Finale

This opens with a pastiche of the first few moments of 1931's Frankenstein, when one of the cast steps on stage to address the audience and warn them of the horrors to come.

It takes a while to get going, despite the mix of events happening in real time and flashback. Two gas station attendants working the night shift are terrorised and subjected to various brutal horrors, and their isolation is well realised by Director Søren Juul Petersen.

What follows is an entertaining ride, with a fair bit of gore thrown in. The nature of the horror would be to drift into spoiler territory. The situation is not a new one, and might have been conveyed more stylishly than here, but I enjoyed this ride, especially as I didn't know which way events would turn. My score is 7 out of 10.

If you think the final scene in Tarantino's latest is too-much, wait until you see what happens here, when a maniac abducts two gas station attendants and display them as merchandise for a live streaming horror show. Having to work on a historic day when Denmark enters the World Cup's finals, the ladies try their best to avoid boredom. They end up being the prey of such a bizarre game where the viewers decide their destiny- including torching them, cutting their legs off, and piercing their nipples. An extremely gore, efficient, gruesome and smart take on the abduction genre, Søren Juul Petersen's directorial debut is an impressive and bold display of human cruelty.

No pun intended - you have to dig horror movies to be able to enjoy this. You may have heard of torture porn - I would not say that it stoops that low (or high, depending on your own sets of values of course) ... but it is a slasher movie, it does have girls in the main roles that could be considered Scream Queens ... and it has quite a lot of violence in it.

The effects are quite nice, the acting is decent enough too. Story wise not too many surprises .. the editing is ... well interesting. It may throw some people off, you have to pay attention that is for sure. If that sounds like something you want to give a go ... go ahead. Just be sure to cut this some slack ... and suspend your disbelief.

Opening with what reminded me of Marge appearing at the start of some Treehouse of Horror episodes of The Simpsons to warn the audience of the content that will appear in the following episode, The Ringmaster is another film that hones in on the success of the Saw films but leaves a lot to be desired in terms of emulating their success.

During the night of the biggest sports final of the year, two girls working in a gas station experience strange incidents. Is it just staged pranks or is it something of a more aggressive intent?

Horror is a genre where you can probably get away with a lot more in terms of extreme content and this is something The Ringmaster has the intention of doing however, it never manages to fulfil the promising potential it starts off with. There's an impressive sense of dread surrounding the two women on their shift at a gas station, particularly when two perculiar men arrive acting rather strangely, but that soon dissolves into nothing much, even as the women are forced to take part in an online entertainment event that isn't as insane as it thinks it is.

We know what's going to happen with the women as the film follows a non-linear narrative that jumps between their shift and then captivity. While not much of an issue for me, there's no surprise to any of it, knowing they will eventually be captured takes away much of the suspense created during the gas station scenes.

The performances, particularly from Anne Bergfield and Karin Michelsen, are decent enough but there isn't really much weight to any of it due to the fact there's no real substance to any of it. Damon Younger plays the Ringmaster and he does bring a sinister sense to proceedings but it does end up falling a bit flat, sitting in the middle rather than tipping over to either side of the psycho scale.

Imagine The Greatest Showman but P. T. Barnum rides out on a tricycle asking his "freaks" if they "wanna play a game". You could imagine it being carnage and that's what I'd want from a horror film called The Ringmaster but what we got instead ends up being rather tame, which is most definitely a shame.

The lead actresses were good, especially Agnes. Some of the scenes are intense (although overall, I wouldn't say the movie is scary though; it's more of a suspense or thriller than a horror) It's very gory, almost on par with Hostel at times. The main villain, who is on the poster, is pretty intimidating, and he looks a little like a frontman for a heavy metal band

There are some issues with the movie though. I didn't like the random time jumps in the first 60% of the film. And the third act is a let down. The movie also aims for some kind of commentary on society's fascination with violence, which it telegraphs with pictures of the Roman Coliseum: I didn't think this message really got through.