HOUSEBOUND - BRD/DVD Review By Greg Klymkiw - Blood-Drenched Kiwi Kitchen Sink Horror Show now available via Anchor Bay Entertainment Canada & Raven Banner

Being the tender tale
of a mother-daughter,
an amiable paranormal
investigator, a creepy Teddy
and a creepier social worker.
One right Royal Kiwi
Kitchen Sink!

Housebound (2014)
Dir. Gerard Johnstone
Starring: Morgana O'Reilly, Rima Te Wiata, Glen-Paul Waru, Cameron Rhodes, Ross Harper, Mick Innes, Millen Baird

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Kylie (Morgana O'Reilly) is a nasty piece of work. Since leaving home, the chunky, unkempt, greasy, tattooed and criminally-minded lassie has been through the revolving doors of Kiwi drug rehab clinics and courtrooms more times than she can remember. A not-unsympathetic judge working for Her Majesty's Crown in New Zealand has all the facts at his fingertips. Her latest escapade involved smashing into an ATM for drug money.

Deciding Kylie needs some stability in her life. albeit forced, he orders her to several months under house arrest in the countryside with her dear Mum (Rima Te Wiata) in the old country homestead.

Prison might have been better since the family home was never, ever a place Kylie felt comfortable in.


With its overgrown yard, gnarly trees, scrubby woods and a creepy neighbour (Mick Innes) to boot, Mummy dearest's musty, ramshackle, pack-rat-crowded old house is chock-full of too many bad memories. It's hardly conducive to a mentally healthy recovery, especially since Kylie's forced to wear an electronic ankle bracelet which keeps her from seeking any respite from the dusty claustrophobia of her childhood home. Adding insult to injury is the incessant nattering of her Mum and regular visits from a smarmy court-appointed slime-bucket councillor (Cameron Rhodes). Her only friend turns out to be an unlikely one, the beefy, amiable security dude Amos (Glen-Paul Waru), hired by the corrections department to monitor her incarceration.

Worst of all, it appears the house is haunted.

Luckily for Kylie, Amos is an amateur paranormal investigator and the two team up to solve the mystery of odd noises and goings-on. Needless to say, there's a whole lot more than meets the eye. Think of Housebound as an extreme kitchen sink melodrama (so popular in the UK during the 60s), that's infused with loads of black comedy, more red herrings than you can shake a stick at, plenty of muted whisperings, things going bump in the night, a surfeit of shock cuts and eventually, a few gallons of bloodletting.

Debut helmer and chief scribe Gerard Johnson, keeps the atmosphere thick with suspense and punctuates the numerous shocks with big laughs. If there's a problem it's that Johnson's script is too packed with red herrings and that it spins its wheels during the last third of the film. It's also a tiny bit of a letdown to discover that what seems to be, isn't, and is, in fact something else altogether.

Still and all, Housebound is an intelligent and finely wrought genre item. That its characters are vaguely plain, plain-spoken and a bit repulsive is an added bonus. If and when the movie is remade in Hollywood, it'll be scrubbed to a lily white and zapped dry of everything that makes it fresh.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***½ 3-and-a-half-stars

Housebound opens January 16, 2015 at the Carlton via Raven Banner and will be available on BRD/DVD via Anchor Bay Entertainment (Canada) in very nice home editions. The Blu-Ray contains an excellent commentary with Writer/Director Gerard Johnstone and two of the film's producers. There are also deleted scenes and a trailer. It's available on XLRator in the USA. It was the Opening Night Gala at the Toronto After Dark Film Festival.

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Greg Klymkiw, presents the The Film Corner Awards (TFCA) in this the year of Our Lord 2014 - Many of these films were first unleashed at such film festivals and venues as TIFF 2014, TIFF Bell Lightbox, Hot Docs 2014, Toronto After Dark 2014, FantAsia 2014, FNC 2014, BITS 2014, NIFF 2014, The Royal Cinema and the Magic Lantern Carlton Cinemas

