Devoured (2012)
A film about a woman working as a minimum wage slave in a cafe, for a pair of pretty horrible bosses. She’s working to save up money for an operation her son needs, but starts to see disturbing visions in the cafe. An effective psychological horror with a good ending – it’s a little slow to get going, but it has to be because the film is fairly intimate in scope. You get a good sense of how lonely and hopeless her life is, the atmosphere is quite haunting and uncomfortable in places. I thought the lead actress did a great job in this one, she was engaging to watch in every scene. It’s hard to say more about this one without ruining it though, it’s worth mentioning it picked up a bunch of film festival rewards.
I Spit On Your Grave 2 (2013)
Is it as good as the first one? No. There – now that’s out of the way, what we have here is an expected tale of horrific abuse and subsequent revenge. A young woman trying to break into modelling goes for a photoshoot, but leaves when they ask her to show a bit more than she expected. Unfortunately the simpleton brother of the photographer takes a shine to her, and it’s downhill from there. The abuse scenes are pretty nasty, they did just enough character building with Katie for them to work, but by the end of the film I didn’t think the bad guys had really suffered enough.
