or rather, Dawn has. A sleazy gynaecologist (Josh Pais) finds himself in a similar painful position when he gets a little over enthusiastic in his examinations, and as for the loser who sleeps with her to settle a bet, and her foul-mouthed, pot-smoking, misogynistic stepbrother (played, somewhat ironically, by Nip/Tuck's John Hensley)… ouch! Yup, Teeth, like The Lost Boys or Fright Night, is a horror/comedy with bite – although the teeth in question are not in the mouth. Yes, ho ho, it's all very funny, we get to see lots of hilarious chewed off willies and spouting stumps. But Teeth also has a more serious agenda – not least in its implication that Dawn's mutation may have something to do with the enormous factory chimneys belching foul smoke into the air behind her house, or its satirical poke at born again American puritanism.

But mainly, like American Werewolf in London, Teen Wolf and their aforementioned 1980s vampire chums, Teeth is about growing up. It's about the unexpected, embarrassing things that start to happen to the body, over which it appears one has no control; and it's about sex, and how actually, when you're a teenager, sex can be really quite scary.

While 1980s horror comedy tended to focus around young men, as their freaky new urges put them at the mercy of predatory females like Grace Jones's marvellous Katrina in Vamp, Teeth is set squarely in the girly camp. But whereas your traditional horror heroine, from Halloween's Laurie onwards, draws strength from not having sex, Dawn discovers that sex can be a weapon.

Clips from old horror films featuring giant black widow spiders and a serpent-haired Medusa serve both to emphasise Dawn's links to ancient, powerful, mythic figures, and to sink Teeth firmly into the tradition of the B-movie, which has always served as a warped reflection of current social fears, from invading Ruskie aliens to demon kids. And in an age where women are increasingly portrayed in the media as pliable and plastic, desperate and disposable, where rape convictions sit at around three per cent and drinking 'til you throw up is regarded as empowering, it's refreshing and exciting to see Dawn's transition from helpless victim to archetypal femme fatale. Isn't it time we women all started celebrating what God's given us, instead of trying to starve our bodies into submission, or sculpt them under the knife? In effect, isn't it time we started biting back? But if you're worried that this post-feminist dissection makes the film sound rather dull, remember, you do get to see a dog swallow half a penis, and spit out the Prince Albert afterwards. Was that a spoiler? Well, it certainly was for the dog...

Six kids head out into the woods in some remote backwater of rural Ireland in order to take magic mushrooms and get off their heads. Given that five of them have flown all the way from America for the occasion (don't they have shrooms in the States?) it's rather unfortunate that they manage to pick woods that are not only peopled by drooling, inbred, axe-wielding halfwits (like Irish zom-com Dead Meat, Shrooms does as much for the tourist trade to Ireland as Hostel does for Slovakia) but also happens to house the crumbling shell of an abandoned borstal for young offenders, which was run by a group of evil, black clad monks – until one of them ate a bowlful of deathshead mushrooms and killed everyone else. Talk about a bad trip…

Of course, if I found out I was going to be camping in haunted woods full of looneys, I'd pitch my tent under the first creepy looking tree I found. And once settled in, I would ensure that, like our naïve heroine Tara (Kirsten Dunst lookalike Lindsey Haun) the first thing I did was eat a deathshead mushroom (symptoms: extreme rage and violence, and the ability to communicate with the dead and see premonitions of the future), then, like brainfried jock Bluto (Robert Hoffman), wander off into the forest all by myself in the middle of the night, or, like hippy chick Holly (Alice Greczyn) approach the aforementioned yokel locals for help. Have these people never seen a horror movie before?

Still, head-slapping stupidity aside, Shrooms is quite a satisfying little horror film. The central theme of the psychotropic mushrooms allows for a nice blurring between the borders of reality and horror fantasy, with some really quite effective hallucinogenic camera work tipping us nicely into the teenagers' trip. Sure, we've seen a lot of it before (mostly in the Blair Witch Project), and you can see the 'twist' coming from a mile off, in the dark, through a whole bunch of trees – and you'll be unsurprised to hear that it's wielding an axe.

Nevertheless, if you're a fan of pick-'em-off horror by numbers and you enjoy jumping out of your seat at regular intervals (or, indeed, if you're partial to talking cows or the rather gorgeous Jack Huston) you'll find plenty to enjoy in this savvy brew of unashamedly retro horror clichés.