THE FILM CORNER AWARDS (TFCA) 2014, 
AS SELECTED BY THE REV. GREG KLYMKIW

This will be the first in a series of year-end Film Corner round-ups of cinema in 2014. Below, you will find the citations of excellence from me, Greg Klymkiw, in the form of my annual The Film Corner Awards (TFCA) for 2014. The most interesting observation is that ALL of these films were first screened within the context of major international film festivals which is further proof of their importance in presenting audiences with the very best that cinema has to offer whilst most mainstream exhibition chains are more interested in presenting refuse on multi-screens of the most ephemeral kind. All the citations here came from films unleashed at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF 2014), the Toronto After Dark Film Festival (TADFF 2014), Hot Docs 2014, Montreal's 2014 FantAsia International Film Festival and the 2014 Montreal Nouveau Cinema Festival (FNC 2014). In Canada, only two of the films cited have been released theatrically within the hardly-visionary, downright lazy mega-plex chain Cineplex Entertainment and even those films are being allowed to play on a limited number of screens in an even-more limited number of cities while ludicrous numbers of awful movies are draining screen time at the aforementioned chain's big boxes. It's not as if all the films the chain allows to hog screens are doing numbers to justify this combination of piggishness and laziness. Keep your eyes open, though. The films cited here are all astounding BIG-SCREEN experiences, which will hopefully find BIG-SCREEN exhibition before being relegated to less-than-ideal home entertainment venues. And now, here goes, The Film Corner Awards (TFCA 2014) as selected by your most Reverend Greg Klymkiw. Included are brief quotes from my original reviews  and links to the full-length reviews from the past year (just click on the title).

American cinema, more than anything, has always exemplified the American Dream. Almost in response to this, director David Zellner with his co-writer brother Nathan, have created Kumiko The Treasure Hunter, one of the most haunting, tragic and profoundly moving explorations of mental illness within the context of dashed hopes and dreams offered by the magic of movies and the wide-open expanse of a country teeming with opportunity and riches.

Best Feature Film
Kumiko The Treasure Hunter

This is such a great film. I could have watched all seven minutes of it if they'd somehow been elongated to a Dreyer-like pace and spread out over 90 minutes. That said, it's perfect as it is. The fact that you don't want it to end is a testament to director Matthew Rankin as one of the young torchbearers (along with Astron-6) of the prairie post-modernist movement which hatched out of Winnipeg via the brilliantly demented minds of John Paizs and Guy Maddin. Blending gorgeously arcane techniques from old Hollywood, ancient government propaganda films with dollops of staggeringly, heart-achingly beautiful animation - bursting with colour and blended with superbly art-directed and costumed live action - Mynarski Death Plummet takes its rightful place alongside such classic Canadian short films as John Martins-Manteiga's The Mario Lanza Story, John Paizs's Springtime in Greenland, Guy Maddin's The Dead Father and Deco Dawson's Ne Crâne pas sois modeste / Keep a Modest Head. 

Best Short Film
Mynarski Death Plummet
(Matthew Rankin)

This is exactly the sort of film that restores my faith in the poetic properties of cinema and how the simplest of tales, at their surface, allow their artists to dig deep and yield the treasures inherent in the picture's soul. When a film is imbued with an inner spirit as this one is, you know you're watching something that hasn't been machine-tooled strictly for ephemeral needs. In Her Place is a film about yearning, love and the extraordinary tears and magic that are borne out of the company and shared experience of women. And, it is exquisite.

Best Canadian Feature Film
In Her Place
(Albert Shin, TimeLapse Pictures)

Avec le temps/Before I Go is 12 minutes long. Director Mark Morgenstern evokes a lifetime in that 12 minutes. It's proof positive of cinema's gifts and how they must not be squandered, but used to their absolute fullest.

The Weatherman and the Shadowboxer by one of Canada's national filmmaking treasures Randall Okita, takes the very simple story of two brothers and charts how a tragic event in childhood placed them on very different, yet equally haunted (and haunting) paths.

Best Canadian Short Film
Avec le temps/Before I Go
(Mark Morgenstern)

-tied with-
The Weatherman and the Shadowboxer
(Randall Okita)

Witnessing these events as captured by Sergey Loznitsa is a moving document of human solidarity in the face of corruption. Witnessing them as a Ukrainian, however, is to experience every beat, word and action as a series of epiphanies. Maidan is a film that places the revolution in the broader context of what is happening in Ukraine now, but in its simple, beautiful and staggering way, it is a film of considerable importance as it expresses how we must all choose revolution when the criminal actions of very few affect the lives of the majority.

