[Frankie Teardrop]

THE OUTWATERS - A recent take on found footage that seems to have alienated and enthralled in equal measure. I tend towards the latter camp - FF isn't always my thing when it amounts to no more than running around the woods with a smartphone, but 'The Outwaters' is much more ambitious and constructs a layered, distorted reality that throbs with menace. Four friends, who have headed out to the desert to do a music video, become increasingly bewildered and panicked by their remote location. Some fateful fork in the path sends them down a dark spiral, and we sense a nightmarish presence closing in. Although it works mainly through suggestion and fragmentation, much of the later imagery offers genuinely disturbing glimpses of the otherworldly. Many have voiced their disgruntlement with it being too abstract and 'experimental', but if the last thing you want is a coherent story, you may like this - I did.

THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH - Alan Birkinshaw did some odd films. I'm trying to remember his other E A Poe 'adaption', but all that comes to mind is pink wallpaper, lots of antiques, and Donald Pleasance as a badly costumed cyborg. If that film exists only in my imagination, perhaps someone should do something about it. Anyway, 'The Masque Of The Red Death' continues Birkinshaw's quest for hideous decor at the service of oddly cast horror classics, and brings us a world that seems entirely set within the confines of an Ultravox video. "This means nothing to meeeee!", in which case get a load of Herbert Lom as a mad doctor and potential slasher, in fact get a load of everything, it's pretty wild even though nothing really happens apart from you waking up thinking you might've just dreamed it. But it's real, and it's only just beginning... PS also stars Frank Stallone as 'The Duke'.