Catherine Bray

This nifty little movie keeps you guessing and when it eventually shows its hand, there’s still plenty of mileage left in the characters.

There are a couple of decent plot twists and reveals, but not enough to stop you from checking out until the next bit with the whale comes up.

The cherry on top of this admittedly weird cocktail is a strong streak of genuine sensuality – if it’s your first encounter with tentacle sex on screen, you might be surprised how appealing Heimann and his cast have managed to make it seem.

There is an undeniable energy and spookiness to this low-budget chiller, which makes intelligently modest use of digital FX in a way that some bigger-budget projections would do well to emulate.

The layering of one creepy thing on to another creates a sense of silliness rather than terror, leaving you with the sense that Coco Chanel’s maxim about the perils of over-accessorising – “Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off” – also applies to writing and editing horror movies.

The biggest problem with Outgunned though is that it seems to have fallen prey to one of the stupidest of modern issues in cinema: a luxuriously padded run time.

If you think The Ballad of Judas Priest, from co-directors and Priest fans Tom Morello and Sam Dunn, is going to be anything other than an ode to everything that’s great about the British headbangers, you’ve got another thing coming.

This horror bonanza, the eighth instalment in the V/H/S anthology series, is a mixed bag, with some very high highs and regrettably poor lows.

Written and directed by Kirk Jones (“Waking Ned Devine”), the film wrestles enthusiastically and mostly successfully with the potential pitfalls of making a funny yet respectful project about a condition that sometimes lends itself to laughter, even as it wreaks havoc with Davidson’s life in serious ways.

It always feels as if the people making this movie are having fun, and while that’s never a guarantee that the audience will too, it’s certainly the case here.