Best Documentary
Maidan
(Sergey Loznitsa)

-tied with-

This film is one of the most harrowing crime pictures ever made. It's no drama, however, but is certainly imbued with a compulsive narrative expertly unfurled by ace documentary filmmaker Berlinger. The picture leaves you breathlessly agog at the utter brutality and sordid corruption of a system that allowed a monster like American gangster James Bulger to get away with his crimes for so long. The film will, no doubt remain a classic of great American cinema long after all of us have gone from this Earth. It's what cinema should be - it's for the ages.

Best Documentary
Whitey: The United States of America V. James J. Bulger
(Joe Berlinger)

The Satellite Girl and Milk Cow is a thorough delight and comes across as a Korean answer to crossing Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke) with Brad Bird (The Iron Giant, The Incredibles). It's certainly the sort of thing we don't get to see in our soul-bereft North American multiplexes. It's a gem of a movie and I urge all parents and kids to seek it out. They won't quite know what hit them, but when it does, they'll know they want it a lot more than Madagascar 3. That's a guarantee.

Best Animated Feature
The Satellite Girl and Milk Cow
(Hyeong-yoon Jang)

Astron-6 have done the impossible by creating a film that holds its own with the greatest gialli of all time. It's laugh-out-loud funny, grotesquely gory and viciously violent. Though it draws inspiration from Argento, Fulci, Bava, et al, the movie is so dazzlingly original that you'll be weeping buckets of joy because finally, someone has managed to mix-master all the giallo elements, but in so doing has served up a delicious platter of post-modern pasta du cinema that both harkens back to simpler, bloodier and nastier times whilst also creating a piece actually made in this day and age. All that said, the following dialogue from the film says it all:

BLONDE STUD: So where were you on the night of the murder?

BLONDE BABE: I was at home washing my hair and shaving my pussy.

Best Horror Film
The Editor
(Adam Brooks, Matthew Kennedy, Astron-6)

Buoyed by intense, intelligent writing from Tony Burgess (Pontypool, Septic Man) in a screenplay that induces fingernail-ripping-and-plucking, plus a great performance by Julian (Hard Core Logo, Cube, Man of Steel) Richings, Ejecta is a movie that plunges you into the terror of one utterly horrendous night in the lives of those who make contact with aliens. They experience a series of close encounters of the third kind, though be warned, you'll find no happy-faced hairless alien midgets gesticulating Zoltán Kodály Hand Signals whilst smiling at a beaming Francois Truffaut here. No-siree-Spielberg, these mo-fos inspire drawer-filling of the highest order.

Best Science Fiction Film
Ejecta
(Chad Archibald, Matt Wiele,
Tony Burgess, Foresight)

With plenty of loving homages to George Miller's Mad Max pictures, helmer Kiah Roache-Turner and his co-scribe Tristan Roache-Turner, serve up a white-knuckle roller coaster ride through the unyielding Australian bushland as a family man (who's had to slaughter his family when they "turn" into zombies) and a ragtag group of tough guys, equip themselves with heavy-duty armour, weaponry and steely resolve to survive. Director Roache-Turner mostly nice clean shots which allow the action and violence to play out stunningly (including a few harrowing chases). He manages, on what feels like a meagre budget, to put numerous blockbusting studio films of a similar ilk to shame. It delivers the goods and then some.

Best Action Film Wyrmwood
(Kiah Roache-Turner)

Movies are so often about dreams coming true, especially American movies and though the dreams don't come true for the characters in the Coen Brothers' Fargo, Zellner makes us believe that Kumiko believes that the film itself can, indeed, make her dreams come true.

Best Director
Kumiko The Treasure Hunter
(David Zellner)

What the Zellner duo have achieved here seems almost incalculable, especially as they eventually infuse you with joy and sadness all at once during the film's final act. One thing is certain, they have etched an indelible portrait of hope in the face of unyielding madness.

Best Original Script
Kumiko The Treasure Hunter
(Nathan Zellner, David Zellner)

Screenwriter Matt Rager delivers a grotesque blueprint to director James Franco that plunges William Faulkner's stream-of-consciousness prose into the same lollapalooza inbred territory as Anthony Mann's overlooked masterpiece of Erskine Caldwell's God's Little Acre and Elia Kazan's madcap Baby Doll. And good goddamn, I accept this with open arms.

