A Horror Film Blog

Very simple, plot wise - a couple buy a house in rural Scotland and almost immediately are targeted by a group of hostile locals who break into the house with evil intent. The couple try to escape. That's the whole story - there is no subplot, no interactions with the locals to suggest motive, no small 'precursor' building up of hostile actions - just straight into the home invasion. Clearly, these guys (meaning either hostiles or the film makers) don't have time to muck around.  It's actually refreshing to find a film where the antagonists are this direct and don't go through an preamble of putting dead birds in mail boxes or kidnapping family pets. This allows the film - even at a lean 80 minutes - to focus on a protracted cat-and-mouse sequence as Sarah and Ed try to survive their night of Hell.  A quaint house warming ritual I liked how the characters were not designed to be likeable or sympathetic - quite the opposite, they are a couple of big city English ...

A family shelter in an isolated cabin.  A hostile group of relentless marauders lay siege to them.  This is the stuff of many films, and it is also the stuff of 2017 Jackals .  A film about which the best thing you can say is it does what it sets out to do pretty well, and the worst thing you can say about it is it could have been a much better film. "Daddy, we will have a lot of things to talk through once this is over." The idea underpinning the narrative - a family attempts to 'deprogram' their son, the brainwashed member of a cult - was interesting and could have been developed a lot more. There was scope for an intriguing cat-and-mouse battle between the family and their ex-army deprogrammer, and the swivel eyed son; and the belief system of the cult could have been explored.  Instead, the intervention aspect is really just a MacGuffin, used to set up the plot of the film, because it requires these people to be in an isolated area so they can be assailed by the ...