Killer cults. Tentacled monsters. Shotgun-toting psychos. Medical experiments run amok. This gleefully berserk and inventive low-budget splat-flick from first-time feature directors Jeremy Gillespie and Steve Kostanski has all this, and so much more. When small-town cop Danny (Aaron Poole) stumbles over a wounded man in the woods, he takes him straight to the local hospital where his estranged wife Allison (Kathleen Munroe) is working the night shift. But the stranger won’t calm down, recoiling from the touch of kindly old Dr Powell (Kenneth Welsh from ‘Twin Peaks’). And then the masked, horn-blowing satanists show up...
Setting a breakneck pace in the first 20 minutes and sustaining it through to the jaw-slapping, Lucio Fulci-inspired finale, this is a gloriously unfettered throwback to the wild days of ’80s horror. Both Gillespie and Kostanski are experienced Hollywood art directors, and it shows: forget about digital effects, their film is packed with drippingly immersive sets and the best pustulent, writhing rubber monsters since ‘The Thing’. The script can be clunky and the characters a mite thin, but those things tend to come with the territory. For lovers of old-fashioned horror, this is your bloody Christmas.