Best Screenplay Adaptation
The Sound and the Fury
(Matt Rager)

Steve Carell's performance as the eccentric billionaire is so extraordinary I managed to suppress Carell was even in the movie until the closing credits.

Best Actor:
Foxcatcher
(Steve Carell)

Fargo, the movie by the Coen Brothers, is not just the instrument which inspires Kumiko's desires, it's like a part of Kumiko's character and soul and represents an ethos of both America and madness. Kumiko is no mere stranger in a strange land, but a stranger in her own land who becomes a stranger in a strange land - a woman without a country save for that which exists in her mind.

Best Actress
Kumiko The Treasure Hunter
(Rinko Kikuchi)

"If you deliberately sabotage my band, I will fuck you like a pig," barks Terence Fletcher, a jazz instructor at a tony private music conservatory. As played by J. K. Simmons, Fletcher makes Gny. Sgt. Hartman in Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket look like your kindly old Granny Apple Doll.

Best Supporting Actor
Whiplash
(J.K. Simmons)

In Her Place quietly rips our hearts to shreds. We are included in the emotional journeys of a daughter whose child can never be hers, a mother whose daughter is everything to her but comes to this realization when it's too late and a woman who has come between them because her own desire to love and nurture is so strong and true.

Best Supporting Actress
In Her Place
(Ahn Ji-hye)

In the ever-accumulating high winds and snow under the big skies of Minnesota, Kumiko gets a bittersweet taste of happiness - a dream of triumph, a dream of reunion, a dream of peace, at last.

Best Cinematography
Kumiko The Treasure Hunter
(Sean Porter)

The editing of Tom Cross leaves you breathless.

Best Editing
Whiplash
(Tom Cross)

Wrenchingly and beautifully scored by Alexandre Klinke, In Her Place is infused with a deep sensitivity that's reminiscent of a Robert Bresson film.

Best Musical Score
In Her Place
(Alexandre Klinke)

The climactic sequence is a musical equivalent to a great action-movie set-piece.

Best Overall Sound
Whiplash

Blasting through hordes of flesh-eating slabs of viscous decay, they careen on a collision course with a group of Nazi-like government soldiers who are kidnapping both zombies and humans so a wing-nut scientist can perform brutal experiments upon them.

Best Makeup/Special Effects
Wyrmwood

In 1941, the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were besieged by Russians intent upon ethnic cleansing. Thousands upon thousands of innocent people were rounded up and shipped to Siberian concentration camps.

Best Costumes
In The Crosswind

The visual beauty of suffering allows us to experience the indomitability of the human spirit and is finally the thing that gives the film its heart, which is in sharp contrast to that spirit decidedly lacking in the Russian oppressors.

Best Art Direction/Production Design
In The Crosswind

COMING SOON: THE FILM CORNER PRESENTS A VARIETY OF 2014 10-BEST LISTS SELECTED BY THE MOST REVEREND GREG KLYMKIW

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The Film Corner Accolades of Toronto After Dark Film Festival 2014 selected by Klymkiw

I've been attending the magnificent Toronto After Dark Film Festival for 5 years of its 9-year-long history and I have to say that I have no idea what I would do if I ever had to miss a year. It's unique amongst genre festivals (and festivals period) in that its head honcho Adam Lopez set out to create an event that was by fans and for fans of all things macabre and this is what makes it so special. The audience-response is always lively, but respectful and you'll get no better on-a-big-screen experience anywhere in Canada - perhaps even the world. Lopez and his lively team (including, but not limited to) Peter Kuplowsky and Christian Burgess, have consistently presented more than just a film festival - it's a pure atmosphere of genre adoration. It's all about . . . . . LOVE!!! And believe me, it has nothing to do with the love between a man and a woman, a man and a man, a woman and a woman, a parent and their child or a boy and his dog. It is, in fact, the special love between those of humankind and the colour of red - BLOOD RED!!! This is a beautiful thing.

