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Reviews
Nightride (2021)
Don't deal and drive...
An excellent low-key thriller carried with aplomb by the stellar performance of Moe Dunford.
One last night of hustling, one last night of pulling the strings, being the puppet-master, bossing the deal... And just like in love or war, no matter how hard you try, nothing goes right for our protaganist Budge. He's a major player in the Belfast coke scene, 50 kg's of the finest nose candy that he's got to shift before midnight, just him, his car, his mobile, his contacts and his wits.
It's been done before, driving through the night, man with a deadline: vis-à-vis Locke. But this time the stakes are much, much higher. Budge wants to get out, to go straight, start a garage business with his partner Graham - just one last deal to do, to fund it. Can he pull it off? Not if he get's on the wrong side of the man he's just borrowed £100k from to buy the drugs, the enigmatic and precisely enunciated Joe, just a voice on the phone played superbly menacingly by Stephen Rea. Joe's enforcer Troy, played by Gerard Jordan, is a man with scant regard to the concept of invading personal space...
So the night rolls on and Budge deals with the hand of fate played out to him by circumstances always beyond his control. And just like his partner, you can get strangely aroused by watching it all unfold... It's a one-shot white knuckle drive to an appointment with destiny.
The Empty Man (2020)
The Wicker Empty Man
A kindly, well-meaning policeman on the trail of a missing girl, encounters sinister cult goings on, and scares the bejesus out of us in the process. So not the most original of plots but David Prior shapes some truly terrifying set pieces aided by Brian Williams' and Christopher Young's superbly scary musical soundtrack. Destined, like its 10* Scottish island predecessor, to become a cult classic, there is a lot to enjoy in this peculiar fable journeying from a Himalayan crevasse to a US hospital bed. It's a mash-up of Lovecraft and L Ron Hubbard's cash cow with a nod to Alan Parker's Angel Heart. It's worthy of your viewing, if nothing else for showing never, ever play pan-pipes with an empty bottle on a bridge...