KorraN-7

"The Advent Calendar" follows Eva, a paraplegic who starts to endure and experience hellish events after her best friend gifts her an antique advent calendar for her birthday.

The setup and plot are honestly great, and the acting in this French production is stellar, but the movie suffers from a lack of emotional investment. Like, Eva is a good character and you root for her, but the further along the story goes, she becomes less and less likeable, becoming essentially a secondary villain out of the blue.

Still, if you're a horror fan wanting a holiday-themed movie to sink your teeth into, you can do worse. At worst, "The Advent Calendar" is a one-off watch, but it's still worth a watch.

"Daddy's Head" follows Laura, her dog Bella and Isaac, the son of her now-deceased boyfriend James as they navigate the grief and loss in James' untimely passing after a vicious accident.

This British horror film shares a fair amount of narrative clout with other genre fare like "The Babadook" and "The Night House," although thankfully it never tries to be so-called 'elevated horror' with pretentious over-complication. The creature design is genuinely scary, the atmosphere is palpable, the writing and direction is taut and the acting superb.

I do wish there was more to speculate on what it was that the family encounters in the film, because there's essentially nothing to go on other than a single scene where a giant cloud of smoke rises from the forest. Too much ambiguity isn't a good thing, but this is still a solid horror thriller with impeccable production design and craftsmanship.

Tank 432 follows a group of mercenaries transporting a hostage and civilian across an unnamed battlefield when they get trapped inside an armored vehicle after being attacked by unseen enemy forces.

EP'ed by Ben Wheatley (High-Rise, Kill List, Free Fire), I went into Tank 432 expecting a psychological thriller that was going to turn into some kind of cosmic horror nightmare with how it was marketed, but instead it turned out to be a pointless, nonsensical and awfully boring movie with terrible characters. Some of the visuals are striking, but they have no effect.

I'd love to see another filmmaker tackle a plot similar to this and go either the cosmic horror route, or even ecological horror or folk horror, because there's a ton of potential in the story.