This year, I reviewed EVERY SINGLE FEATURE FILM and a selection of first-rate short films. Below, you will find my annual accolades for this year's edition of the festival. Without further delay, here they are:

BEST OVERALL FILM OF THE FESTIVAL:
Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter

BEST HORROR FILM:
Hellmouth

BEST SCIENCE FICTION FILM:
Time Lapse

BEST THRILLER:
Open Windows

BEST HORROR COMEDY:
Suburban Gothic

BEST WEREWOLF MOVIE:
Late Phases

BEST ZOMBIE MOVIE:
Wyrmwood

BEST CANADIAN FEATURE FILM:
Hellmouth

BEST SHORT FILM:
He Took His Skin Off For Me

BEST CANADIAN SHORT FILM:
Migration

BEST DIRECTOR:
David Zellner, Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter

BEST SCREENPLAY:
Nathan and David Zellner, Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter

BEST ACTOR:
Stephen McHattie, Hellmouth

BEST ACTRESS:
Rinko Kikuchi, Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR:
Jason Spisak, Time Lapse

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS:
Siobhan Murphy, Hellmouth

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY:
Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter

BEST EDITING:
Wyrmwood

BEST SOUND:
Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter

BEST ART DIRECTION:
Time Lapse

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS:
Hellmouth

BEST MAKEUP EFFECTS:
He Took His Skin Off For Me

Here are links to every single Film Corner review from TADFF 2014:

Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter

Let Us Prey

Late Phases

Hellmouth

The Babadook

Canadian Shorts at TADFF 2014

Why Horror?

Refuge

The Town That Dreaded Sundown 2014

Wyrmwood

Wolves

The ABCs of Death 2

Dead Snow 2: Red VS. Dead

Shorts After Dark

Suburban Gothic

Time Lapse

The Drownsman

Zombeavers

Predestination

Housebound

Open Windows

KUMIKO, THE TREASURE HUNTER - Review By Greg Klymkiw - 2014 Toronto After Dark

Kumiko travels from Tokyo to Fargo in search of treasure.

Kumiko studies FARGO

Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter (2014)
Dir. David Zellner
Scr. David & Nathan Zellner
Starring: Rinko Kikuchi

Review By Greg Klymkiw

American cinema, more than anything, has always exemplified the American Dream.

Brilliantly responding to this notion, director David Zellner and his co-writer brother Nathan, have created Kumiko The Treasure Hunter, one of the most haunting, tragic and profoundly moving explorations of mental illness within the context of those dashed hopes and dreams, at first offered, then reneged upon by the magic of movies and the wide-open expanse of a country teeming with opportunity and riches.

The riches awaiting Kumiko (Rinko Kikuchi) in Fargo, North Dakota are, given her lot in life, seemingly untold. She knows this all too well and in fact, knows it more than all of us. You see, night after night, for God-knows-how-many-years, the sad-eyed, lonely, friendless "office girl" has come home from long work days under the harsh fluorescent wash of lights in an anonymous corporate tower in Tokyo and settled down in her dreary apartment to ingest a bowl of packaged noodles.

Untold riches await Kumiko in Fargo, North Dakota

Accompanying the modest meal, she inserts a well-worn VHS tape of the Coen Brothers' Fargo into a clunky, ancient VCR, and watches the events unfold on a tiny TV screen in order to study every detail of the precise location where the hapless, critically wounded Steve Buscemi hides a briefcase full of ransom money that he'll never, ever be able to retrieve.

Kumiko, having placed considerable faith in the opening titles of the film which proclaim that Fargo is a "true" story, obsessively pauses the VHS image upon salient details in order to create a detailed treasure map. It's quite an ingenious plan, at least to Kumiko. Movies are so often about dreams coming true, especially American movies and though the dreams don't come true for the characters in Fargo, she believes that the film itself can make her dreams come true.

Kumiko is clearly suffering from depression. She's teased by all the upwardly mobile young ladies at work, the boss lectures her about lacking ambition, her mother complains endlessly on the telephone about Kumiko being unmarried and even a chance meeting with a dear, old friend from elementary school goes awry when Kumiko storms out of the teahouse she meets her in, crushed by the shame of not having a child and husband as her friend is happily in possession of.

Kumiko has not known any such happiness. In fact, she appears to have never been acquainted with any happiness. Only Fargo gives her hope that one day, she too can be happy.

FARGO gives Kumiko hope that one day, she will be happy.

As luck would have it, her boss gives her the company credit card to buy his wife a birthday gift. This is the chance Kumiko knows she must take. After all, whatever money she embezzles from her boss can be paid back once she finds the hidden treasure of Fargo. The American Dream and all of its untold promise and riches is a mere flight from Tokyo to Minneapolis, Minnesota.

She must take the plunge.

Bidding a teary-eyed farewell to the only thing in the world she loves, her dwarf bunny, Kumiko then hops aboard the first available airplane, eventually landing in the middle of a harsh Minnesota winter. Her odyssey through the heartland of America is the stuff movies are made of.

Alas, dreams are not always made of the same thing.

What the Zellner duo have achieved here seems almost incalculable, especially as they eventually infuse you with joy and sadness all at once during the film's final act. One thing is certain, they have etched an indelible portrait of hope in the face of unyielding madness. We're given the opportunity to experience an America not unlike that which the Coen Brothers detailed in Fargo, however, none of it in the Zellners' film feels derivative and manages, thankfully, to avoid even a shred of film-geek homage. Fargo, the movie, is not just an instrument which inspires Kumiko's desires, it's like a part of Kumiko's character and soul and represents an ethos of both America and madness. Kumiko is no mere stranger in a strange land, but a stranger in her own land who becomes a stranger in a strange land - a woman without a country save for that which exists in her mind.

There isn't a false note to be found in this gorgeously acted, directed and photographed movie. It is not without humour, but none of it is at Kumiko's expense and when the film slowly slides into full blown tragedy, the Zellners surround Kumiko in the ever-accumulating high winds and snow under the big skies of Minnesota. We get, as she does, a bittersweet taste of happiness - a dream of triumph, a dream of reunion, a dream of peace, at last.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***** 5-Stars

Kumiko The Treasure Hunter screened at the Toronto After Dark Film Festival. (TADFF 2014) It will be released theatrically in Canada via FilmsWeLike and in the USA via Amplify Releasing.

LET US PREY - Review By Greg Klymkiw - 2nd Closer 2014 Toronto After Dark Film Fest

Let Us Prey (2014)
Dir. Brian O'Malley
Scr. David Cairns, Fiona Watson
Starring: Pollyanna McIntosh, Liam Cunningham, Douglas Russell, Bryan Larkin, Hanna Stanbridge, Niall Greig Fulton

Review By Greg Klymkiw

If you've seen Lucky McKee's delectably vile The Woman, you already know what a great actress (and babe) Pollyanna McIntosh is. Brian O'Malley's Let Us Prey, is a rip-snortingly scary, utterly demented supernatural take on John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13, which, for added kick, is liberally sprinkled with plenty of Irish Whiskey and smothered with globs of haggis (as its Irish-Scottish co-pro roots demand).

Featuring McIntosh's va-va-va-voom frame of womanhood stuffed into the tasty sausage sack of a form-fitting cop's uniform, she's clearly not here (as in McKee's picture) to be hung up nude in a barn and used for sexual gratification, but like The Woman, she more than admirably delivers the goods in terms of ass-kicking and major-league ultra-violent payback upon a fine selection of despicable scumbags.

Using the taut, imaginative screenplay by David Cairns and Fiona Watson as his blueprint for madness, helmer O'Malley skillfully leads us into the fiery pits of the first official night on the job for a newbie female cop in a Bonny Scottish station house located in the most remote locale imaginable. All you need know is that an event occurs which spirals the whole joint out of control as it's besieged by filth of the highest order - all demanding to be dispatched.

We get an alcoholic thug, a mass murderer, a self-flagellating killer of buff, young fellas and amongst corrupt, murderous cops, a child-raping kidnapper who may or may not be a demon from the utter depths of Hell itself. Of all nights, this is one in which our plucky heroine might have wished she'd been home washing her hair, then eating bonbons in front of the telly. But such is not to be the case. Violence must be done and we, the audience, are all the better for it.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***½ 3-and-a-half-stars
Let Us Prey was one of the closing night films at the 2014 edition of the Toronto After Dark Film Festival. It'll be coming to cinema and home entertainment venues near you via Raven Banner Entertainment and Anchor Bay Canada.